Northgard

For the older player ( I am 82 ) this game can be played with your kids and you can keep up. It is not too complex and rewards thought more than speed.

One of my most favorited games. Very fun game. Everyone starts on different areas of the map and you claim lands to expand your territories and build up and army and smash the enemy. Some of the clans you can play as are harder than the others. The AI is goofy sometimes but its still fun. With friends is better

Like:
+Nordic theme
+Challenging resource management
+High replay value, thanks to multiple game modes and a lot of clan (most are available via DLC)
+Unique abilities and bonus for each clan
Dislike:
–Too many clan DLC

UPDATE: Patch downloaded on Jan 22, 2026 fixed this problem so far. I've put another 12 hours on the game and haven't had this problem. Thank you for the fix.
Original Post:
I've begun playing Conquests and have run to a problem of the Application Crashing at the point of a final Win or Lose, of a conquest. I checked my event logs and am getting the error below.
I've tried all the steps to get around it, i.e. , run as administrator, uninstall/reinstall, force running in both OpenGL and DirectX, etc. When my game crashes upon the final Win, or Lose, in a conquest game, I get this message in my event viewer:
Faulting application name: Northgard.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x68ad635b
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.26100.7462, time stamp: 0x9225342c
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000000c41e
Faulting process id: 0x99AC
Faulting application start time: 0x1DC84162ADF7963
Faulting application path: C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Northgard\Northgard.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: e6f6c916-7a7d-409b-91a3-7afddbae83e4
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
Log Name: Application
Source: Application Error
Event ID: 1000
Task Category: Application Crashing Events.
I've captured a few Log Events and using my AI Analysis tools - it states the problem is:
Northgard executed invalid memory operations, and Windows terminated it.
This lines up perfectly with the libhl.dll access violations you were getting earlier.
It’s the same underlying issue — just bubbling up through a different module this time.
🧠 Why this matters for your case
You’ve already done:
- Clean reinstall
- Deleted LocalLow configs
- Disabled overlays
- Forced OpenGL / D3D11
- Fresh missions
- No mods
- Updated drivers
…and the crashes still happen across multiple scripted missions.
That tells us:
This is not a local corruption issue.
This is a game‑side bug in the Definitive Edition scripting engine.
The fact that it’s now crashing in ntdll.dll instead of libhl.dll doesn’t change the root cause — it just means the memory violation happened earlier in the call chain.
🛠️ What the error is not telling you
- It’s not a GPU driver crash
- It’s not a RAM hardware failure
- It’s not a Windows corruption issue
- It’s not a Steam problem
If any of those were true, you’d see different exception codes or different modules.
🧷 The short version
Your crash log means:
Northgard attempted an illegal memory access during gameplay, Windows caught it in ntdll.dll, and terminated the process.
This is consistent with the widespread Definitive Edition scripting crashes other players are reporting.
If you want, I can translate this into a clean, developer‑friendly explanation to add to your support ticket — or we can dig deeper into whether this specific offset (0xC41E) matches other known crash signatures.

This is not CoC. AOE, Warcraft, Dune or anything like pure RTS. Tile mechanics (limits to building count and types, discovery, no trespassing for workers) and certain life simulation aspects will otherwise annoy you to no end.
There are also eyebrow raising things like AI getting 0->20 workers, 0->6 warriors in a minute just after I wiped them all by raids (in a campaign though), guaranteed lag during long games after certain time or quite a few clans being locked behind paid content (not expensive) which puts kinda loose meaning to 'Definitive Edition'.
Anyway despite all of that, I still consider this game as good, the way how different clans are introduced in campaign was nice, everything feels and looks just right (except of what I mentioned) if one is willing to accept, this is not "just" RTS.

This game is actually awesome. I read that it was a cross between Civ and RTS games and I went.... huh? what does that even mean? Then I bought the game for like $5. I have around 140 hours in it (a couple of days I was in offline mode) and have found that the solo player stuff alone is definitely worth it. I dont play online games so I have no idea about that department but if you are looking for a good RTS game I recommend this one. The factions are almost all entirely unique and play very differently.

Pros

Zone based strategy game.
Lots of variety and bonuses or challenges in maps and clans.
Very pretty fantasy aesthetic.
Slow paced, good for casuals and older players.

Cons

Poorly optimised, can lag in mid to late game.
Isn't clear when a clan is strong early, mid or late game, requires a lot of trial and error.