Nah, I don't feel that's the case. They don't need to forge more than other nations, they just do it a lot cheaper. Same thing with buffing troops. And you can give all (well, most) their smiths the same script and be effective. Nothing like the T'ien Chi hassle to optimize scripting for a gazillion different mages with 1000's of different possible spells to cast.
Incidentally Ulm was the first nation I played in MP. I used a rainbow pretender and got away with it. In the huge endgame battles against Calmons Ermor I first had to figure out what to do with the various indy/summoned mages, assign one smith to army of lead duty, and then just script 37x [summon earthpower, magma eruption x4]
That was the easy part.