MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

CUnknown’s guide to Ulm is solid, and a bit similar to what I write here, but I have several other angles I want to explore particularly since Ulm’s face lift. Ulm fits right into my usual guide MO, an under appreciated nation who can be a real gem once you polish them up and present the right angles. Many people consider Ulm a very weak nation without much flexibility. Line up a bunch of slow, tough guys and march around casting the same 2 or 3 spells until somebody exploits your weakness and squishes you. Or you could just be a forge ***** the whole game, that’s always fun. And that’s exactly what’s gonna happen if you don’t anticipate your weaknesses and have a plan.

As I’ve said elsewhere I think the strongest choice for Ulm is an awake rainbow pretender. Many fear a rush when playing Ulm and think a combat pretender is necessary, but with Ulm’s new units and a little planning there’s no rush you need fear (more on this in a moment), and lets look at what a rainbow pretender gets you.

1) The most obvious is magic diversity. Ulm doesn’t have terrible magic diversity as far as the spread goes – you’ll get F/E/S/A and N indies are easy to come by. The problem is most of those are level one and insufficient to site search. With a booster though things rapidly start opening up, and for the paths which you can’t easily forge a booster (generally air) a modest income will pretty quickly build up to 30 gems for a cheap empowering. Which leads us to…

2) Gem income. Everyone knows Ulm is the forge champion, and this is a critical national advantage you can’t afford to neglect for lack of gems. You need a constant stream of gems from an early point through the whole game and manually site searching with level one mages is *not* going to cut it. Having your pretender prime the pump by site searching is pretty much the difference between having access to that path or not (other than earth).

3) Initial research. This is the thing that requires you have an awake rather than sleeping pretender. You could probably scrape by with no site searching until the second year. What you can’t do is fight off certain kinds of rushes with no research. An awake rainbow pretender is going to give you a powerful jumpstart on research in the first couple turns, easily clearing a level three school before even the fastest rush could possibly materialize, and into level 4 if you push before much can materialize. At this point your mages are better support than a poorly equipped and buffed SC pretender would be.

As with any good strategy, design points get very tight at this point. You need an awake pretender. You need production 3. You want order 3. You want on your pretender A4 & F4 (for boosters), S4 (rings of wizardry, golems, end game astral), W3 & D3 (for site searching to prime the pump), N4 & E4 (for reasons I’ll explain in a minute). Good news is of course you’re taking drain 3 and death is a good option, and you don’t need a high dominion. Still, you can’t afford all the things you want so you’ll have to decide what’s most important to you. With a rainbow chasis though, there’s really no reason to not take at least 1 in every path (with the exception of blood) since you’ll be site searching anyway and 10 design points buys you a modest income in that path.

For initial expansion against the indies, you can’t go too wrong with any of Ulm’s troops. Still, your troops take so many resources (and thus time to mass) it’s good to steadily build up the army you’ll want when you start fighting another player. This is going to vary depending on what you’re anticipating facing in the near to mid term.
You’ve got good, cheap units, but they’re not holy and you’re gonna be cranking out a lot of them. Be mindful of the upkeep, I generally only recruit 10 gold units unless there is a specific need I’m addressing. After the first couple turns I always recruit the black plate infantry rather than the chainmail guys – resources don’t have upkeep.

Pikes are probably the best general use weapon, with a good attack, damage, and a repel that does a surprising amount against rank and file troops (particularly combined with the armor). Flails are good against high defense guys as they give you a second attack (try to land a strength of giants to compensate for the lower damage). Battleaxes are made for giants (strength of giants….well that basically goes for everything). Tower shields are of course where you’re gonna want to go vs heavy ranged attacks (keep in mind shields can block some mage spells to), but they do give up a good amount of offense so it’s often best to try to use the shields as archer screens while the two handed weapon guys do most of the damage (bonus, the shields make them move slower so its not hard to accomplish this). Arbalests are *devastating* to anything without a shield. Unfortunately, most things you’ll be worried about will have shields, so I don’t tend to recruit these guys for general use. Start cranking them out though when an enemy dragon or wyrm pretender tries to bully you, or somebody actually believes the elephant vs Ulm propaganda. Heck, even with a shield 50 guys firing at point blank range will land enough AP damage to cause considerable pain. If you do use arbalests consider trying to scrape up an air mage for wind guide – it’ll help considerably, and flaming arrows should be a no brainer if it’s researched.

The knights can be very good, but they’re too easy to counter. The only solution I’ve really come up with is to use them sparingly enough that your opponent doesn’t invest in a counter to them – just a few on the flanks or supporting a black lord. If your opponent has counters anyway, just shelve them and consider their job done in tying up your opponents resources in their counters.

