Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Again, if the main advantage of ghoul gardians is that they count 2x as defense then why the #@$# would you buy them again? (they are also undead right?)
Because their upkeep is lower for the amount of defense you get? You can't reliably patrol with them anyway, since if you lose they will not be in your castle defending anyway...

That is if you need patrolers you are going to use wolves or thralls or whatever free chaff you can come up with.

And to mass them quickly you NEED not just order (which you still don't really need, but whatever) you NEED to take production which further cuts into the real advantage LA Ulm has. Production becomes more and more useless the longer the game goes on anyway, no amount of ulmish infantry is going to stand up to proper SCs or likely even a handful of thugs designed to counter them. Their magic resistance isn't even the issue, it's still their mobility which makes them expensive targets who are unlikely to be where you actually need them. And if nothing else, provide no kind of strategic problem for your opponents, who are more than happy (at least i would be) to see you turtle up in your 'impregnable' fortresses while they just do whatever they want. On a small map I can see them providing enough of an early advantage that different scales may be warrented. On mid-large maps, not so much.


But I think Chris has the right idea with his test game, though I'm not so sure about the 100 counts in 40 turns, but what the hell, even half that would still be giving you a ton of chaff and rapid defense/offense.

You don't need to give your counts much equipment to make them reliable raiders afterall, and Ulm (even LA) can still manage to out forge just about anyone else.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

High production is a given if you want to use the strategy I have outlined.

As for Ghoul Guardians, you buy them all the time, marching them up to your front fortresses to tie up the enemy while he attacks you as he sees you as an harmless turtle. At the same time you slowly grind away at him with your own army of summons and faster troops, building fortresses as you go along, stuffing them with those cheap defence troops. And if he attacks your main army you just fall back to your fortresses while you attack on another spot. Mobility and defence combined.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Ghoul Guardians have map move 2, zero encumbrance, base 14MR, good protection, 100%PR, and frikking laser beams in their skulls!

Wait, scratch the laser beams. But they do have Black Halberds.

I don't see why you'd buy any other troop in your capitol once you've got another fort up. Maybe if you desperately needed some cavalry ... but in LA you should be able to pump some out some indy cav at at least one of your forts.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Ghoul Guardians are extremely useful and when you have new forts up, they should be your primary unit recruit at your capital (unless you need a few Templars).

In my opinion, the best part of LA Ulm is the flexibility. Being a one-trick horse is a fatal strategic and tactical decision, as sure enough, your enemies will find counters and use them. You've got plenty of strategic and tactical options as LA Ulm: stealthy ranger armies and stealthy communions (think Helheim/Vanheim and mass glamoured stealthy armies for some ideas what you can do with those). You've got a versatile array of heavy infantry that all excel in certain situations and against certain opponents (pikemen have better survivability against giants for example). You've got ghoul guardians that will simply TEAR any bless heavy nation (like Mictlan) to shreds and have map move 2. You've also got Shields and Zweihanders that are just all around useful. You also have armies of chaff: wolves and thralls (I believe the wolves have gotten a boost in the new CBM and got a patrol bonus), which makes for an excellent buffer for your iron blizzard spamming iron priests and main army. You've got heavy cavalry for those rare situations when they're needed (charge against elephants, for example). Hell, you've got an easily spammable shortbowman (villans) if you are REALLY drowning against armies of chaff (like against R'lyeh: they also benefit from having +1 MR compared to the rest of Ulm's infantry), though you'll probably forgo them for the crap morale.

My point is that Ulm has so many options in terms of tactics and strategies that it's ALWAYS a good idea to keep all options on the table when you're playing with them. LA Ulm is incredibly versatile, both army and magicwise, and my philosophy is summed up by Napoleon:
One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority.
So my opinion is that focusing on one strength at the cost of the whole (and Ulm's blood potential is VERY strong already) is a poor plan, as by focusing JUST on blood cuts out the other options.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I could not disagree more while still agreeing in principle.

You cannot try to be a 'do it all' nation because then you will inevitiably fail against a nation who actually does something very very well.

That said, you don't go into a game saying "I'm going to do this and only this no matter what", but changing your strategy every 10 turns (or whatever an equivilent is) is only good for getting yourself killed, since any STRONG late game play is going to have required you to have played the particular strategy to set it up in the early and mid games.

