[Daynarr]

Originally posted by SelfishGene:
I will be following this thread with interest as i find Black Forest Ulm to be a painfully weak and insipid theme.

From what ive gathered from other threads, most like Black Forest because of Vampire Counts and their ability to rout independents. Well, that must be all that Ulm has.

You could not be more wrong here. BF is possibly one of the most powerfull themes there if you know how to use their strengths. And it's actually even easier to use it for beginners then default Ulm. One of their best strengths are rangers. You can build masses of them just like man can build longbows, but rangers use armor piercing crossbows which are better at taking HI and HC which helps incredibly at early expansion. Heck, in MP you have a chance to take out 2 players out before real magic starts to kick in. You don't know how powerfull they are until you play against it in MP and you suddenly face large masses of rangers (who have high accuracy by the way) that start to effectively erase you troops backed up by a hard to penetrate wall of Ulm HI.
The really scary part is that BF can recruit those rangers really, really fast so you will probably face them much sooner then you can build effective defense.

BF also allows you to take Misfortune 3 and get away with it. Just build dozens of Fortunetellers and keep them in capitol. Chances for bad events are capitol based IIRC, and it will suppress most of bad events. Of course, that will mean that you don't get national heroes either, but you do get lots of nice design points.

You don't need to rush VC to play this theme effectively. And it DOES allow you to get Ice Devils later on, which normal Ulm wouldn't be able to, at least not easily.

Having only the generic priest available for duty means you cannot cast any morale support without your prophet. Having no sacred units means you can't ever build for bless effects. Virtually every unit has a mere 10 morale, which is downright terrible and makes Ulm the equal in morale weakness with the worst civs.

All this is true for normal Ulm as well, so this is not really weakness of BF but Ulm in general. As Graeme Dice said, there are workarounds to tackle these problems, but in the beginning your prophet is going to have to carry the burden of sustaining morale of your troops.

Having only 1 Blood, 160 gold, non-sacred mages means you HAVE to use scouts, meaning you have to blood hunt the whole country and spend dozens of turns building scouts.

That is why it's important to have a pretender with Blood magic to speed up the things (like VQ).