I wanted to make special note of the black halberd guardians. They’re capital only and pretty expensive relative to your other troops, but with good reason. This weapon will handily dispatch any sacred unit in the game, including fully decked out SCs. It does AOE 1 fatigue damage to holy units…which means there’s no way to dodge, block, or resist it. Against cheaper masses of units like eagle warriors it’s merely very good, but
against high end sacred units like Vans, Knights of the Chalice, or Black Spiders it is retarded good. I pity Pythium’s angels, or Bandar Log’s celestials should they decide Ulm looks like easy pickings. A surprising amount of SC/thugs are holy, all of them are neutered against a prepared Ulm. Note, the guardians are not sacred so you can crank them out at whatever your production limit is, which means you’ll want to wait until you’ve got a good use for them before building them (and paying their upkeep). Use your much cheaper general issue infantry for most tasks.

But what about non-sacred bad guys? Baalz, didn’t you know Ulm is the poster boy for elephant bait! I’d like to go ahead and lay this myth to bed for once and all. Yes, Ulm will get slaughtered if you just line up all your troops and march towards a bunch of tramplers. Why in the world would you do that? With the early research push by your pretender you need never face anybody without Evo-3 researched, and really you’ll have evo-4. This gives you magma bolts, iron darts, and then blade wind. Elephants do not have a remote chance of overrunning ten smiths spamming these spells with a couple score arbalests playing backup. The smiths are awesome battle mages once your research matures, with reinvig from earthpower, blade wind, magma eruption, destruction and earth elementals. They are the answer to most things which would otherwise give Ulm problems. They’re cheap for mages, so make sure you use them, send a couple with any moderately sized force. If you’re pressed into an early fight you’ll probably want to research evocation with a laser beam focus until you get magma eruption – with it every one of your cheap smiths (well, with earthpower which you’ll want to pick up immediately after) is a top of the line carnage machine. The other option depending on what you’re facing (ie abyssia) is to switch over to alteration and pick up destruction. Also, don’t forget about iron blizzard, it’s easier to spam than blade wind, is AP, and slaughters magic beings, but its only castable by your cap only holy smiths and has a shorter range so it’s a niche spell.

So, focusing on recruiting 10 gold high resource troops, with order and production scales you’ll be putting castles 2 and 3 up pretty quick, which is good because that’s urgent. Once you’ve got 3 castles though, you’re sitting pretty with a steady flow of infantry and mages, your urgent research done, and gold piling up – pretty much before any real rush can materialize.

Now, unless you’re fighting off somebody who thought you’d be easy pickings you’ll want to shift into second gear and you’ve got a couple options on where to go. You’ll very likely have a research lead at this point, possibly a production lead, have been focusing on combat spells and have good combat mages. It’s certainly possible to rush someone yourself, particularly if they’re reliant on sacred troops (honestly I don’t see how ie Vanheim has a chance against a good Ulm rush with the addition of black halberds).

Equally effective is to go the opposite direction and turtle up. Solid scales and modest upkeep will let you put up castles at a good rate (with a research surge to match), and your pretender out site searching will give you a very respectable gem income. You’ll be hitting the construction research now, which is an investment which pays dividends.

You’ll want to aim for a couple things at this point. Dwarven hammers, lots of them. Unless it’s an emergency you never ever want to forge anything without using a dwarven hammer. The strength of Ulm is efficiency, don’t squander that. It’ll take a little bit to build up your hammers, but that’s alright because it gives your gem flow time to establish itself. A single 30 gem empowering in Air for a smith with that random should be affordable fairly early, which is a bargain because you’ll probably want to crank out a steady flow of flying boots.

As I mentioned above smiths need nothing but a few PD blockers to lay a ridiculous hurt on people. If you’ve got a dozen winged boots in your lab, and several castles spread around you’ve got the capability for a very rapid response force anywhere in your nation. This is critical as your nation grows, your infantry just moves too slowly to counter a nimble opponent and none of your mages are inheritably able to teleport.

Ulm’s forge bonus lends itself to many things, but perhaps the most obvious is a fire brand and golden shield combo, for the hammer forged price of 8 gems. Black Lords scream to be used as mini thugs with this, and they do work very well with nothing else provided they don’t need to make MR checks and you use more than one together (I also generally include some black knights set to guard commander). Using your pretender to create a revenant, and then black servants is also a good choice which yields a stealthy thug. What I prefer though is what nobody expects from Ulm – a highly mobile flying swarm of thugs.

Take one smith with the aforementioned firebrand and golden shield. Add in a pair of winged boots you’ve been stockpiling. Mix in black plate and a girdle of strength. Garnish with a lucky pendant and fire helm. Price: 21 gems. Summon earth power, invulnerability, hold then attack. That will get you a very respectable raiding thug, but you’ll still get unlucky with the fatigue you built up causing you to take critical hits, and a point here and there will slowly add up to bring you down. What you really want is just a touch more reinvig and a bit of regen, which is why I suggested E4 and N4 were very nice things to have on your pretender. Substitute in a holy smith and add a blessing in for a dish that’s best served hot – just that little bit extra goes a long way. I mean honestly, who expects Ulm to air drop a dozen thugs on them in year two? Raid aggressively while your behemoth mage supported infantry army grinds its way up to deal with the real resistance.