To that end I cannot fathom wasting time with ghouls or infantry centric strategies (meaning strats where you take order and production to boost their production) since they are quickly rendered useless by anyone who knows what they are doing.

And if you never face anyone who knows what they are doing then it really doesn't matter what kind of a strategy you adopt unless you also don't know what you are doing.

The odd thing to me is that I'm not saying 'never buy ghouls or infantry' I'm saying don't build your nation so that your plan is to buy lots of them. That is don't sacrifice your ultimate strengths by taking scales which become less and less useful as the game progresses, as the benefits they provide you become essentially useless.

I also really do not agree that you need lots of money to buy more castles after around 25 turns in, because by then you are just going to be taking 'free' castles anyway, and pretending that you can turtle doesn't seem that smart either, since you don't research *that* well either, and you probably want/need more area to set up your blood economy, all the while pumping out black priests.

What is more versitile anyway? 11 HI or one black priest with free spawned chaff? Infantry are just really not as useful as I think some of you are making them out to be. Sure, they can have their uses, but guess what? If you don't 'guess' right about what infantry you actually need, you'll never have enough of it in the right place (becasue they are so slow) to respond to anything anyway. And if you just build enough infantry to cover every counter, then you've wasted 3x or 4x the gold and production on a force which is only 33% effective?

All the while you are still paying upkeep on these troops moving around one province at a time who are easilly exploited due to to their sluggishness and crap MR.

I don't know, maybe I'm misreading you all, but it sure seems you are suggesting sacrificing what Ulm actually has as a real strength to gain some minor advantage in the first 20 turns after which you have really nothing to scare anyone with.

Ghouls are nice units, but you NEED production to mass them, and then they are cap only, and ...

Just like any other guide or discussion of nations who wind up reliant on cap only troops you have to be able to justify them as an all game solution. Ghouls are not this, not even close. What they do well you don't even need that many of them (early sacred rush for example). As castle defense you can still get alot of milage out of freespawn (which you can get anywhere) and summons (same) which oyu will still generate even while you are being seiged.

I don't get any strategy which has you sacrificing time and man power defending against sieges while your other 'army' does it's thing somewhere else. Especially when your other army apparently has lots of map move 1 infantry in it.

Mobility? Hardly.

Try throwing a dozen outfitted counts at your opponents lands while his army tries to figure out whether to siege a meaningless castle or push on into your dominion where you can 'suicide' even more naked counts at him, spamming lamashastas (sp?). Even when you 'lose' you obviously 'win'.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of vampire counts as anything but very effective blood hunters. They make /ok/ raiders but so does a black servant with a lycan ammie and it doesn't require a constant stock of death gems if you're using summon lamm's. Furthermore, you still keep bringing up the trade of infantry versus mages/vampires where people are pointing out you can just get both.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Also, the MR horse is dead. We Soul Slayed it. :happy:

To sum up - you are not likely to win a war with Ulmish heavy infantry alone, but the other side of that coin shows you are unlikely to win a war with Vampire Counts alone.


Besides, people spend enormous amounts of design points on awake SC pretenders, sometimes -mostly- to slingshot them to a strong mid-late game, and sometimes with a very diminished usefulness after that. I see Production scales as performing the same role, except that they cost less design points, and they provide a consistent increase in gold income, in contrast to the awake SC that usually erodes your ability to take good scales, thus reducing your income potential through the entire game.


To be fair, I will do some early game expansion tests with just Rangers, but I admit I am quite skeptical.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

It is not a matter of "doing it all", it is a matter of doing the right things at the right time and that means planning. And planning means you need to know what your enemy is up to all the time.

If you meet a beginner he might try doing just one thing, like the tank rush in C&C, but in this game that makes him weak because there is actually counters to everything. An experienced players sees what he is up to and adapts accordingly. It is easy for him to do so because the enemy is so predictable.

Then you meet an experienced player, he watches you and adapts to what you do, and you do the same. And in the end that means mixed armies. The challenge is to find the perfect mix, and deploy it at the right spot at the right time. And that means planning... and so on.

:)

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

1 vampire count + 1 horror = 1 taken province.

Ok, sometimes it will take 2 horrors...

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

If by enormous you mean 150...

And gold is pointless in the late game anyway.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Yes it means planning, but if you are planning on having a 'mass' of strat move one infantry of different flavors to counter whatever your enemy throws at you, ...

