[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Sandman:
Mass producing priests for the right random pick is horribly inefficient. You'd need multiple fortresses, for a start, which is hardly cheap.

Ulm can afford a second castle within 10 turns in a normal richness game, and they don't have anything else to spend their gold on, so you build black priests. I don't see how this is any different from mass producing smiths under standard Ulm. It's not like you are planning to have less than 30 or 40 as soon as possible.

That's why I use a rainbow pretender for Ulm. To find air mages and air gems (although laterns require fire gems). The rainbow pretender is much more dependable that a 1 in 8 air BP.

Or you could use an air 6, water 2 titan, and get a unit that could find all your air sites, and most of your water sites, and that would have the ability to throw massive quanties of lightning around.

I wasn't talking about searching. Whilst Iron Faith has more variety in its magic, regular Ulm can easily gain the variety they lack by employing a rainbow pretender and getting hidden mage sites. And regular Ulm has a good, dependable mage available even if nothing is found.

A rainbow pretender lacks focus, and provides no real way to deal with a strong combat pretender. It is also extremely vulnerable to attack, assasination, far slaying spells, and just about everything else that will get thrown at it. There are very few hidden mage sites that can't be found through the use of the site searching spells that IF Ulm has access to through it's priests. It can't get enchantresses, but those aren't particularly common.

Bless effects are not going to be worth it on the black lord, unless you get both air 9 and astral 9 to cover their weaknesses.

Black templars are just as vulnerable to air magic and MR based spells as any other Ulmish troop. They are too expensive to use in large numbers when they will just get decimated by orb lightning and soul slay.

OK, well I consider a rainbow mage to be an effective way of countering Ulm's weaknesses.

And for the same price you could get a combat pretender that would double your rate of expansion, then actually be useful against opposing armies. A rainbow pretender lacks focus, and a strategy can't really be planned around them.

One random pick does not equal 'much more' versatility.

Of course it does. They have access to every path of magic at a low level, whereas standard Ulm has access to _only_ earth 2 fire 1. There would be no reason to play standard Ulm if the priests had drain immunity.

They can forge low-level items cheaply, sure, but their role on the battlefield is limited to casting weak attack and buff spells at maximum fatigue, as well as priest spells.

How is this any different from standard Ulm? They gain slightly easier access to blade wind, and the ability to cast magma eruption and magma bolts.

[quote]Can you give some examples of their great versatility?[quote]

They have access to every single path of magic. Ulm doesn't. They can build every item that needs combinations of fire 1, air 1, water 2, earth 3, nature 1, astral 1, death 1, and blood 1 just through the use of path boosters that are available to them through construction research.

How does this help their cause as much as being able to reliably cast blade wind, strength of giants, legions of steel and other powerful earth spells?

Legions of steel is not a powerful earth spell. It's a fairly weak armor buff, which gives Ulm more armor, something it doesn't really need. I get annoyed every single time a smith wastes fatigue casting that spell. As for blade wind, earth boots only cost you 5 gems as Ulm, so it's not much harder to get multiple mages that can cast it.

Oh come on. Cost is important.

Cost is important, but not that important to Ulm. They will almost always have more gold than they know what to do with once past turn 10 or so. This is especially true when your mages are scared. Most nations will recruit multiple 200 gold mages per turn once they have the income to do so, and if they don't they will tend to lose magical battles.