Now on top of the air, you’ll want to seriously consider empowering smiths in death (can immediately start dark knowledging, crank out fire skulls), water (water braclet, then voice of tiamat, boots of quickness, rune smashers), and nature (half price fever fetishs which will eventually let you crank out a steady stream of phoenix rods and flambeaus).

Now, Ulm’s got a couple strengths which are often ignored because you’re always recruiting a smith from every castle. For that reason I like to dedicate one castle to not having a lab so I recruit a steady stream of spies, black lords & siege engineers. Black lords are used as outlined above, and siege engineers are great to support your attacks – outfitted with cheaply forged range weapons they can contribute to the fighting (piercers, banefire bows, vision’s foe, bows of war, ethereal xbows, etc.) and make sure enemy forts fall instantly (use them with flying boots in combination with your smiths to take enemy forts without using any troops!). Spies people seem to underestimate, thinking that a scout does the same job unless you’re trying to cause massive unrest. It seems ridiculous to underestimate the benefit of accurate information! You can see exactly the PD you’ll be facing to drop your relatively fragile thugs into, if your opponent has 1 PD all over you can hit him with call of the winds, arouse hunger, etc. You can see where their gold income centers are to focus on raiding those, with spies adding unrest – and even better popping out with implementor axes to pillage when a response is not coming in that turn. And of course you can use them to incite unrest, which is nothing but an annoyance at peace time but can quickly become game changing if they can’t respond to it because it just started on the same turn a war did (an evil person would goad an opponent into patrolling for spies then teleport a golem in to squish the patrollers who are probably without magic support).

Blood is a very good thing to bootstrap into for Ulm. Set 10 scouts to bloodhunt and they’ll eventually scrape up 50 blood slaves to empower a smith. Forge a sanguine rod and you’re quickly up to popping out a blood stone every couple turns at half price (also slap boots of youth on any of your smiths who are old and have a good random). If things are going well set up another scout bloodhunting province and you’ll get to the point you’re cranking out multiple blood stones per turn. Blood stones are very, very good for Ulm, giving you the earth income to forge everything you want and boosting your mages (earth random + boots + blood stone = E5 = earth attack, petrify, weapons of sharpness, etc.). Tip: you can often trade a blood nation for your initial 50 blood slaves – Ulm should be a fantastic trader. Your pretender was E4, so with a solid earth income you should look at earthblood deepwell, it’ll turn your strong earth income into a torrent.

Now, what to do with all those earth gems? Mechanical men, buffed with weapons of sharpness & strength of giants are pretty difficult to stop once they hit critical mass. Add in almost any elemental battlefield enchantment (heat from hell, firestorm, wrathful skies, foul vapors etc. etc.) for heavy lifting.

Earth attack is probably the best assassination spell, set yourself up to spam this incessantly and it’s pretty crippling against most opponents.

And enter the iron angel. The perfect complement to a surging earth income and forging focus is a SC chassis for a reasonable earth gem price. It’s not unreasonably you might be summoning and equipping two of these guys per turn by the early end game. While they’re not top shelf SCs, they’re definitely solidly in the SC category and can’t be beat for the price. Their lack of magic and thus lack of need to buff, with their strength, flying and toughness makes them excellent anti-SCs who fly in round one to whack the guy trying to buff himself. A couple of these guys with flambeaus set to attack large monsters is exactly what everybody wants – a very effective budget tartarian counter, and their heretic abilities will make them quite effective against sacred SCs like most of the various high end national summons (and they’re *much* more mobile than the guardians). Heck, with that ubiquitous fire brand & golden shield (throw in a girdle of might) these guys will whacking anything large for 37 AP damage before chewing up the chaff with the flame blast and will chew up most anything without counter-SC tactics. Not bad for under 35 gems apiece. For real anti-SC though use boots of quickness and go with either the aforementioned flambeaus against undead/demons (for double 114 point AP attacks) or a gate cleaver (for double 54 AN damage attacks) which will explode pretty much anybody even if they manage to make a shield block.

Let’s see, other fun stuff to do with Ulm. Your focus on construction will give you early access to golems which is one more thing to add to your mobility. Gargoyles are good to, either have your pretender gift of reason a couple or just lead a flock by ye old fly booted smiths if you're short on N gems. Earthquake – each cheap smith with a 5 gem pair of earth boots is like an IED in the path of any big army. If you get prissy you can slap some armor and iron skin him and he’ll probably even survive unscratched. Don’t be shy, use several of them! Similarly rain of stones is open to your air random smiths, and it works very well with your heavily armored troops (enemy mages are likely not so lucky). You’ll certainly want to crank out a steady stream of 2 gem lightless lanterns. Crystal/slave matrixes can be forged cheaply and open up a whole lot of options I won’t explore here but keep them in mind if what you’d really like is something Ulm can’t otherwise do easily like foul vapors for your mechanical men to play in. If your blood economy ramps up well look into robes of the magi, they’re actually affordable at half price (and can often be traded for a huge profit).