You have no reaction time, you have no slack with that kind of a force. And that force isn't even particularly effective no matter its composition because the counters to slow moving infantry are easy, moderately cheap, and pentiful.

The counters to thugged counts (or flying thugs in general) are much less, and not always as easy for specific nations to come up with. They are also more costly in terms of opportunity cost to defend against flying thugs than to defend against a large slow army.

If you don't think equiped counts make for excellent raiders you've missed the boat somewhere. Also I did not say to use summon lamas with your raiders, you use naked counts in you dominion to attrit down a large invading army. Its rather pointless to use lamas on raiding counts, unless you are planning on throwing them all away, which is usually a desperation gambit anyway.

Infantry has a place for Ulm, just not one worth actually wasting design points on maximizing.

Income is entirely overrated for Ulm as well, so long as you understand what you are maximizing for the reduction in income flow. And anyway, while you may believe that L3 is not a good way to get gold, I think you've perhaps not studied it enough. Sure, it is not a guarenteed income flow, but with proper planning the income events (to say nothing of the mines...) allow you to behave as if you were actually getting that steady income flow.

It seems as though one should spend all their money every turn, but honestly, this is far from the case, even beyond such considerations as saving enough to put up fort/temple/lab in the next turn.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

How are /equipped/ counts any better as raiders than say spectres, bane lords, black servants, harbingers, succubi's, etc ad infinitum? Immortality rarely comes into play on offense in actual games, counts have poor stats and poor buffing paths. Their only real winning clauses are that they fly and stealth, one of which is replaceable by items. The excellent raider clause is a complete exaggeration. They make /ok/ raiders but that is definitely not their strength. Heck with a decent bless, even Black Lords (or Horgkluwera as they're called now) make better thugs out of the box.

I also find it odd, that you constantly assert Order 3 has to play a different style than luck 3. I'm not even sure I understand your argument on "plan for income events" but it seems to say just build less infantry. Well, as I've already repeated multiple times, you can get just as many counts by taking Order 3, I find it hard to believe that less infantry > the ability to get more castles, more mages, and more troops.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

As I find no reason to repeat myself I just point to KissBlade. :)

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I will give you one example of how a count, not even equipped, is better than all of those others.

Stealth a vampire into a territory.
Next turn, hit it with sufficient horrors to wipe out the indy.
The vampire's free spawn occurs *after* magical combat - and wins the territory for you.

Stealth him into the next territory.

Since the vampire is stealthy, he is never attacked by the horrors, or even seen. Since he *stays* stealthy, he is not at risk for strategic spells.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In one sense I agree with you; that vampires counts are unimpressive stat wise. I generally only summon 2-3.

VC counts are useful in a few ways:
1. They lead ghouls.
2. With two easy boosters, they cast sanguine heritage, relieving the need of your pretender to do same.
3. They fly - which most of the other things on your list do not. And hence are the perfect thing to lead vampires.

As long as you fly and raid *in dominion* you don't care whether you win or lose the fight. Merely inflicting casualties is sufficient.

4. Vampires counts are significantly cheaper than harbingers or succubi.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Chris - Did you just argue that a count has some sort of special utility because it can do the exact same job a 20g indy scout can? (Taking a prov over after a horror attack) Seriously?

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

No, thats not what I'm arguing at all.

A scout you would have to attack the province.
The vampire *doesn't have to*. With the vampire, you take one province a turn. With a scout or other .. its one every other.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

But technically dor the price of one Count, you could have a Scout in every single territory of your enemy, just waiting.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

So you think a stealthy raider that leaves a trail of thralls to point out his location is better than the other options I've listed because it can attack indies with the help of horrors? Seems awfully inefficient to me ... Especially since the premier remote spell is Mind Hunt. If you're talking about using send horrors to bomb an opponent's pd and raid, that's already a tactic you can apply to anything. If you rely on just thralls, not only is it inefficient versus scouts (you lose the blood hunting turns of the count) but your opponent can just counter it by moving around a few recruited indie commanders on "hold, hold, retreat". Since your thralls would auto rout versus them with no commanders.

Second, Harbingers are only 20 death gems versus 44 slaves. if you value slaves lower than 1/2 a gem, then 66 slaves for a succubi versus 44 for a vamp count isn't significantly cheaper since we're talking about using them on the field rather than blood hunting. Furthermore, the poster mentioned gearing them up with gems. Once you factor that in, it swings far more in favor of other chassis with more durability.


