[Sly Frog]

With Ulm, it really is all about getting an explosive start, which might include taking out a weak nation to get a second capital. Ulm does not necessarily have to win early to win, but it must get enough of a leg up early to put itself in a position that offsets its weaker late game. In other words, you can hang around in the late game, but only if you acquired more resources than everyone else in the early game to offset your weakness.

Blade wind is a must, but understand that it will stop working at some point when other forces get creatures with protection levels as high as yours. Magma eruption should work, but the casting seems spotty and inaccurate, and I have often taken out more of my own units than the enemy. The magical constructs are okay, but are very fragile. They are likely your only hope against air magic, however (see below). Get the global that brings extra earth gems up (forget its exact name right now). Get the Earth Kings, and start hammering the other side's bastard spell casters with earth attacks, a relatively cheap (especially if you are getting heavy earth gem income from the global) assassination spell. Ulm is very pretender oriented (they are always important, but particularly for Ulm). I agree with the earlier posters - an SC is nice, but Ulm desperately needs additional magic paths, and they are likely to only come from your pretender (at least until your pretender can summon other creatures with magic paths).

That said, I do believe that Ulm is underpowered/overpriced. All of the forged items (one of your two main strenghts) are nice; good luck finding some place useful to put them. Your lack of magical paths mean that you won't have access to the SC summons that can actually hold the items without being easy pickings (and thus merely transfer the items to another player when the holder dies). You will be absolutely slaughtered by air magic, in particular the grossly overpowered/too easily available wrathful skies. The descriptions of Ulm make a big deal out of their drain resistance; don't expect this to have any real impact on the battlefield (it would be cool if fighting Ulm did really impact the opponents spell casting, but it doesn't).