[Micah]

MA Ulm is horrid, but earth magic and the forge bonus are certainly redeeming qualities. Destruction, blade wind, summon earth power and magma eruption are all excellent battlefield spells. Their PD is also excellent.

OTOH being someone's forge-chump is just a way to lose slowly instead of quickly, their magic diversity is complete crap, their troops are too resource-intensive to make many expansion groups early, their morale is atrocious (especially since they have such bad combat movement that they die in droves while fleeing). The 1-space mapmove further cuts down their already-limited options, and they can't easily get the thugs or SCs that would benefit from their cheap item-forging. I think it would give them a huge boost to have some lightly-armored crossbows that didn't cost a billion resources...Marignon has em in MA, so I don't think it'd be a problem on any level to give them a useful, cheap troop. Go ahead and make them cap-only so they're not the only thing Ulm builds though. Giving them some more early expansion potential will help counteract the weakness of a schizophrenic pretender, and maybe give them the momentum to make it into late-game with some sort of hope.

Their pretender is hamstrung by having to take production-3 and no free temperature picks. The free drain is tempting, but giving up the bonus RP from a magic scale hurts them quite a bit. Plus even though the drain doesn't hurt their national mages, it means the tribal shaman they'll want recruit to get some N access will be worthless researchers. They really need an awake pretender to help them expand, especially the first turns to get resources into their cap, but they need some way to increase their magic diversity too, and it's much too expensive to do both.

And to tie it back into the thread topic: The best nation is whichever one is currently dueling MA Ulm. =)