MA Ulm Pretender

[archaeolept]

Originally Posted by vfb

I agree, but have to nitpick about MA Mictlan. They shouldn't be putting labs in their first expansion castles, since they just need a temple to recruit the eagles and 60-gold priests. Move the priests back to the capitol to research, and indy commanders can bus the eagles about. Capitol should always only recruit jags.

Also, Sloth-3 pays a lot towards the F/S bless.

On pure random maps though, MA Mictlan doesn't stand a chance of doing this since they need 'real' mountains to build 800-gold, 3-turn forts. All other fort choices are horrible. On a non-random map with mountains, you can have a Hillfort and temple up in turn 7, and still have been recruiting 10 jaguars per month, using something like:

Oracle
Magic: Fire 9 Astral 9
Dominion 10
Scales: Order 3 Sloth 3 Heat 3 Growth 1 Misfortune 2 Magic 1
Imprisoned

Also, Mictlan's force should include a few turkeys from the lab. They are excellent at getting to the front in no time, and are great against low-MR units with their 100-precision Mesmerize ranged weapon, which is penetration+2 according to debug:

hitunit 2124 568 dmg128 spec1216499712 ba1
spec_mr pen 12 mr 10 (unr 2124 vic 568 dmg 11 eff 128)

I think turn 12 you could be looking at 80 jags, some shield chaff, and 20 eagles.

But Mictlan's going to take significant losses and be open to a 3rd party attack, so the Halberds are probably enough of a deterrent.

This is all correct, though i'd play with the bless some.

I'd counter that by turn 12 your suggested Mictlan force would be facing easily 80-100 halberds plus another 100+ black plate infantry from secondary castles

This is not. ulm can't move. the jag armies will run around and join together to take out the reinforcements and the breadbaskets, and be back in time to relieve any attempted siege by the un-reinforced original Ulm force.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

I hope you meant Stone Shards. If you didn't, could you PM me the details?

Rain of stones is actually a really powerful move for Ulm. You should end up with a couple smiths who get an air random, and with your forge bonus you can cheaply slap black steel plate on your combat mages (2 earth gems apiece with a hammer). Have your mages cast stone/iron skin round one and they (along with all your black plate troops) will be functionally immune to the rain of stones. Anybody tough enough to shrug off the stones now gets the joy of charging into magma eruptions. Anybody too tough for *that* will probably face destruction. Hmmm, come to think of it, a sadistic person might wait until after a couple turns of destruction to land the stones. >

Or, just empower your air random smith cheaply with 30 gems, stick some black steel full plate on him and a pair of earth boots, cloud trapeze into the path of an attacking army to drop a first round rain of stones which your PD will mostly ignore (not so much the enemy mages). Retreat, rinse, and repeat. Probably worthwhile to invest a few extra items on that guy, but you don't need anything expensive.

[SlipperyJim]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Rain of stones is actually a really powerful move for Ulm. You should end up with a couple smiths who get an air random, and with your forge bonus you can cheaply slap black steel plate on your combat mages (2 earth gems apiece with a hammer). Have your mages cast stone/iron skin round one and they (along with all your black plate troops) will be functionally immune to the rain of stones. Anybody tough enough to shrug off the stones now gets the joy of charging into magma eruptions. Anybody too tough for *that* will probably face destruction. Hmmm, come to think of it, a sadistic person might wait until after a couple turns of destruction to land the stones.

You're a very evil man, and I appreciate that. After I finish my current Lanka game, I'm thinking I should play as MA Ulm. Ulm was my first choice back in the Dom:PPP days, and it's about time to revisit those glory days.

[HoneyBadger]

I think just having a small corps of mages set to casting Destruction, specifically, wouldn't be a bad idea, once you've got Rain of Stones going on.

[KissBlade]

I should point out, rush strategies tend not to win games anyway outside of small maps. Remember, against good players, you don't have to have the best army. You just have to have a better one than his other neighbors.

[Agema]

To what extent could Ulm divert elephants with a load of small combat groups (say, 6 groups of 5 each) by creating a sort of "chain" of target nearest that keeps them from large troop formations for as long as possible, allowing mages and missiles to whittle them down?

[Baalz]

Elephants vs Ulm are a bit of an overblown threat IMO, particularly since Ulm's face lift. Magma bolts decimate the shieldless pachyderms when spammed in sufficient numbers, and I haven't tested it out but it seems like iron darts/blizzard would work reasonably as well.

As far as beating elephants without using mages - no there's not really any clever placement you can do, the best you can really manage is trying to mass enough sappers/arbalests to get critical mass to bring them down before they start splattering your troops. This actually works pretty well due to your archer's range if you can get a sufficient number and your opponent is holding his elephants back waiting for your mages to tire out. 2-4 volleys of bolts does a lot when you fire enough of them at things without shields. If your opponent is instead charging straight forward with a big block of elephants, try half a dozen smiths spamming magma bolts into their face - you won't be disappointed. Moral of the story is Ulm's combat mages are their backbone, you'll struggle mightily against lots of stuff without them.

The thing about elephants is they really need critical mass plus they're expensive. If your opponent masses a bunch of them together and pushes straight for your capital, meet it with all those research mages you've got there. If he splits it into a couple largish groups, spread out your mages into hit squads and take the aggressors out one group at a time. If he splits into smaller squads, just boost your PD strategically - it has the right weapons to do some damage if there are less than 5 elephants per group. If you're to the point that you've got several largish squads of elephants...well you should really have magma eruption and blade wind by that point as well as several castles cranking out smiths, so I don't see that as too much of a problem.

[Baalz]

Yeah, I just ran 2 tests out of curiosity.

Test 1: 20 elephants + 20 Hypaspists (~2400 gold) vs 100 arbalests + 20 PD(~1200 gold). Elephants all the way back (behind hypaspists) set to hold then attack, arbalests set to fire large enemy monsters. Elephants break with heavy losses, Ulm takes no non-PD losses.

Test 2: 30 elephants (3000 gold) set to charge straight forward vs 100 arbalests, 20 PD and 6 priest smith's set to spam iron darts from the back row (~2400 gold). Elephants break with heavy losses, Ulm takes no non-PD losses.

I shudder to think about slapping a wind guide on top of that with your pretender, as you were researching alt-4 for destruction anyway.

[JimMorrison]

I just have to comment - Iron Darts is really a sick, sick spell. I've taken some hideous losses against comparatively weak forces (should have walked over them), with 5-6 smiths spamming Darts - and they do cut through Elephants like Ginsu cuts tomatoes - fast and juicy.

[HoneyBadger]

So no word on the Virtue?