I'll state once again, raiding with vampire counts is entirely overrated. They're good for other reasons but martially, there are more effective tools once you get going.

Lastly, I'll point out again, there is nothing that says you can't use counts if you take Order 3. If anything, order 3 is better since you quell more unrest with order (small doses) than turmoil and is far less likely to suffer brigands/barbarians.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

You are less likely to suffer brigands/barbarians if you take luck than anything Order may give you.

You also seem to completely underrate flying. Flying (and stealth on top of it) is absolutely huge when you are raiding someone. Ulm cannot get boots of flying without their pretender, or willing trading partners (which cuts both ways for any strategy) and adds an additional 10 air gems (9 or 6 with boni) to the cost of equipping your thugs.

Counts require zero research as well, any other thug summon requires some (no matter how little in some cases).

But this is all tangential to the crux of this disagreement, which is over taking O3 and how necessary that is, vs having either better scales elsewhere, or a more rounded pretender.

My contention is that Ulm is better off with an awake pretender to get some counts out year one, than they are paying for O3 with a sleeping pretender and delaying count production into year 2.

Of course you can get pretty far using infantry and rangers, but I don't think you get much farther maximizing them at the expense of the rest of your strengths.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

The one thing I don't get is so bent on order = costly equality. Order3/Misf2 is only 40 points more expensive than Turmoil3/Luck3. And when it comes to bad events, that's why the nation has those fortune tellers and stuff.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

forutune tellers are only useful where you put them. No way are you going to have them in more than a handful of places, so you will still suffer from the barbs type of event hitting your provinces. Your PD is pretty mediocre until you go over 20.

Ulm also has some interesting heros you'd probably like to get. Mot3rd is really really nice to help you diversify into fire and often get another high astral mage.

Of course you can go O3M2 and do fine, alot of nations take this as some kind of default anyway. However, it really doesn't provide some of the support Ulm can use in expanding your off path gem pool specifically. Of course luck can be fickle, you may not get much, or you may get a ring of wizardry in the 1st year.

How do you plan on defending your empire from barbs and knights and bloodslave losses due to events? Or do you just accept them and divert a portion of your army to retaking what you may lose? Counts can do this as easilly as anything of course.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

LA Ulm PD is great against barbarians. 15 will stop it nearly all the time, 12 stops it most of the time, unless you get unlucky with a huge horde.

LA Ulm PD gets pikes and archers (not crossbows), and archers are better against barbarians because of the higher rate of fire. I'm talking about CBM with better pikes BTW, so they repel a lot of the barbarian attacks.

When you have castles spaces so they aren't adjacent (adjacent castles is a terrible plan anyway since adjacent castles waste resources), you will have armies and mages in these castles which are very capable of taking back provinces the next month from indy events when you add one turn of recruitment. Even against knight events.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I will agree that using Winged Shoes does increase costs of thugs.

But I have to absolutely disagree 100% that LA Ulm can't get the Shoes without their pretender. You have national mages that at least get 1 Air. If you can't get one of the Mercenary Air mages, then you at least have someone that can manually search some mountains until you are getting a few a turn. (and there is -always- significant chance of a crosspath site, Singing Stones, anyone?) From there it's a short matter of time before you can empower someone to A2, and you should be able to find your way from there.

Diversifying rarely has to be as hard as "use your pretender". If you can get even a random pick in a path, it's not that hard to gear into it. LA Ulm will never be an Air power, but they have no excuse at all to go without.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

You're right jim, I overstated that.

However, you are taking a big a risk at getting into air without some kind of 'assistance'. You may get there 'quickly' you may not. To guarantee it you need to make a sacrifice somewhere.

But why would you? You don't need air for anything do you (other than what you already can do with the EA combo or communions)? Use your innate advantages (which are your counts) and run with it. Is it easier for Ulm to forge some Boots of Stone or Marble armor than it is to find a way to A2 and air gem income (since you already burned 35 of them...) to get reliable flying onto other thugs?

Anyway diversifying into air is clearly much more difficult than the other paths.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

It's 30 for level 2. :p But still, you're going to want Air sooner or later, for battlefield enchants, and those all take gems to cast.

