Forge of Ulm
 

I have looked everywhere for the explanation for this global enchantment spell. And I can't find it at all

The description is very vague, so what does this spell do?

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

It is like Forge of the Ancients, it both reduces forge prices and makes your mage levels count as one more for forging requirement purposes.
This means that an A1 Mage Smith will be able to forge A2 items.
Be wary about using it in MP games, it can make people attack you.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Fixed that for you.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Not always Soyweiser, although I am currently doing a terrible mistake by casting it in a goon game :)

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Is "not always" being used as a code for "provided that somebody else throws up Arcane Nexus or Astral Corruption and steals the high priority spot"?

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Forge vs. AN... no, you should still kill the Forge caster first. Seriously.

Edit: I think its being used as code for 'My opponents don't have a clue'

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I'd call that situational, though there are certainly cases where I'd go for the Forge caster prior to the AN caster. Astral Corruption on the other hand takes priority, if only because AC basically blocks the Forge.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Well if you mainly have astral mages, or have other ways of preventing/ignoring the horror attacks AC isn't always a problem.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Depends of the game size doesn't it? Definitely AN in larger games.
Though, if you cast forge, it would be enough to hold it for 2-3 turns and mass forge 150 items and than dispel it yourself or kill the caster. That won't make people attack you.
And heck, if only 2-3 neighbors can attack you, you can easily deal with them.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

The thing is, forge of Ulm can be cast early, before a lot of cross map mobility happens, and if you only border 4 guys, one of those being in a war already, you can bribe at least one of the other 3, and team up with him to eat the attacking neighbours. Also, if its cast early, it objectivly is not as much as a gamewinning threat as casting it later. And you can get away with some funny lightless lantern rushing if graphs are off.
That early, its not awfully likely that someone has an astral stash with your name written on it either. Nor is it particularly easy to get rid of a rainbow in his own dominion very early in the game.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I think the forge its not half a treath as arcane nexus. Early mother oak is menacing too.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

The situation where only 2-3 neighbors can attack you is unlikely. There are a lot of remote assassination spells, fast travel spells, province attack spells, population attack spells, so on and so forth. Sure, one person halfway across the map trying to kill you with those is mildly inconvenient, but if everyone chooses to do so you have a big problem.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

The thing with Forge is, Ulm can cast it turn 18 or so.
At that time, people are usually in some kind of early war, dont tend to have a lot of remote attack spells or the gems to use them.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Assassination spells require a huge amount of investment. Take mind hunt for example;
Crystal Coin + Astral Cap + Eye of Void + Rune Smasher = 55 gems.
Besides, assassination spells usually only work the first turn around. After that you'll be sure to protect your good mages and if the enemy keeps attacking your lesser mages all the better.
Most province attack spells are easily dealable, with the exception of GR, which usually takes a lich and two boosters which total 65 gems. So nobodys gonna have too many of those.
Fast travel spells are unreliable and cost a heck of a lot of gems to organize. And time too. You usually need to take a province, farsummon a fort, build a lab and gateway in troops which is immensely expensive. Don't get me wrong, I love doing it but it's a very risky form of attack.

Of course you'll get killed in the end if everyone joins up but I still think you'd have a very good shot of defending against even 4 nations with the forge up.

Not sure what my point was anyway... Forge is OP for level 0?

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I see that you assumed a 2S mage, and no higher. The nations that are actually likely to use Mind Hunt probably have a 3S mage, and furthermore, given that, can probably work decently without an Eye of the Void and Rune Smasher. Moreover, others are much cheaper (e.g Manifestation, Earth Attack) for the nations good at them, and Forge of the Ancients is the sort of thing that warrants spending lots of gems as a countermeasure anyways. Plus, if you do invest in an assassination strategy as a counter, you will still have most of the investment after it.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I'd prefer to just shank my neighbour who is busy gatewaying his armies and spending all his gems to kill ulm.

As long as ulm doesn't have ~30%+ of the land on the map, forges isn't a huge deal. Especially since most people have no idea what to use it to spam.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

FotA is no big deal? I think that's the first time I've heard that. So I guess it will be you and Ulm vs. the rest of players? :p

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

CBM is thug/SC edition of dom3, but you don't gain that much as ULM from getting up forges. Even if you have a pretender and the research to whack out bane lords or whatever you still have crappy mages that suck and need a crystal shield in battle and a lightless lantern out of battle to even register as 'a mage'.