Finally, I wanted to point out that putting up the forge of the ancients can generally pay for itself even if it is dispelled after one round. With smiths, any item costing 5 gems only costs 1 under the forge – without even using a hammer! Fire brands and golden shields for 2 gems apiece. Plan on forging 50 items the turn the forge goes up, and you’ll easily save more than you paid for it, not even counting the benefit of being able to forge items you weren’t able to before. Careful though, the forge has been known to start wars!

The Ulm caricature is a big lumbering beast, unable to move or respond to its nimble opponents. Keep that picture in your mind, and don’t play like that! Your heavy infantry will take care of itself, focus on mobility and flexibility to transform Ulm into a very competitive nation.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

*****. Had to do it.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Baalz, the Lord of Strategy, Master of the Hidden Strength strikes again! :D

Thanks for this great guide, MA Ulm is one of my favorite nations of all time thematically and it's the first one I ever played a Dominions game with (back with Dom-PPP).

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

great guide. Was ther not a thread once in the dom2 forums about flying smiths casting fire shield and double-wielding axes of sharpness ?

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Smiths-thugs! That sounds like a great idea.


A rainbow with N4 E4 S4, A3 F3 D3, W2 would be able to do the same stuff as N4 E4 S4 A4 F4, D3 W3, given few extra turns and gems after constr 6. It will take few more turns and little more gems to get there, but it will save you some design points. I don't have Dominions here, so I can't test if it's necessary or not. Details:

A3E4: even a single Staff of Elemental Mastery will help you boost all the elemental paths, and you need A4 to forge Air boosters. On the other hand, the pretender will have the paths to forge Ring of Wizardry and the F/W Staff of Elemental Mastery, so as long as you get enough gems A3 would be enough... You really do want those Air boosters, because with two boosters an Air-random-plus-empowerment Smith can forge Staves of Elemental Mastery for half the normal price, so I could see A4 as well. It would also let you forge Staff of Storms much earlier if you need it.

F3D3: A single Flaming Skull will get you access F4 and Flaming Helmets, and furthermore, Flaming Skull and Flaming Helmet on a Fire-random Smith will let you forge Flaming Helmets for half-price. Death 3 is much better than D2 for bootstrapping into Death as well.

W2: Since you'll get F4 (as I explained above), just forge the two Water boosters to access W/F Staff of Elemental Mastery. If you need any higher Water, you could summon Naiads or Kokythiads, who are also good for the Death. You might miss some Water 3 sites, though.


Is the artifact sceptre that gives +3 Death magic one-handed or two-handed? If it's one-handed and MA Ulm gets to Constr 8 early, the Death-empowered Smith could change from half-priced Flaming Skulls to half-priced Standards of the Damned...

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Major complaint:
This guide isn't linked in your sig!

Awesome stuff, as usual. :up:

If I can humbly suggest adding a mention of Living Statues:
Compared to Mechanical Men, Living Statues have nearly double the HP, higher Attack, higher Protection, lower AP (a bonus when employed as blockers), a MUCH better shield, and a longer weapon while still having strat move 3 and being mindless/lifeless. In other words, they make awesome offensive linemen (blockers to the non-US folks). Sure they lack lack fire resistance, but that doesn't help vs. friendly Magma Eruptions anyway.

Especially if you're taking A4E4 on your pretender, you can make the oft-forgotten Staff of Elemental Mastery...give one to that pretender, add Earth Boots & a Ring of Wizardry for E7, and each 20E Enliven Statues casting gives you 14 Living Statues, which is conveniently more efficient than Mechanical Men.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Yeah, that's what put the germ of the idea in my head, but it didn't quite work until you could stack a minor bless on top. Fire shield + 2 axes of sharpness = a fun gimmick, awe + regen + reinvig + 29 protection + AOE damage = single handed crowd clearer. With your hps being so low you really need your fatigue to be near zero as critical hits will quickly drop you, and you're still gonna take a couple points of damage every now and then so you really need a minor regen. The holy smiths are what make this work, without the blessing you've got a good chance of going down vs strong PD.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Yeah, the thing is one of the big advantages of mechanical men is the synergy with your research goals. Cons-6 is one of your first research goals, one more level buys you golems, weapons of sharpness, and mechanical men - all very beneficial. And the other real benefit to mechanical men is that they're immune to most magic. Certainly there are some nations that can counter them easily enough, but there are plenty of nations reliant on elemental damage who don't really have much at all to throw at a bunch of mechanical men buffed with weapons of sharpness - which is oh so conveniently unlocked at the same time.

Living statues on the other hand are all the way out at ench-6, which you're probably not going to pick up very early (the only real thing you want down there is Deep Well, and it's not an early target). They can be taken down by anything from lightning strike to frozen heart to falling fires and basically fill the same niche as Ulm's infantry - tough things for the bad guys to whack on in melee but who won't last too long against a magical barrage.