Personally, I do agree that in many cases, the Vampire Count is a superior thug chassis choice for LA Ulm. I just couldn't swallow poor Air access as a primary reasoning for it. ;)

But bear in mind, that the Vampire Count *is* the easy way, and it *is* the expected answer. Especially if you let your opponent know (by using them) that you have Vampires, you might well give him a big surprise when your other choices start making appearances.

Generally, I try to make a point of always diversifying into every path (other than Blood, often too big a bother) during the course of a game. Taking your opponent off guard by introducing weapons that he didn't think you had any access to, can be a priceless advantage. Or in some cases, waiting until your enemy comes at you with his "secret weapon", only to find that with a little effort, you are already prepared to drop a Storm Warriors on your army. Honestly, for the small amount of actual effort required to diversify most paths (a couple of Priests manual searching, they're doing Holy as well anyways), I tend to feel that even just access to a few items you otherwise couldn't get, justifies the expense. Then I let the gems pile up, even at 4-5 a turn, you will have enough to pull off some interesting surprises eventually, and a couple of stray items won't tip off your opponent, as they could have come from victories in combat, or random events.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Jim is absolutely right, and that is what makes Dominions so great. If this game was linear like: you should only build that unit because the other sucks, or you should only use this spell instead of any other, I would have stopped playing it years ago. I can sense a lesson in this thread, don't be so rash in judging good from bad. There are of course things that are better to use in some situations, but that depends on the, well, situation. So much work must be put to anticipating those situations or creating them yourself. And that is hard work.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

This is all sound advice, but has little to do with the actual question of how necessary O3 is.

As some of you have been want to tell me, you can summon counts with O3, well guess what?

You can summon and forge whatever you like more easily with L3! (and don't forget the fun of improved cross breeding for even more free chaff, some of it actually very useful, and very able to provide resistances and abilities your opponent may not easily counter).

So unless you want to go back to discussing how Order and production scales (since you need the production more if you plan on massing ghouls or other HI) the rest of this is largely just us agreeing with each other.

That is, no where have I said that Ulm should rely on anything? What I have said is Ulm should look first to their strengths (as should any nation). And Ulms ultimate strengths are NOT in infantry, as such there is no reason to play a strategy which involves massing them more than you may want to to have some of them around for whatever purpose they wind up serving.

What is going to to be your late game bread and butter and how are you going to get to it? Astral? Death? Blood? No matter how flexible you want to be, you have to make some choice in this matter from the start, at least to minimize the expense (or reliance on luck in finding sites) of actually making your A9, D9, B9 mage to pull out the big summons.

The late game is certainly not going to be 100s of HI moving around at a snails pace.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Jim, (or anyone with an ax in this argument) We need one more for ulmish civil wars...

Whose theory reigns supreme... who takes it....

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I was very tempted by that game, I love this nation and have been wanting to play it in MP for awhile..... But I'm trying to slim down my roster a little (currently back down to 8 games atm, woo?), and it's not proving easy. And as I mentioned before, I haven't gotten my timing down for the transition to later game stuff..... in SP tests so far, getting my Blood started has been especially slow for some reason. (largely due to dealing with overzealous AI neighbors, surely, but still)

As far as Order/Misf vs Turmoil/Luck - I'll let one thing out of the bag - my current concept build uses 2Death AND 2Drain, so Misf is certainly out of the question, for me at least. :p But it's a tricky build, to say the least. I think that while Ulm can survive through leaner times than some nations, that it doesn't truly thrive unless it can afford to build a lot. I'd argue that while you aren't going to be pumping out massive amounts of infantry all game, it's unwise to just ignore the "Steel Tide", and thus without Production scales, you probably want to very much maximize your castle construction, so you are supplanting your need for resources/castle, with a need for gold/turn to optimize your opportunity to use your national troops as much as necessary.

I suppose that since my Shinuyama SP that I was fooling around with just got ruined by an AI casting BoT, I can get around to that promised test of primarily using Rangers for the early game. But honestly, I would feel more comfortable facing a human player that was relying almost entirely on Rangers, than a human who had large amounts of Ulm's heavy infantry. I mean, you'll need foot troops all game for some things, unless you intend to utilize thugs with Gate Cleavers to take down gates, and other thugs who somehow manage to get full immunities so your enemy can't just send a few Frozen Heart (et al) spammers to ruin your entire military capacity.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Cool beans - welcome aboard. I can't imagine how you handle 13 games.... or 8..