I'll just dust to dust the bane lords and use battlemagic and master enslave to take/kill the armies after i've eaten 2-3 other players who spent all their resources on the 'ulmish threat'. Ulm in CBM is a earlygame or midgame threat at best. If the PLAYER playing ulm is known as a good player I might consider using some remotes or sending people he's fighting gold or gems so he doesn't run over them and end up on my doorstep before I get out the lategame big guns, but otherwise meh.

The only player i've ever seen use ulm properly is mightypeon, and he always overexpands so basically you can just get all his neighbours to gank him when destruction/anti heavy armour spells become available in early midgame.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Try dust2dusting Iron Angels while eating Iron Blizzard spam from non-caponly Black Priests.
Why bother with armies when you can have a gajillion of cheap SCs?

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Just for reference I don't agree with this.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Ulm smiths have E/S/A/F. Forging vice that covers a damn lot.

Magic vice, Ulm can brew up such a **** storm you can hardly see it coming. Boosting Smiths to S3/A3/E4/F3 is rather easy and cheap (crystal shield + spell booster), and boosting that with say 4 communion slaves which would cost you 8 gems to forge would give you a S5/A5/E6/F5 smith. Of course you can add more boosters as needed. And besides, the black priests do a pretty decent job of tearing apart any conventional army to shreds.

Along side those mages you can add 1 gem ethereal bows, thunder bows, bows of war, (which equal to 26 archer at 1 gem). Get a smith to cast flamming arrows and completely humiliate anyone who tries to attack. If someone tires to use SCs or thugs get some 5 gem incineration rods, or 1 gem vision bows or piercers. Then there are 3 gem wand of wild fire for troops, 1 gem herald lances for any sort of undead, heck even recruiting indie commanders and sending them off with medallions of vengeance is a viable option!

Research vice, I'll just say 1 gem lanterns.

And than you get to the "big guns". Super cheap thugs and reasonably cheap SCs. Heck, you can even thug out smiths with half a dozen gems if you don't know how to spend you gems.
For example do this. Take some smiths, give them fire brends, gold shields, braces of protection and a slave matrix. Than get an astral or air OR preferably both smiths and give them a crystal matrix and cast mistform, mirror image, personal luck, body ethereal, earth power, etc.
Nice isn't it? You could get all that by turn 20 probably.

BTW, I'd just say the contrary, MA Ulm is vulnerable early on (and even early on is damn hard to kill) but is a mid-late game powerhouse.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Iron blizzard gets stopped by arrow fend. It's nice, but it's like the Ulmish version of flaming arrows. Devastating from when you get it to when the enemy gets the counter, and mostly useless thereafter. It's certainly not likely to be a big deal when Iron Angels are in the field.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

i think this is why cbm nerfed the hammers. just got a little silly

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Well, some nations need Conj8 to break into air. And even air pretender can`t be everywhere at once.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Further more, Arrow Fend and iron blizzard is of the same level of research, but while most Ulm players prioritize iron blizzard, ench 6 is not all that popular to most air nations.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Well, if you're right about how Storm works, then it comes one level lower, is an early priority for all air nations, and halves the effect of iron blizzard in addition to the precision malus.

Like I said, it's much like flaming arrows. How easy it is to counter varies depending on the nation. Pythium for instance, laughs at iron blizzard with its ubiquitous tower shields, just like it does flaming arrows.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Destruction is easy to research and it deals with tower shields nicely With Summon Earthpower every single master smith can cast it... Followed by bladewind for added carnage.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Eh, that doesn't work as well in practice as it sounds, especially blade wind. I really wish there was a way to stop mages from casting bladewind as soon as their script runs out. That 80 fatigue is ridiculous unless it's an Earth King. Destruction has high fatigue and friendly fire issues, and honestly isn't that great except against small squads of elites. That much fatigue would have been better used just straight up killing enemies instead of only rendering them open to being killed. The whole reason why Iron Blizzard is awesome is that it's tons of damage at low fatigue, so almost endlessly spammable, and you lose that if half your casters are too busy working so the other half actually does damage with Iron Blizzard.

