[licker]

Drain is a killer to Ulm, cannot really do it methinks.

But if you don't lock yourself into the rigid O3P+ line of thinking you have many many options...

By the way, no one has really been explicit about whether their designs are vanilla or CBM. I mostly favor using CBM and my comments are geared from that direction.

T3S3C/H1 is 280 design points to play with. L3G1M1 is only 200 back, and you can talk yourself out of G if you really want to, though it does help long term to keep your income higher than it would otherwise be. Again it boils down to what you want your pretender to be, I favor the FoB with D4ish and B6ish and relatively high dominion (to give your counts some extra provinces to 'die' in).

Also jim-

Under no circumstances would I build NO HI (indy or Ulmish), you always can use some kind of a screen for your rangers or villains. My tests have however shown that you don't really need a very large screen to hammer indies with minimal losses, and you will always likely be building some kind of infantry somewhere and chugging it around. It does have some use, just that some of the discussion here seemed to imply that you actually wanted to have alot of this infantry for reasons which continue to elude me. You will be saving money from time to time to get up your next castle/lab/temple, especially with T3, but my tests have also shown, that with T3L3 you are very unlucky indeed if you do not get a nice gold event sometime in the first year (assuming you are expanding normally), which allows immediate castle construction usually. And if you are lucky you will get a BIG gold event (bigger than 400) which really allows you to warp up a couple castles in the first year.

I don't think you can do that with O3 under just about any circumstances, unless you just stop buying military for multiple turns.