This will be 5 for me- the most ever.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Well, I've spent the afternoon showing myself that no matter how I try, it's the Drain that is killing me. The difference between 5RP and 3RP is dramatic, to say the least. ;)

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Drain is a killer to Ulm, cannot really do it methinks.

But if you don't lock yourself into the rigid O3P+ line of thinking you have many many options...

By the way, no one has really been explicit about whether their designs are vanilla or CBM. I mostly favor using CBM and my comments are geared from that direction.

T3S3C/H1 is 280 design points to play with. L3G1M1 is only 200 back, and you can talk yourself out of G if you really want to, though it does help long term to keep your income higher than it would otherwise be. Again it boils down to what you want your pretender to be, I favor the FoB with D4ish and B6ish and relatively high dominion (to give your counts some extra provinces to 'die' in).

Also jim-

Under no circumstances would I build NO HI (indy or Ulmish), you always can use some kind of a screen for your rangers or villains. My tests have however shown that you don't really need a very large screen to hammer indies with minimal losses, and you will always likely be building some kind of infantry somewhere and chugging it around. It does have some use, just that some of the discussion here seemed to imply that you actually wanted to have alot of this infantry for reasons which continue to elude me. You will be saving money from time to time to get up your next castle/lab/temple, especially with T3, but my tests have also shown, that with T3L3 you are very unlucky indeed if you do not get a nice gold event sometime in the first year (assuming you are expanding normally), which allows immediate castle construction usually. And if you are lucky you will get a BIG gold event (bigger than 400) which really allows you to warp up a couple castles in the first year.

I don't think you can do that with O3 under just about any circumstances, unless you just stop buying military for multiple turns.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I like the guide and look forward to trying out Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom! (Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap!) but my concern is what you do when arrow fend shows up, neutering both your combat magic (iron blizzard) and ranged support in one go.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Shadow Blast, Magma Eruption, Rain of Stones. Anything that's AoE damage. Wear some earth boots and bring some blood stones; fly in some vampires with death gems if you need them too. Hire some ranger commanders and send your ranged units raiding.

Oh, and Ulm has some very nice infantry units, the Pikemen are quite good I hear. Not to mention those Ghoul Guardians!

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Good tips vfb!

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Go with SCs who laugh at puny attempts to stop your arrows. At some point the only real reason you have those bodies is to speed up sieging.

Otherwise you can look to the kind of battlefield magic vfb mentioned, use communions if you need to. Forge crystal shields for some extra boost to your black priests.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

I've revamped the guide, added a unit-by-unit analysis, and changed the pretender design.

Decided that the +2 RP was more important then the +1 MR, and decided the Great Enchantress was a better rainbow chassis then the Frost Father (though the Chill Aura was fun in SP).

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Good work Tolkien!

Some small things though:

*Morningstars do not ignore shields (the same with flails), they do however get a +2 bonus to attack against them.

*I don't see why pikemen should have a worse time than anything else against lots of infantry. Getting hit in combat basically gets down to your defence. While pikemen has 8 defence compared to 12 of Morningstar infantry this only means that they have a disadvantage of two infantry (-2+ -2) attacks, but that is it. After that the morningstar infantry has lost their advantage while the pikeneer still got his - repel. Yes, morningstars are much better against shorter (1 and down) weapons because they will have repel as well, but it ends there. Pikeneers will never lose that advantage except to other pikes (length 6). Yes, repel gets harder and harder (-2 per repel) but takes a while for it to get impossible AND pikeneers still got their defence although 4 less than morningstar infantry.

To conclude:
I would choose Morningstar Infantry over Pikeneers if faced with the following: Missile units, very short length weapons (less than 2, daggers, claws etc), very high morale infantry 14+ (because the drn + 13 repel check), shield bearing infantry with short weapons (not spears) due to +2 attack from morningstar.

I would choose Pikeneers over Morningstar Infantry if I face the following: Over length 3 weapons (Zweihander greatswords have 3) like spears, medium (13-10) to low morale troops (9-).

I would choose Zweihanders over all the other if I face the following: High HP units with length 3 or less weapons, due to their very high protection plus repel they would normally survive the encounter.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Tolkien,
I'd suggest chill rather than heat, due to inclusion of undead in your mix.
However, more importantly is whose in game.

