Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightypeon
Would you agree with the statement:
If you wish ranged fire support as MA Ulm, usually go with Sappers unless there is a direct reason to go with Arbalests?
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I do not want to be difficult, but that statement is rather odd. If I wish ranged support as MA Ulm, I want it for a reason. That reason determines what kind of ranged support I will invest in. What I can agree to, is that in most games I will probably have recruited more sappers than arbalest-wielders in the end, but both types of units will have been of use.
I readily admit that I am not that good a player and CBM is not my prefered way of enjoying Dominions, so I try not to be too hard to convince in discussions of this kind, but here it is not even close. I understand that a number of you think the ulmish crossbowman with his arbalest is a bad unit, but the arguments presented here so far are less than convincing.
To repeat my stance, I find arbalests useful against heavily armoured units, which includes units getting their good armour score from protective magics.
Yes, magic can make a lot of units obsolete - this includes arbalests - but this does not take away from the fact that arbalests are useful under some circumstances where the usefulness of ordinary crossbows is questionable. It is easy to add protection to units by way of magic - up to a point. Legions of Steel is available at construction 1 and protection at alteration 3, to take two early examples. You do not need a ton of research to apply this - plenty of nations can use it in the first year.
For a lot of nations it is rather easy to bring a good number of units to protection values in the early twenties, but very few - if any - can reach as high 28 without trouble.
The danger posed by arbalests to your own troops is overstated in this thread. Apart from having the heaviest armour around, ulmish troops also have towershields available in combination with good attack scores and decent damage.
Regarding the resource cost, it is important to keep things in perspective. I find the comparison to the LA ulmish ranger totally inappropriate - even aside from everything else, units from different ages cannot be compared in such a fashion - and the marignon crossbowman is the cheapest around in MA. The independent crossbowmen I find mostly seem to be the of the 17 resource variant (2 less than the sapper). Yes, the arbalest-wielders are slightly expensive resource-wise, but they are not EA Arcoscephalian units, they are MA ulmish units. MA Ulm is pretty much a poster nation for production 3 and has a production bonus to boot. Castles with about 300 production per turn should be common - meaning 12 crossbowmen or 15 sappers per turn per castle. And Ulm wants lots of castles anyway. Producing a good number of arbalests per turn should not be a problem.
Now, to illustrate, let me take you through a comparison between
sappers and the ulmish crossbowman. The sapper costs about 4/5 of the resources of a crossbowman and fires 3/2 times as fast. Since the sapper has an extra point of accuracy, we can add another 1/4 of damage and thereby require that the arbalest should do double the damage per shot. The break-point for this is at protection 12. And this is ignoring the fact that the gold cost of the sapper contingent is 7/4 of that of the crossbowman contingent.
The siege bonus and the better map move of the sapper are certainly points in its favour, but the impact of the latter is somewhat diminished by the fact the ulmish infantry has the same map move as the arbalest unit, and the former does not influence in-battle performance.
Finally, before you start planning too much about improvements to MA Ulm, I suggest you play around with it a bit in its latest incarnation. I do not seem to be alone in the opinion that MA Ulm is quite strong in the opening game.