[Sorlakind]

Middle era Ulm is a difficult nation to play competitively. It has weak priests and weak mages, and since magics end up dominating the game, it has a hard time surviving. Notice also that it has no sacred troops, so no bless strategies. I have never played MP, but from what I gather (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), Ulm is in the low end of the scale. I'd like to make three suggestions to improve the situation a little - no big changes intended.

1. Raise the chance of an extra magic pick for the smiths to 50%. Those extra picks are sorely needed but at 10%, even with smiths being relatively cheap (140g) they are hard to come by.

2. An additional *crossbow* unit. Ulm has arbalests which have lower precision - and Ulm units already have low precision to boot. The extra damage (14 vs 10) and extra range (45 vs 35) does not compensate for this. One *could* buy sappers, but it does not pay off: you can buy 2 arbalests for 1 sapper, which means that at the end of 6 rounds, the arbalests have fired 4 arrows while the sapper has fired only 3. So what I suggest is an extra crossbow unit, with a cost around 10g (possibly a *little* higher, like 11-12g), but with lower protection, that is, even less fitted for melee - an Ulm specific version of the independent crossbow unit.

3. This is not an Ulm-specific improvement, but it would help Ulm a lot. The Ulm smiths have a builtin forge bonus and with a dwarven hammer this bonus is even larger. So they are well fitted for a construction strategy: build lots of commanders (e.g. black lords, guardians) and deck them with trinkets. They can then serve as mini-mini-thugs in support of your armies. Of course, this is a micromanagement hell to pull off, so please, please, please, could we have a monthly forge command?

Best regards