Mictlan, abysia, playing agaisnt you.. definitely choose cold.
Ermor, Utgard, Ryallah.. choose hot.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

That's my point. You can tilt the heat/cold scale depending on who you're up against.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Ok.. 22 games played to the end of year 3.

Three competeing philosophies:

1. Mine: Heavy blood/nature awake pretender. Luck scales.
2. Licker: Moderate awake pretender. Luck scales.
3. Dedas/Tolkien: Sleeping pretender. Order scales.

So here is what I found - all things considered, I thought my strategy was the hardest, with the slowest ramp up. Plus sides on mine:

A. Fully kitted out SC: Blood thorn, armor of souls, horror helmet, Eyeshield, Luck amulet, Boots of quickness, Amulet of MR.
Prophet.

HP: 55+. MR 30 ish; mid 20's. Regen like 13. With the blood thorn shredded even beat 4-6 bless niefles.

Occassional game breaking luck events: Each of the games got Incredible luck events. I have seen the 3000 gp event almost once per game. Magic item events - ring of wizardry!
Animists, and sometimes frost fathers.

B. National heros. More than 400 blood in the bank. Highest research.

2: Better gem income. Better scales meant better early expansion, 1 more castle than option 1. Still, slow slogging first year.

3. Much easier first year expansion. Magic averaged 280 pts less research than option 1. Gems in the bank was comparable to #1, due to luck events for #1 - however per turn income was higher due site searching with asleep pretender (when it awakened)

More than *twice* as many castles on the average - with 13 at the end of year 3. However, I still had yet to cast my first sanguine heritage; no vampires no counts, and no real blood economy. No national heros.

The question is - how would it fare against human opponents.

In my games - I always try to transition to SC's. Yet I have to say, that I think the transition happens to early in my strategy.

So overall, I am convinced that despite the design challenges of coming up with the extra 40 points, an asleep rainbow pretender with order scales is probably the best strategy.

I'd like to offer a small refinement to Tolkien: Obviously you wish a pretender with death access for your sanguine heritage spell. However, also valuable early on for your ability to lead
your ghoul guardians.

So, in short. I was wrong. I still think my strategy cool, neat and nifty. Just not optimal.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

For the sleeping pretenders, I used a crone with accross the bord 4's except earth and air. Dominion 5.

Fire is important for flame arrows.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Ferrying around Ghoul Guardians? I would use Counts for that, since your pretender is better used for research/searching/forging boosters: ferrying around ghouls is something for the common commanders to do, not a god :P . Also, if you delay major research in the first year, you should come up with enough blood slaves with Second Tiers for a count. Once you get a count up, your blood economy should scale up nicely from that point: much slower as compared to having an awake blood pretender searching, however. You won't overtake Mictlan, but you'll still be in the running: and unlike Mictlan, you aren't sacrificing everything else just to be top dog in blood.

I'll go back to refining my strategy.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Mictlan doesn't sacrifice anything (well except virgins) to be the top dog in blood = ).

In the first year, you are *very* busy with capital intensive commanders. With your build, in my best attempts, I was *never* able to get my blood economy going in any serious way in year 1 or 2.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Interesting analysis Chris.

A couple questions, was this with CBM or vanilla? Was the pretender used in my test case a true rainbow or the DB FoB?

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Touche.:p

As for the blood part: I've gotten the slaves. To do it, you'll be spending your time recruiting mostly Second Tiers in your first year (as wolfherds and fortunetellers come up after you get your new forts up, because we need reliable blood mages and they have +1 RP over the fortunetellers; even if the FTs are more cost-effective) and patrolling your capital, but I've done it. I get enough slaves with 4ish (give or take one) blood hunters on my capital or mid-sized provinces with a bit of patrolling to summon a count by the time you wake. Once that is done, you can start sending your Second Tiers to research.

I'll do some trials on it tomorrow when I get some free time.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Yeah, I have no question you can do it - but the cost is falling even farther behind on research.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Well, Magic 1 helps, but the main thing is that even if you focus all of your mages to research from Turn 1, it isn't going to be extremely significant.

