[The Panther]

As for the Ulm thing with forging, I am currently playing base Ulm in one of my MP games. Because base Ulm gets exactly ZERO random schools of magic on the master smith (the ONLY mage it can recruit), then it still has very limited selections of things to build, no matter how many gems it gets. The forge benefit for Ulm is not all that great because you can only forge the same things over and over. No luck pendant even!

Of course, forge of the ancients changes this radically and would therefore be top priority for the enemies to dispel. I could see a team putting over 100 earth gems into that global enchantment and hoping it Lasts for a couple of turns to do mass forging. Still, that is a very high cost for sure and late game only. The other team, which put those gems into powerful golems instead of this enchantment just might have crushed you by then.

Also a rainbow alchemist that never left home would definitely be advantage to Ulm, but it is easy to simply disallow.

And if the team wants to pour mass gems into empowering the Ulm master smith, well then it will take a long time for the forge benefit to break even, especially for only the level 1 skill artifacts. A viable long term strategy, but it will take a while to reap the benefit.

Also, don't forget that ANY earth magic mage from ANY race can build the forge bonus tools, like dwarven hammers, and distribute them to teammates. This actually reduces one major Ulm advantage, the one that it can make a bunch of those things quicker than any other race can. For the team with no Ulm can just pool earth gems into the proper nation and build a bunch of them. You don't have to wait to pile up the gems, only wait for the Construction research. Don't forget that Ulm is a VERY slow researching race because of the high gold cost per base research level (just 5) on its only mage, the master smith. I believe that Ulm is the slowest researching race of them all, everything else being equal.