[aldin]

On the 'Ulm for n00bs' discussion:

As best I can tell, basic Ulm is the easiest nation to wrap your brain around. Build strong armies, research construction, go beat everyone else up. With a Combat Pretender (an MP liability I'm sure, but fine for SP) it's even simpler because you inherit the smithy goal of clothing your pretender for war. As such, I'd say it's almost Dominions Lite and imminently suitable for dragging someone into the game.

Since that's what I did, I know it works for getting into the game. It does have SERIOUS cons though. Things I'm finding as I expand out:
1) You wind up with almost no concept of what priests are supposed to do.
2) You have very little concept of what mages are supposed to do.
3) You have a skewed, high-resource perspective on what it takes to build an army.
4) You have a skewed, too-confident perspective on how hardy an infantry unit ought to be.
5) You have a skewed, too-weak perspective on how effective archery is.
6) You have a tendancy to want to look at Construction for solutions to your problems.

Still, Ulm is what got me here. Therefore I immediately abandoned my Caelum game (geh, the best troops have no mobility) and tried to set up an IF game.

I think I got a lucky start. I decided to go with a Great Sage pretender with 4 in everything but Blood. Dominion 5; Order, Production, Heat, Misfortune and Drain were mostly maxxed (Heat 2 mebbe). I got a Fortress, cheapest 30 Admin.

The goal was to use mercs to clear the surrounding territories while the Sage researched (30+/turn on Drain3) and the Templars were built. By the time the surrounding territories were cleared I had a dozen templars, a 4 Holy Prophet, and quite a bit of research accomplished.

The 4 Holy is the key. I can split the templars into two wings that get blessed with the battlefield bless. And the whole battlefield gets morale support too. The pretender is in the process of spinning through the adjacent territories and my gem income is skyrocketing. The army is unstoppable, one opponent in home siege with no other territories and another only a few turns away from the same thing (it's only turn 20 or so).

As a standard, I'd probably take five of the seven magics and try to preserve my scales a bit, mebbe upgrade to a Castle. As it is, and I think I was lucky, IF looks very viable as a nation that can rapidly build a devestating force.

~Aldin