Throw in the possibility of several different battlefield enchantments (heat from hell, etc) which are not an option for living statues) and they just don't seem in the same league IMO.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Well, I messed around with this guide trying to create a pretender to specification. In order to buy all the paths recommended on an Enchantress I had to pick up Heat and Misfortune while leaving dominion at a mere 2. I agree with Endoporez that some scaling back on paths is necessary and you do not loose much in the process. F3 from F4 is obvious, especially when your pretender will already have death to build a flaming skull, and you plan on empowering a Smith with death anyways. I also shudder at the thought of spending the 82 points to give a nation strong with Earth magic E4 on their pretender to help create a marginal thug when there are other ways to get revigoration (items and Earthpower). Similarly, N4 to get 5% regeneration on a low HP unit is probably also a waste. N3 should be all you need for diversity.

When messing around with early expansion, I noticed gold was already almost always a bottle neck. Switching to Turmoil-3 Luck-3 might be viable, and in the long term gives Ulm a lot more magic gems and helps him avoid the crippling plague events. Use the 40 points saved to bring your temp scales closer to normal.

Of course, this is just based on an hour of play last night and I assume Baalz has put a lot more time into developing his strategy.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I agree that Turmoil-Luck is a good choice with MA ulm, particularly if you are playing CBM. Ulm has relatively cheap mages and troops, and a forging strategy loves more gems. It also gives you some more design points to play with and taking death becomes a lot more attractive.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I felt that Ulm was an overlooked nation well before they were patched. The new stuff, to me, feels like it's over the top. I like Ulm because it is efficient and elegant. I think Baalz makes a point that I've believed is true the whole time. As Ulm, other players need you, not the other way around.

I do feel that the roll of blood magic for Ulm is underplayed a lot in this guide. Blood stones, in my opinion, move Ulm to a whole new level of dangerous. Not because of the gem income it produces, but rather because they are overlooked as an earth booster. Ulm doesn't need more then a few blood stones at home. The rest ought to be fielded on smiths moving with your armies. Combined with a pair of earth boots and summon earthpower you have an earth 5 mage who can use the constant supply of earth gems to great effect.

Another thing overlooked I feel is alteration. Sure, iron blizzard is a handy evocation spell, and magma bolts satisfies a player's hunger for mass destruction, but it just isn't the path I would choose if I was given a lot of earth mages. Armor destruction, immobilization, battlefield fatigue, and protection are just a few of the spells under alteration. One of the most overlooked spells in my opinion is petrify, most likely because it requires an earth 5 caster. Yet, I just pointed out how easy it is to generate one of these in battle. Later on you can support your thugs with Crumble, fortify your position with iron walls and wizard's tower. Finally you can field those living statues in place of mechanical men without much a draw back as you can then cast army of gold. That's just the earth magic, their is also spells like blindness and doom. Doom is a spell you only need to cast once. Have your god show up, cast, and then retreat or cast returning. The enemy units will never be the same. Will of Fates is just further down. If your fielding golems you can provide them with a starshine cap and crystal coin, now everyone of your armies are nearly unstoppable.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Oh, perhaps I wasn't clear. You definitely can't afford everything I suggest is beneficial on your pretender and get the scales you need, you have to pick out of the choices as to what is most important for you. I would not at all suggest going with heat and misfortune, that will significantly cut into your vital income. I'd probably go with something like order-3, production-3, drain-3, death-3, dom-4, E4 N4 S3 D3 F2 A2 W2.

The blessing is the critical factor that puts you up into the "almost invincible" category rather than "really tough". When you're talking about a 12 hitpoint guy, the difference between taking a hit every 3-4 turns while regenerating 1 point per turn is *huge* compared to taking 2 hits every 3-4 turns while not regenerating. Using winged boots and a lucky pendant (again, a huge difference in halving your hits...plus it's cheap) you don't have a whole lot of choices for more reinvig and regen, and nothing using your smiths to forge. To be honest, I just find the cost/benefit for the smith thug with no blessing is too high with his mortality rate. You could make the call that you think other options are better an opt not to use the holy smith thugs, but its hard to argue the cost of the blessing is too high if you do plan to use them.

Additionally, having an E4 pretender helps a lot in casting the larger spells you might be considering like Earth Blood Deep Well or Forge of the ancients or iron angel. Of course you can always forge boosters, but one extra level often makes such endeavors *much* cheaper rather than depending on an elemental staff or ring of wizardry. Finally, as you may have noticed you'll want to be spending a bunch of earth gems, so having E4 on the guy you already planned to send extensively site searching is hard to classify as a waste.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I disagree, even though I usually stay clear away from Misfortune.

While more gems are good and Ulm's mages and units are cheap, Ulm needs castles, and since the mundane armies are slow you preferably want to have several, and since research is slow you preferably want secondary research center up as soon as possible. Without Order 3, you just can't afford new castles fast enough.

