[Teleolurian]

Play Ulm, usually recommended for newbies because they epitomize 'big hitty army'. While in MP you'll need to develop magic for them (and explore their weaknesses), you can usually tank the AI just by playing them as a huge army.

PRETENDER DESIGN Don't worry about Bless effects (does normal Ulm even have blessable units?). You can probably do fine with an Earth Mother, surrounded by an army with one or two other commanders, to wipe out independent provinces.

CASTLES High admin is generally important, especially with Ulm. Build your castles one or two provinces away from each other. If you're not sure, go with Alex's advice and build the watchtower - you're not going to need tremendous pretender magic anyways.

MAGIC If you want to forge a wide range of gear, take a mage-type pretender (one with 10-point paths) and spread out a few points, probably 2 in everything but blood and astral. Keep in mind that you won't have gems for most of these magics at the beginning (Ulm produces Earth gems). However, a rainbow mage is an excellent sitesearcher. If you instead want to back up your armies, you should probably go with a high-Earth pretender, like the Earth Mother or Cyclops.

SCALES High Productivity is necessary with Ulm. Order is also useful; you can balance this out with high Drain (important for Ulm, since their Master Smiths ignore this to some extent) and maybe a point or two of unluck. Ulm needs a relatively high Dominion; don't leave it below 5. Many players recommend 7 or higher.

RESEARCH When playing the game, you will probably want to spend most of your research in Construction; however, there's no reason not to look for strong/useful Earth spells in other branches and get to them. Once you've got enough researchers to get to level 2 in one or two turns, you might as well pick up a couple of levels in everything (but Blood, unless you have blood).

TEMPLES AND LABS: Build a temple in every province- every 5 temples will increase your overall Dominion strength. Labs are only necessary where you plan on recruiting magical units.

RECRUITING: Don't go for expensive black plate units at first. Take time to read unit descriptions, or at least mix and match; place flail and hammer infantry on the front line and set them to attack closest; behind them, pikeneers (that's Ulm, right?) on hold and attack; on the flanks, put some of those crushing Ulm knights.

FIRST GAME: Play against Mictlan, because they suck. Make sure to guard your commanders against Eagle Warriors, which fly to the back. Set a group of troops to guard commander.

DEFENSE: Defense is moderately useful; not only are Ulm troops better than most in 1-on-1 combat, but the AI tends not to attack defense-20 provinces unless it has no other choice. Defense militia also don't keep wounds (like other units), and you can always 'move' your defense around by decreasing defense in one province and increasing it elsewhere. Plus, Ulm has tremendous amounts of money in the late game. Heck, even the mid game.

Note that this guide is zero percent opinion; it's basically a mishmash of previous Posts. The always-included disclaimer is that this is only one way to play the game; specifically, if we took all the posters who originally posted Ulm strategies and made some sort of hideous flesh golem out of them that then figured out how to play Dominions, it would probably play Pythium instead, but might write a strategy guide much like this one.