[Salamander8]

I concur with Doctor Praetorius about MA Agartha compared to MA Ulm. MA Agartha is far from the strongest, and has some glaring weaknesses, but is functionally better than MA Ulm is. The infantry is somewhat similar, if lacking solid weaponry, but is less easily exhausted, has at least average MR, and has darkvision. MA Agartha's mages and priests are more diverse and they have some solid national summons as well. MA Agartha's golem cult effect can make a large difference for not only it's national statues, but for other construction summons as well. In Chinchilla, in which I am MA Agartha, I repeatedly beat MA Tien Chi's arrow swarms between my infantry's shields, and my statues' high protection and hit points to the point where he called off the war. I would of course still rank MA Agartha as not the best out there, but certainly a better performer than MA Ulm.

I've always liked MA Ulm's idea, but in practice they have so many problems. Slow and heavy infantry with bad MR get eaten alive by battlefield magic before they can even close the gap. As MA R'Lyeh fighting them for an example, I have my artillery brigades of ilithids mind blast away while my infantry blocks hold and attack and am often able to force Ulm to rout before they ever get to melee. The Arbalests fire so slowly and from such extreme range (and I usually split my ilithid groups into fire closest and fire archers as well), that they have little to no effect on even my poorly armored lobo guard chaff. I would like to see exactly what Dr. Praetorius was asking for: force the enemy, somehow, to meet Ulm on Ulm's terms.

On a related note, I was under the impression that shields did not help troops from friendly fire since the shields are in front and the projectiles hit you in the back and thusly provided no bonus against them. Is this not the case?