Luck really helps Ulm, especially if you get coastal provinces, since there are events that easily produce betweeen 15 and 25 water gems or blood slaves (huge number of water gems have been blown ashore// a slave ship was captured) - but you need the castles more, and even Order1/Luck3 builds don't get enough many reliably.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Yes, I don't disagree with anything AOE has said about alteration, it can be extremely powerful and under the right circumstances I'll focus on it. The thing is, alteration is a force multiplier. That's usually a good thing. The problem is it requires sufficient force to multiply.

Iron blizzard is, as I mentioned, a niche spell. Magma bolts is a useful stopgap if you're pressed early. You can't compare petrify to magma bolts, lets be fair and compare petrify to magma eruption, as it's the spell I clearly say should be your focus. By level 6 evocation I'll match your petrify, destruction and curse of stones with magma eruption, blade wind, and earthquake. It's a bit disingenuous to dismiss these spells as satisfying a hunger, taken together there are precious few armies those three spells won't decimate when cast by several mages with an appropriate strategy.

The big consideration though, which I tried to stress is you have to work hard to overcome Ulm's inherent inertia. There's a reason Ulm has an image as a lumbering beast who can't turn around - by default that's what it is. If you focus on force multipliers, your only option is to use it with sufficient force - namely large groups of map move one infantry. If you focus on force generators though, you gain a lot more flexibility on how you deploy them. Keep a stockpile of winged boots in your lab and plan your castles appropriately and you can drop dozens of magma blast spammers and thugs anywhere in your nation on a single turn's notice - or spread out and cover virtually your entire nation with one or two guys who will slaughter small raiding squads. Focusing primarily on alteration is what I alluded to before- you're basically going down the route of marching big, slow blocks of guys around casting the same handful of spells until a nimble opponent hamstrings you.

Of course I'd like to stress one last time that you don't want to ignore alteration, there's obviously some good stuff in there and you don't have to work hard to come up with a scenario that it's exactly what you need. You don't want to focus on it initially though at the expense of the things which give you speed and flexibility - you've already got the strength and you have more urgent things than multiplying it.

You also can't compare a level 9 spell (army of gold) combined with a level 6 spell of another path (enliven statues) with two level 7 spells from the same path (mechanical men and weapons of sharpness). At the point you're casting army of gold, why bother with statues at all? A large part of the benefit of the mechanical men is the point of the game where you field them.

I also object to you saying I underplayed the bloodstones, I didn't talk about them at length because I felt that is belaboring the obvious. Let me quote:

"Blood stones are very, very good for Ulm, giving you the earth income to forge everything you want and boosting your mages (earth random + boots + blood stone = E5 = earth attack, petrify, weapons of sharpness, etc.)"

I will say though that I disagree with you that Ulm doesn't need many blood stones at home, if I'm pulling in 50E per turn I'm putting it all to excellent work. Putting blood stones on key smiths is a powerful tool, but putting them on all your combat smiths is a wasteful use of gems generally and you'll lose your bloodstones that way! I'd rather keep them safe in the castle spamming earth attack...

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Force multipler vs. force generator: good thoughts, Baalz. Thanks. This will be useful to me with nations that have nothing to do with Ulm, and goes into the same bucket as other thoughts like "the keys to endgame strength are flexibility and mobility."

-Max

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Lord knows I'll take turmoil/luck sometimes, but this is not the time to do it. Your initial expansion is going to be average because of the speed your troops are produced, you have to get your second and third castle up very quickly. Getting those castles up a couple turns earlier makes a big difference in the number of indies you're able to grab before they're all taken, which largely sets the stage for how your initial interaction with your neighbors is going to be. Being below average puts you in the prey bucket for the initial tilt, and by and large turmoil vs order is that margin for Ulm.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

My apologies, I didn't want to come off as saying that alteration is somehow greater then evocation. They each clearly fill in a different roles. If Ry'leh is knocking on the door with a bunch of shambler thralls, you want iron blizzard. No doubt about that. I would even agree that evocation is likely to be my first pick for research. I wasn't trying to make a serious comparison between spells of completely different levels if you can believe that.

My main point is that a few spells, like petrify, are under-appreciated, mostly because they appear to be out of reach for most casters. However, earth is surprisingly easy to boost, particularly with a nation that has a forge bonus and starting earth gem income. In the case of petrify versus magma eruption, it depends highly on what units each of us are using against each other. Destruction and petrification is much more useful against a barrage of thugs then earthquake and magma eruption.

