[Micah]

MA Ulm is horrid, sorry.

1: Toe to toe, sure, they have excellent infantry, I don't think anyone would dispute that, but they're incredibly slow and have pretty subpar morale on the battlefield. If their morale breaks you can expect to lose a LOT of them while they retreat and get hit in the back repeatedly. Also, mapmove 1 = awful. Getting that stand-up fight you want so badly is pretty difficult when your opponent forces you to split up your forces to stop raiders and you can't reassemble them quickly.

2: firing every 3 turns is pretty bad. Normal crossbows or flaming arrow indies are going to do comparable amounts of damage because of their rate of fire, and their range advantage is minimal, especially if the opponent is expecting them and puts his own archers further forward...the length of the battlefield usually isn't more than the range on a normal Xbow. If they had a resource-light version of them I think it would help Ulm out a lot, but they compete for resources in a major way.

3: Other nations can always choose not to spend money on their troops too, it's just a bad plan. Ulm also HAS to spend money building castles for resources.

4: The bonus is nice, but most of the nice stuff they can make is tailored for SCs that they can't easily access, since it tends to be armor, weapons, and shields. Hammers and earth boots are major sellers, and trading is a major plus, it's true, but the variety of items they can make is extremely limited. Indie mage recruitment to expand your forge selection either means a lot of really bad researchers if you took drain, or a lot of pretender points sunk into not taking drain, which hurts because Production 3 is non-optional.

5: Lightless lanterns are nice, but you have to hit construction 6 before you can make them which takes a while. You're also, again, forced to make a pile of them to stay competitive, so you burn a lot of gems just to avoid falling behind.

6: No national paths to summon either of the guys you mentioned. N4 and D2 aren't exceptionally difficult to get, but you'll probably need a ring of sorcery to do so unless you're using your pretender.

Ulm also has a ton of mismatches. Flaming arrows will cut through arbalests and any non-shielded ground troops. Jotunheim's infantry is problematic for Ulm. Massed tramplers are a nightmare. Shadow blast decimates them. Granted FA and SB kill lots of stuff really effectively, but it takes Ulm a long time to recover their losses on the front line. The front castles can only make 20 or so troops per turn, maximum, and with a 1 mapmove castles in the rear aren't going to be able to get help up to the fight for a while.