[Knai]

Originally Posted by shatner

1) I feel like Ulm would really benefit from having widely available magical melee mooks. Whether those should be the blacksteel heavy infantry or not is reason for debate but I am adamant that of all the nations that should be showing up with magic weapons, it should be Ulm.

2) The non-blacksteel troops are, in my opinion, too costly to mass (remember that if it takes 3 turns to mass those 10gold units, they are effectively 13+ gold units after you take into account upkeep) and perform too poorly in actual combat. I'm fine with Ulm have well armored chaff but I think it should be priced accordingly.

3) Yes the name does not jive with being a repeating crossbow. Rename it. There are work arounds for the flaming-arrows of doom issue. Specifically, you could make the weapon shoot twice and deal 7 dmg each OR you could give the unit two different crossbow weapons; one which shoots twice for 5 dmg each but does not benefit from flaming arrows and another which only shoots once for 5 dmg but does benefit from flaming arrows.

4) The changes here are instead of anything else they have. They would be an E2F1 + 1.0 AEFS + .1 A + .1 F + .1 S making them a 4.3 path caster in total. This still puts them behind the MA Pythium Theurg, the MA Shinuyama Bakemono Sorcerer, or the MA Jotunheim Skratti in terms of price, power or chassis, to name a few.

5) It's all a question of what you want from those mage-priests. First off, Ulm's troops are cheap gold-wise and expensive resource-wise so they can't spend all that much on troops on any given turn. Spending more on commanders is therefore possible without being exorbitant. Also, I was re-purposing the mage priest as a diversifying caster, base Ulm has it as a mini-thug and iron darts caster, and CMB was using them as a troop buff-caster.

6) Yeah, that's true. I was reluctant to change spell requirements in my mod so I had to do other things to fix it.

7) Unless you are facing jaguar warriors or knights of the chalice, I didn't find the guardians better than their peers by a wide enough margin to warrant using them. They are a move-1, non-sacred, capital-only unit so they have to be something really special for them to ever make an appearance at your front line. And that "specialness" only happens now if you are facing massed sacred troops.

1) Ulm's whole concept is wrapped around minimalist magic, and while this obviously doesn't play out in the game, due to how key magic is, a massive amount of magical weapons doesn't help.

2) As of now, they are too costly to mass. Reduced resources alone should help there.

3) A crossbow that specifically avoids flaming arrows is adding needless edge cases. Better that they stay as is, as incredibly strong weapons that effectively counter heavily armored troops, but don't get a lot of shots off. That said, a precision boost to all units that use them is reasonable.

4) That seems pretty reasonable, and with the free drain scale gives Ulm a useful niche.

5) As is, the cheapness of the priests is essentially what allows Ulm to meaningful interact with dominion. Losing that for magic diversity is almost certainly a step up, but also a step away from what Ulm is supposed to be.

7) I'm honestly not sure that giving them full Awe would be that unbalancing. As long as they don't have much of it, it gives them a use as blockers - moreover, the units Awe is best at dealing with are more easily countered elsewhere, as most are low morale, poorly armored, and have rather unimpressive defense, all of which translates to flail infantry being devastating against them. Two attacks per round, that get around shields decently? Yes please.