I'm a little surprised that you are much more conservative about the fielding of blood stones then you are about the fielding of thugs and gear. I've always felt that the best place for the stones is on the field of battle, not stocked away at home. Yes, they are indeed valuable and produce gems of their own, but they save you more gems and resources in battle then out. It is wonderful to have a huge supply of gems each turn, but blood stones are not clams. You can make them work for you right away and in a very powerful way. Granted, you shouldn't field all but one of them all of the time. However, you should be willing to take those flying shoes and bloody stones and place them on the field when things start to happen. Don't treat them like treasures, treat them like tools is all I say.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I like the priest smith thug idea and am starting to play around with it. (Or will if I ever get a air random:) How necessary is the full black plate? It seems to me the high encumbrance from that is the only reason you need the extra reinvig from the earth bless. Is ironskin + fire plate sufficient? Or even one of the robes? Shroud would let you use master smiths, Shadows for etherealness or missile protection? Assuming the appropriate gems/paths on your forgers.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

No, you want the black steel plate, the 5 gem one with 2 encumbrance. Alternatively you can go with fire plate for essentially the same thing. The one with 4 encumbrance is a bad idea, the point of the extra reinvig is not to have a net 0 encumbrance, it's to have a high negative net encumberance so you can recover the fatigue from your buffs before many people start trying to make critical hits on you. That's why you want to stick to summon earthpower, then blessing, then invulernability, then wait twice before attacking rather than stacking on a fireshield or some other buff.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Excellent as usual. I wonder how much of this is applicable to EA Ulm... ;)
Certainly this would call for using Shamans as thugs (somewhat counterintuitive...). Also, Evocation probably shouldn't be first priority there...
(sorry for OT, I just interested in making that nation work more than in case of MA)

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Yeah, one thing I didn't mention but probably should, your initial mages you're recruiting should be master smiths, not holy smiths. The upkeep on the holy smiths is lower, and there's a few extra spells they can cast (iron blizzard, etc), but you really want to get those 10% randoms fairly early. Once you've got 3+ castles cranking out smiths and you've got a couple of the randoms you need you can switch to making holy smiths from your capital every turn so you'll have them when you want them for thugs or those spells.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Excellent guide, However I disagree on the scales a little. order/death is good for smaller map, but in a bigger game I'd go with luck to compensate money loss by death and to get those extra gems from the start.
But than again I just like luck.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I somewhat disagree. I've been experimenting with EA Ulm lately and found out that strong bless and thug holy smiths is a workable combination*. But going for this requires that the holy smiths (shamans) be recruited earlier than the smiths.
Also it is more efficient to start recruiting smiths en mass once you've hit high const. and have significant gem income. This way you'd be recruiting them when they're guaranteed to do what they are good at - forging.

* Actually, I didn't find a lot working for EA Ulm so it was kinda nice surprise to learn that bless and shaman thugs is workable.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I'm going to side with Baalz here. The randoms generated from the regular smiths are way more game changing then a few extra thugs and dollars.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I like luck too. But remember, you've got drain and I'm pretty sure that cuts deeply into those extra gem events.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

This has not been my experience. I'm not saying there is no difference, but I found plenty of gem generators with drain scales, but a lot less with misfortune scales.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Even with Drain, Luck does give gems. It might lower the amount of gems you get slightly, and/or make good events more rare, and I'm pretty sure item events are much more rare. But yes, it does give gems, and when few gems are all you need for an item, it can be nice.

As I said before, I'd still take Order 3 for MA Ulm and Luck only if I already had the important stuff like good magic for the pretender, maxed Order/Production, perhaps a pick of Growth to keep the Smiths from getting diseased etc.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

A somewhat related topic: I just met some problems using Magma eruption.

I had an army of round 60 regular units(hold and attack), leaded by serveal master smiths.
All smiths were scripted with Summon Earth Power - 4x magma eruption. But when they met a single SC (mistform - mirror image - attack close using winged shoes) on the battlefield, all of them refused to use that spell. They even perfered a melee attack with the enemy, which made that battle simply a total slaughter.

What's wrong with them? The SC has 50% fire resistant and 20 protection. Should that be the reason for my smiths to change their mind? Any comments will be sincerely appreciated.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Hmmm, shouldn't be. Generally when the AI refuses to cast a spell you scripted it's because it can't find a valid target. Fire resistance shouldn't help against it, and a 20 protection is not going to stop it all. I've had SCs go down to maga eruption spam before, not sure why they're mutinying for you, is the guy out of range at first and then engaging the smiths in melee?

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Not that case. I made some of my units guard my mages, and she (mother of thuatha) just flied into the front ranks and killed the men one after another while most of my mages were standing idle. The same situation happened in 2 separated battles. If I remember it correctly, in one battle she had even zero FR as she was wielding a frost brand instead of the fire one.

I assume the ai thought our side had decesive advantage and casting such a spell into our own ranks was a waste.

Attached is the save file of the second battle. Hmmm... should have made a backup for the first battle too.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Do you mean that they actually moved *into* melee range to engage the SC? That would be weird. If the SC just showed up next to them, though, you should be aware that a caster in melee combat has only a 50% chance to be able to cast a spell, otherwise he will engage in melee.

-Max

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Indeed. You can check my save file in last post. The mages pretended to have been given an order "Stay behind troops". After the minions were dead, they came into melee, only to prove that they are no better than a heavy infantry.

