[licker]

Well my experience says otherwise.

You can bank the positive gold luck events for when you are ready for your fortress.

Also you just don't need that much gold anyway, and you don't need to be slow.

You can play them that way, or you can play them 'fast'. Either way will likely meet with success, and become just a difference in play style.

Honestly though, if you spend your time building lots of Ulmish HI I think you are going to lose eventually. While that infantry looks great, it's not really all that tough, and the movement is horrible. So unless you have some way of 'warping' them around (and Ulm doesn't have easy access to any of those methods) they will mostly just cost you upkeep while a more agile opponent dances around them until he's ready to level them.

That doesn't mean you cannot or should not use them, it does mean you should be thinking about how quickly you can retire them...