[aldin]

Originally posted by SurvivalistMerc:
I've experimented a bit more with this and concluded that the templars are just distraction. It's the change to your mages that is important. And I think the same kind of rainbow sage that works with vanilla ulm works with IF. Sure...you may only have a reinvig bonus for your magi if you took earth 4 and the rest a rainbow...but you need a variety of gems to make your research work. Especially if you take drain 3 which I still find wise.

My thinking is that if you take a decent bless effect, you are in effect ignoring your nation's research or other needs. (Such as productivity/order).

Thoughts?

I've just finished a couple of plays with IF and I'd come to more or less the same conclusions. Standard Ulm has three glaring problems, devestating production costs, little magic flexibility and morale issues. IF provides solutions for the Last two. With the right items, Black priests can easily be 2E2?. That's plenty powerful. And sermon of courage cannot be overemphasized in it's ability to keep those heavily armored troops on the battlefield where they do some good. I'd want to toy with it a lot more, but I think Templars are just one component to IF Ulmish Mage/Priest led armies.

By the way, I think the most important unit with regard to Bless is the Black Priests themselves. Air Shield and Reinvigoration both look pretty good on a magic user...

Originally posted by PvK:
1) Because I heard that site searching required up to 4.

3) Again with IF Ulm, the pretender with level-4's can (I thought - may be wrong) better help the Black Priests out with items to get them boosted with items matching their random picks.

PvK

1) It does, but there is only ~1 lvl 4 site for each sphere.

3) Usually level 3 is good enough.

~Aldin (who also bumps his pretender to 4s and is certainly more of a n00b than PvK)