[Quitti]

Yes, forge bonus is one redeeming factor. And the black knights are awesome, but cost a ton. Full chain mail troops are not bad either, but require lots of resources per gold spent (though they do get resource bonus in forts, so it's not THAT bad). They are def 5 though, so not evading anything, and that's with prot17. Plate ones are def 4 with body prot of 21 and one more enc, and both plate and chain troops are map move 1. Their "crossbowmen" have arbalests, which while do good damage, fire only once per three turns. Sappers cost 1½x the gold and same resources, but are more viable to use due having normal crossbows and a very good siege bonus. Still, the lack of diversity in national mages is even worse than of EA/MA vanheim. One 3.3% s1 chance on your main researcher. Weak priests (h2 cap only that eats the recruitment time from other useful stuff). No blood, no death, unreliably (10%) access up to e3 from only useful mages is rather weak. Iron angels are good, but require either e+s random smith (0.33% chance to get to begin with) with RoW/Robe of Magi/similar to summon, or pretender designed to do that.

And LA Ulm does not need their pretender to stay and summon counts, one is enough as it can continue the process with boosters or summon up one vampire lord and it needs less boosters to do the trick. Of course this requires construction research and so on. And LA gets s2b1 mages right out of the box, which is quite awesome (for communions, against sc's and so on), and the troops are good even if a bit expensive resourcewise for expansion - but the trick is to just spam those delicious rangers and keep some guys tieing the other troops down. And certainly this again has a counter, like pretty much everything in dom3. Still, I would rank LA Ulm well better off than MA, due the access to blood and death and astral in reliable quantities (provided that you go towards the vampire counts).