Against lots of shields, it's a better idea to just spend the same caster and fatigue buffing flail troops with strength of giants and letting them go.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

That`s my biggest problem - I lack practice. :)
What about magma eruption? Every master smith can cast it with summon earthpower, and I don`t think it gets stopped by arrow fend, so you still can have combat evocations when your enemy starts bringing arrow fend with him.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Yes Iron Blizzard is an amassing spell and yes arrow fend tends to stop it. But even with arrow fend you still do a fair amount of damage since you cast over 30 projectiles. The shear number of projectiles you can put out is enough to overpower arrow fend sometimes.
I may be getting off topic here but arrow fend doesn't stop Ulm. It more or less equals things out for the other nation. For example those 5 Bows of War Ulm paid 5 gems for effectively become a single Bow of War under arrow fend.

I should state that there are also only a handful of nations that have A3 mages to recruit. Of course there are twice that many much which have A2 mages but you'd still need air boosters or communions or crystal shields and stuff to protect your armies and all those tend to cast. I should also mention that a single turn that some nation takes to put up arrow fend is enough for iron blizzard to annihilate an army and than switch to other stuff such as magma eruption as Shardphoenix stated.

I agree that Destruction + Blade Wind doesn't work as well in practice as it sounds. Here are the five spells I found most potent for Ulm.
-Iron Blizzard
-Magma Eruption
-Strength of Giants
-Weapons of Sharpness
-Legions of Steel/Iron Blessing

The first two basically crush most types of troops. And the 3 boosting spells turn your flail infantry into killing machines. I've seen Grendelkins, Treants, Zmeys and all sort of things chopped under Ulms boosted flail infantry.

I'd say that Ulm is currently the strongest MA nation IMO. Before they were crappy but now they got just too many small boost which combined are a bit OP.

I may not agree on a number of things in CBM 1.9 but so far I've experienced first hand only two things that really need to be removed. Agarthas darkness PD and Ulm Forge.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

FWIW I agree w/ Executor mostly. I just think ma ulm is OP now. With the forge up there only two options:
Either all the other nations immediately gang ulm and then possibly stop it or MA ulm wins. I'm looking fwd to a quick fix of some sort in CBM, until which I plan to ban ulm from my games.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I think Ulm is fine without the forge, things can indeed get somewhat silly if they get it without getting dragged in wars.
I disagree heavily with them being the strongest MA nation, that is imho Shinuyama by a fair margin.
They are however up there with pythium and Shinu, and Shinu has a number of hard counters to MA ulm.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Really? Would you mind explaining why you feel so? I'm kind of interested. Never played Shiny myself though Jomon is definitely strong and quite to my liking.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Shinuyama has very good troops, and more importantly very varied troops.
Ulm has excellent heavy infantry, Shinuyama can pick and choose between very good heavy infantry, size 1 infantry with human stats, size one archers, Armour piercing aquatic Size 2 infantry for 1 resrouces, ok giant like troops for one gold piece.
Shinuyama also has excellent recruit anywhere mages. E2F2D2W1 Sacreds that get a guaranteed other pick and a maybe additional pick. They have better Earth access than MA Ulm since their mages have above 25% odds of being E3 (and can get native E4 sometimes), D3 allows skellie spamm and Bane Fire, F3 opens many many Evocations and Flaming arrows (and Shinuyama has some of the cost effective archers in the game too), and E3 can trollface Ulm with Destruction/Iron bane. Iron bane can be safe for Shinu to cast since they can recruit large armies in one turn that dont have artificial armour.

Having certain access to D3,F3,W2,E3,N2 from national mages (N2 coming from Ubas) allows them to get Kitsunes, who are stealthy Nature 3+ mages that can get additional picks in Air (hello rainbow armour), Earth (higher level buffs from N, some forging options), S, or combinations of those. The not unsensible choice of Having a Pretender with E4 (great for your battlemages) and A4(great for giving you A access) allows castings of Dai Tengu, who are A3E1 mages that provide even more options for Shinu.
Buff Spell Wise, Shinuyama can reliably get access to any Major buff that is not in Blood or Astral, it has all evocation options of Ulm and then some, and can get a couple of crucial summons without needing as many boosters as Ulm.