Alright, working hypothetically: We're building 4 Second Tiers in the first four turns and sending them blood hunting. Assuming a mid-sized province without unrest (or capital with patrolling), each has a 50% chance of getting d6+1 slaves (at least 2).
Turn 1: No Blood Hunting.
Turn 2: 1 Blood Hunter. (patrolling as we wait for another turn of rangers)
Turn 3: No Blood Hunting. (move the Second Tiers to capture a mid-pop province with your commander).
Turn 4: 2 Blood Hunters, 2 50%. (we move the next two hunters to another province).
Turn 5: 3 Blood Hunters, 3 50%.
Turn 6-12: 4 Blood Hunters, 4 50%.
(you can also just use your capital and patrol that, which speeds up expansion, but means you can get unrest in your cap if you get lucky with the d6 of hunting, and that can hurt abit).

I've also just run a couple (lost count, a few dozen) test runs in SP, up to the end of year 1 following this.
Depending on how luck goes, you should easily be able to pull up 44 slaves by the end of turn 12. I've done a few test runs and 4 might even be too many: I've pulled up 44 by turn 7 (with a bit of luck on the d6+1) on a few trials and always gotten the 44 by the time my pretender awakens. That still means you have 8 turns to recruit mages for research or commanders to lead expansion armies.

The research lost isn't too important at all. Ulm in Year One isn't dependent on magic to expand: you aren't Bogarus with the crappy troops and where research is ESSENTIAL to your survival: your main blood goal, Vampire Counts, for much of the earlygame/early midgame, can already be summoned. Your troops are good enough to kick off expansion, and you're just putting off your signature battlefield spells (in evocation, Iron Blizzard and to a lesser extent, Shadow Blast) and Construction-4 to near the end of Year Two. It would indeed be nice to have these spells earlier, but by sacrificing a few turns without Iron Blizzard and other magics, you're setting yourself up to be a major midgame/endgame power. You can make up the research lost with the increased mage production from new forts. Using Calculus, you can get roughly 1226 RP from Year 1 to Year 2 with 2 forts turning out researchers and your Pretender (and assuming no researchers to begin with and you should have some mages available to be transitioned into research role by the end of year 1): enough to get you to Evo6 and Cons4, and that is discounting even more forts coming up and experience. With more forts, your research curve grows sharper, so it makes up for you research (or lack thereof) in year 1. The research you get in year 1 isn't significant anyway. If you devote your capital to nothing but research from turn 1, you get a graph of 6.1x (again discounting experience and new forts), of which the area is equal to 3.05x^2 and that means you end up with 439 RP. This is assuming you aren't turning out commanders for expansion. It's enough to get you to Cons4, but not even close to enough for Evo6, which is really more important than Cons4 (as it means access to Shadow Blast and Iron Blizzard).
Again, building up more forts means you can make up this gap in the long term.

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

It's a good theory, I like it. I personally try never to train Second Tiers, due to the upkeep, but using them to get your Blood started ASAP, isn't a bad trick.

The only problem with this as far as my own style, is that I like an Imprisoned rainbow, and to work this, you need to only be Dormant, so you can summon your count(s), correct? Also I would be sorely tempted to just Blood Hunt the capital, and Patrol, so I'd probably want Growth, further impacting available points for a good rainbow pretender.

I think in my case, I'd find the happy medium by letting it take just a couple more turns to get the hunting started, in order to optimize the targeted province, the scales, and the disposition of forces. My inability to sacrifice "economy" for "horsepower" borders on OCD. :shock:

Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
 

Well I favor patrolling when you're expanding anyway: the only problem is, having enough spare troops to actually patrol the provinces. Honestly, you don't even need to use two provinces if you are patrolling: if you are, setting one to 0% taxes and patrolling should suffice. Patrolling though is the #1 killer of population when it comes to blood hunting, and 0% taxes on a few mid-sized provinces don't hurt that much: they give 40-75 gold on 100 gold. Blood is basically based on turning gold into slaves. Since the amount of gold in the game and army sizes have increased from Dom2, the conversion rate doesn't hurt your income as much as it use to, and it means blood is actually better.

Personally, I like Second Tiers. They're more cost-effective (and recruit everywhere) researchers then the Iron Priests all in all: though the sacred part on the Priests does decrease total upkeep. Second Tiers are what you'll be using for most of your blood hunting needs until your Counts are in numbers, they're good for getting research up, and stealthy communions are %#*(ing awesome.