[Baalz]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the difference is between SCs and thugs. I generally think of thugs as strong enough to take out most any PD singlehandedly, while SCs are in the ballpark of taking out moderately strong armies absent magical support. Ulm has some good thugs in the construction line which is a high priority anyway- golems & iron dragons (you can GOR the dragons, or just have a smith equipped with winged boots lead one dragon apiece for pretty lethal raiding options). For SCs, with boosters Ulm can reasonably easily summon all the elemental royalty other than water. You're also almost certainly going to want to empower a smith one level in death for forging reasons, this gives you an easy way to create death golems which can start encroaching into SC territory if properly equipped (no astral to mind duel, high HP & prot, built in crowd control with banefire shield). Outside of that, you've got the boosters to get that d1 smith high enough to cast liches, then the liches can take the boosters to make tartarians.

Also, keep in mind Ulm really needs a pretender to flesh out some of their magic diversity, and summoning SCs is a pretty reasonable use of pretender-turns so its not unreasonable to expect that to be something your pretender contributes to.