They also have the Shura, one of the most cost effective thugs of the game (Basically a Bane with more fear and Ethereal build in for 6 D gems), and their weakness in S can be dealt by Kitsunes, Shade mages and Dust Priests, all of whom are castable without needing the pretender.

If you think Jomon is strong, Shinuyama is Jomons incredibly nasty bigger brother (Shinuyama can do nearly everything jomon can better, they arent a heavy aquatic power though. If you get UW castles they still get to buy Kappas from there though), who, imho, happens to be in a "smaller" pond too. In an all ages game, I would see MA Pythium, MA Ulm, MA Shinuyama as contenders, while EA (Mict, Niefel, Sauro, Lanka, Hinnom, Acro) and LA (Mari, Mict, Atlantis, others) have a much higher amount of "heavyweights".

Compared to MA Ulm, Shinuyama has better E access, much more flexibility (they also dont have map move 1 issues at all) and can usually react very rapidly to any kind of emerging threat.
Ulm is a very powerfull force on the offense, but often has issues with reacting to sudden developments, Shinuyama is much more fluid.
Forge of Ulm is still overpowered though.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

I do think that Shinu have become rather powerful in CBM, but while shinu is much more diverse than Ulm, they can't really match Ulms streamlined and cost effective MIGHT! For all their diversity, Ulmish troops can still counter all of shinus troops in the early game while spending much less money doing so. And in the mid game when mages dominate the battle field, Ulm still have the advantage of better chaff. And although shinus mages are just plain better on paper, they are also incredibly old and will thus have much more encumbrance than their ulmish opponents. And because Ulms troops are so much cheaper, ulm can afford much more forts and mages to compensate. And this is a place were quantity have a quality all of its own.

So in short, Ulm is still much more powerful than shinu.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

But Ulms chaff has map move 1, and Shinus chaff is avaialble on very short notice. If they play their cards right, they will be able to attack Ulmish troops with sizeable local superiority. They also have Stealth, something Ulm once again totally lacks.
Also, Destruction can be available early on (Shinus mages being old does not stop them from being great researchers) and makes it very easy for Shinuyama to defeat Ulmish troops on a cost efficient basis.
Given that Shinu is also a very good archery nation, destruction really makes it very very easy to kill Ulms stuff from afar. Pangea can also counter Ulm using destruction and archery, but is much less powerfull in general.
And Shinu also has room for much more variability in Pretenders as it does not need much from one (other than preferably awesome scales, to an extent, Drain 2 is a very good choice for them due to Shinuyamas researchers not caring that much about loosing an RP)
It should also be noted that Shinus mages are sacred and all of them can cast earthpower. Given that a A4E4 Celestial General is rather popular for Shinu, reinvig 6 in major battles (where the prophet is available) is not awfully uncommon.

This does not mean that Forge should not be changed, but I seriously see Shinuyama as stronger, especially in a direct matchup.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Why are we discussing this in terms of a direct matchup, a direct matchup is pretty useless to figure out which nation is stronger in this game. That'd be like saying ma vanheim is stronger than vanilla ashdod because ashdod has no easy way to handle air magic.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Well, I think most would agree that Shinuyama and CBM MA Ulm are both very strong nations, and in such a situation in may be worthwhile to look at the direct matchup, as their respective "strongness" makes them more likely to end up fighting each other directly (before after or while they kill everyone else).

Ulm is better at forging, Ulms has great troops, Ulm has reliable and cheap but effective battlemagic.
Ulm is slow, Ulm has issues reacting rapidly to new situations, Ulm cannot rely on National Mages/recruits to do the thugging.

Shinuyama has good troops, some of the best mages in the game, but neither of those is cheap. It has unmacthed flexibility, stealth and a high degree of mobility. It has access to very cost effective Thugs, but cannot equip them as cheaply as Ulm can.
Both Shinuyama and Ulm can counter enemy heavy infantry very well, but Shinuyama does not have to rely on heavy armour due to its flexibility, while Ulm does.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Something worth keeping in mind is that Ulm is not restricted to using only its national troops. Of course later in the game national troops will at the very least be supplemented (if not replaced) by summons but even earlier in the game you can use indies to complement your national troops (this would obviously not apply on a NI map but the majority of games do allow indies and CBM has to balance things with the most common MP settings in mind).