Hmmm... This is really annoying. Hope the reason behind it could be tracked.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

yeah, it looked like they were on "stay behind troops" to me, as they moved up a bit and then did nothing, after their original spell. is the previous turn available so that the orders can be checked?

edit: yah, that was a strange bug - I added a bunch of principe to the battle w/ shift-u, and the smiths spammed magma erruption, and a few other things probably dependent upon scripting and range.

further edit: yeah, the smiths just refuse to target the Mother of Tuathas. The prophet will target her w/ smites, but the smiths won't cast jack **** on her. She's not counted as a valid target for them, very weird. - ok one time one sent a cast of flying shards at her, after all the principe were gone.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Sorry, the previous turn are not available... That was a small Blitz MP game and no extra files have been saved.

Besides, some mages did cast Magma eruption / Iron blizzard upon the enemy, means they were not "staying behind troops" but waiting?

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

adding extra units to the battle shows that the smiths were likely set to cast magma erruption. why the Mother was not considered a valid target, I have no idea. It certainly seems to be a bug.

as further insult, half the time the normal ulmish troops manage to take her down anyways - bane of heresy dispells the mistform :)

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I wonder if it's because they don't calculate that they're going to hit a lone target with Magma Eruption, and don't have any spells researched that would be better for a single target. That doesn't sound very plausible, though, since I'm pretty sure I *have* seen mages try to target individual cavalrymen with Magma Eruption. Maybe storm was in effect or some other precision-killing effect? I would check it out but I'm not at my game computer at the moment.

The only way to know for sure what's going on is to run the battle replay with the debug logger running.

-Max

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

they cast magma bolts, flying shards, and fire and iron darts as well - those could certainly be used.

edit: ok, i tried another run through, where i delayed the tuatha from showing up at the ulmish line for a few rounds, and the smiths happily targetted her for one round of spells, and then stopped :)

perhaps a calculation is being done that they will cause more harm to their own troops w/ thier spells - though the AI seems happy enough usually to kill its own ;p

yeah, when she's not surrounded, they seem happy to target her

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Aha. Yes, the combat AI does do a friendly-fire calculation. Am I correct in thinking that the Mother of Tuathas is a low-HP unit? I think the "value" of an arty spell is primarily determined by how much HP damage you do and not so much who you do it to--if she is surrounded by Ulmish warriors most of the HP will be done to Ulm (especially because most of the time it will ONLY hit Ulmish warriors because of Prec).

I'm guessing that if you check the debug log it will have a bunch of lines that say "Friendly Fire" and decline to cast Magma Eruption. It's kind of perplexing that they would run all the way up to melee, though. Note also that the friendly fire calculation is a little bit weird anyway, because at close range you're supposed to be 100% precise according to the manual (under Prec/2 distance?) and yet Agarthan Stone Throwers and such will often engage in melee instead of throwing boulders, presumably because of friendly fire issues. I don't fully understand it.

-Max

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

she's high HP - over 200. But friendly fire is the only thing that makes sense in this case - if BesucherXia had alt 2 researched, they would have spammed combustion - and probably would have spammed earth grip w/ alt 1. But their only spells are fairly imprecise collateral damage spells like magma erruption and flying shards.

let this be a lesson to research alt 1 before conj 6 :judge:

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I have made some further SP tests. The friendly-fire calculation should be to blame.

First case, Smiths with only 10 units: They cast the spell like crazy, drove the enemy away.
Second, Smiths plus 80 extra units: They refused to cast any spells again after the enemy was surrounded.

Now I see the AI will only consider how much damage an art spell will bring to the both sides, but never understand the importance of those damage.
Besides, the AI are not likely to change their mind once they thought they should avoid hurting friendly units, even after all friend units have already gone...

A good lesson for me.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Some awesome thread necromancy performed by me and voila!

As the Ulm ***** I am I tried to build the pretender Baalz suggested here but it is just not possible in vanilla. Any tips on what magic I should lower? Death perhaps?

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Drop the fire death to 2.
Death 2 is the breaking point for death-bootstrap (create revenant for Dark Knowledge & skull staff) and you have some fire on every smith so you'll have it entirely covered by construction 6 (with skull of fire) at the latest.

Rainbow types gain the most from CBM, in my opinion.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

You could take a point of heat/cold perhaps?

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Thanks for the tips!

Nah, I would avoid heat/cold as Ulm needs all the money it can get for all those fortresses. Dropping death and fire to two on the other hand sounds good. Will try it.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Oh right, I edited my post one time too many and the end result didn't come out right ;)

You'll need to drop fire entirely and death by one if that build is going to add up.
I reasoned that fire is easy enough for Ulm to work as is

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I think that Baalz was thinking more from a CBM perspective here, as he has in most of his recent guides.

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

Perhaps, though he didn't state it in any of his posts in this thread. Maybe it is just me who still plays vanilla? :)

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

yeah i think so, vanilla is so 2007

Re: MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?
 

I play vinilla. Parden me for being behind the times.