[Aleph]

Thanks very much, all - a lot of good material here, everyone contributing something different. Spectres are definitely a good pickup for Ulm, making me think about prioritizing conjuration more than I had initially been.

The sleeping master lich sounds good, and the lammashtas trick is brutal.

I'm not really in love with an immobile pretender with paths that I don't have anyone else capable of searching for/casting spells to search for. I don't see how to get started with such paths, although I suppose you could get lucky on indeps, or alchemy -> searching spells. On reflection, though, I could definitely see throwing F2N2E2 in as a nice boost to catalyze boots/mace production to get your E priests and N enabled fortune tellers able to cast their site spells, kicking off fever fetish spam, enabling soul contracts, and for the late late game having Infernal Prison to enable continued casting while under the affects of Astral Corruption.

I also cringe at seeing sloth and cold on Ulm, since I'm having trouble getting solidly established early - I need those resources. Maybe I'm missing the point (and Meglobob's sleeping giant premise implies that I might be) but it seems to me that you need to take advantage of Ulm's excellent high resource cost troops in order to "get" them. They have awful conventional magics in exchange for strong blood economy, hard as nails troops, two kinds of freespawn, and excellent stealth capabilities. I realize that good players can probably dominate without relying on all of these, but it just hurts my brain to have such good troops and cripple them with -40% production rates.

I'll think about what I'd have to give up to have a B6D3N2F2E2 master liche.