[licker]

Well I may have taken a liberty in assigning the ranger specific strat to you, but you did mention a mass of rangers buffed with WG and FA...

In any case, you do not need O3 to pump out mages, especially when you don't need to pump out expensive sacreds or other pricey units. Most ulm units cost ~10g right? Now especially if you are also taking sloth (which doesn't hurt you much either, since you don't need swarms of units with upkeep...) you are probably resource limited in cranking out anything rather than gold limited. Black Priests cost ~110? Members of the 2nd tier cost ~150? Sanguine Counts cost 44 blood slaves (or 33, depending on mods right?)...

Fortune Tellers cost 90?

You don't need O3 to pump these things out. You don't even need O3 to build castles if you save from your L3 gold events until you are ready to do it.

But still, ulm is strong enough that I think it will play well either way, just that at some point you reach a point where you don't really need gold for anything particularly useful.

Units should be free spawn or summons, commanders can also be summoned, or ~1k a turn to recruit ~10 commanders (or am i completely misremembering the costs?). Upkeep will be low, Black Priests are sacred, and free spawn/summons are zero.

It comes down to play style preference at this point I think.