So, for instance, one drawback to Ulm's troops is map move 1. But the important thing is your mages are map move 2 (having map move 1 mages is a major drawback). Ulm lends itself to production (and in 1.92 prod scales are more appealing than ever) so even in unforted provinces you should have no problem massing indie troops (especially since the map move 2/3 indies tend to be lower resource units). And of course you can apply the exact same buffs to those troops as your national ones. So you've got your heavy hitters for your main offensive force (which is going one province at a time anyway) combined with a more rapid response map move 2 force of indies. I've also noticed that Ulm players in particular tend to spam forts so later in the game map move may not matter much when responding to raids since almost every province may be neighbored by a fort.

And if someone wants to play the destruction/iron bane game I think Ulm can compete. Sure, you might have to change your troop mix but that's an important part of the challenge and fun of the game.

I also wanted to make a comment about another Ulm weakness - slightly lower than average MR. This is something that will kill you late game if you get hit with master enslave pre-buff. But the thing is, that will devastate even nations with good MR units (one of the great things about demons is that their base MR is 16/17). For much of the game tempering the will means your effective MR over the course of a battle will frequently be as good as the good MR nations. Now nations with good MR troops can cast antimagic but if they are not astral nations and they are fighting an astral nation (a time when you'll really need that MR boost) your opponent can likely afford to risk mages to magic duel more than you can.

Something I haven't heard mentioned and that I'm not fond of is the holy Iron Fears Not Fire/Lighting/Ice spells. Lightning having its damage cut in half from the beginning of the game is in bad enough shape but fire and ice, which are AP at best at low levels, basically become unusable against Ulm's high prot troops. I understand the idea of giving Ulm elemental resist spells that are hard for them to come by with their mages but I think these should be made earth spells and require some degree of research.

It has also occurred to me that the removal of hammers helps Ulm. For instance, Ulm's cost to forge a 5 gem item with a hammer has gone from 2 to 3 gems. Other nations (ones without a forge bonus of course) had their cost increased from 3 to 5. It's a relative advantage for Ulm - your forge costs have gone up but not as much as most other nations.

Also, a comment about master smiths. While they aren't the most powerful mages around there's something to be said for a cheap, recruit everywhere, tougher than average mage who, either by using gems or earth boots, can add punch to any force by casting weapons of sharpness (imo the single best troop buff because it lets you take down targets that would otherwise not be threatened by normal troops).

So I agree with Executor's assessment that there were just too many boosts that added up to the nation becoming OP. Ulm wasn't the only nation that got boosts in 1.92 so it's inevitable there will be a review of how things played out for all of those nations and if some things should be nerfed. And I'm not really surprised that Ulm stands out as having become particular strong since they were weak for such a long time (enough so that they actually got a boost in an IW patch) and they've had a lot of player support to help them out.

I'd say it would make sense to implement a couple of nerfs to MA Ulm and see how it goes - definitely don't want to go crazy and overnerf them.

I'd should also say that when boosting weak nations I prefer to aim for average/somewhat above average power level rather than top tier. Partly because I like to tone down the power level rather than ramp it up but also because you'll just eventually end up with the previously mid-range nations become the new underpowered ones and then you'll have to boost them up. Pythium has been a power for a long time and I can live with them and the other top flight nations keeping their position without adding more nations to their group.

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

Iron fears not has AoE one, and priests that are using them do not spam iron Blizzard, I am not sure that spamming indie priest to get it is very viable either.
And only 20% of Ulms mages can cast weapons of sharpness too :)

Re: Forge of Ulm
 

AOE 2 and it scales so a black priest will cover 4 squares at a casting. Especially early in the game when armies are smaller a single black priest might be all you need to buff each army. By the time you reach iron blizzard I don't think it's a problem since you may well be using the enchantment elemental resistance spells. Just a matter of the timing being a bit early IMO.

Right, that's why you'd need either gems or earth boots. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not claiming smiths are anything like the kind of late game army buffers Pans are but they're not totally useless. ;)