[FrankTrollman]

Really what Iron Faith needs is some way to make it not completely suck and waste my time by existing. When you get down to it, that's really my only problem with it.

Iron Faith is a crap team that can't win. The fact that their full random is used as an excuse for why regular Ulm can't have nice things just makes it even worse. Really, using Iron Faith as an excuse for why Ulm can't have randoms is like using Serpent Cult Pythium as an example of why Oceania shouldn't be allowed to have Nature and Water mages. If a theme is a waste of space, its existence shouldn't keep others from horning in on its junk.

Ulm gets Forge Bonuses, yes, but thanks to its absolutely dreadful site searching, it actually has less gems coming in than just about anyone. Really, you end up with about the same number of gems worth of forged items as anyone else, and less summoned monsters. And Ulm can't even natively buil a hammer, which means that anyone else who wants to forge a bunch of stuff can probably do it better than Ulm can.

A Forge-happy Atlantis is better at mass forging than Ulm is. Not "almost as good", it's better.

Ulm needs at least a random elemental pick on its Master Smiths. Then at the very least one out of four of them could make a hammer and you could ever find magic sites. Forge bonuses are by themselves meaningless unless you actually have a supply of gems.

And no, even a full random wouldn't be enough to turn Ulm into super hoarders. The best they could do at that point is have the random death master make Mound Kings (once they had found a death site or three), and then have the random Nature master make Fever Fetishes (after finding a nature site or two). One random Nature and you couldn't natively hoard anything. If you have to wait until you get Construction 6 to Clam hoard, you aren't a real clam hoarder, are you?

-Frank