MA Ulm in CBM 1.9x

[Mightypeon]

According to the Wiki, flaming arrows should indeed apply to Arbalests. With them, they reach something like 22 AP damage and partly enter the realm of overkill against Humans.
What about the following unit proposal:

Pavise arbalest: Wears an Ulmish towershield/Ulmish Pavise (great parry values and protection, but reduces attack and defense, adds encumberance) in addition to his Arbalest, has excellent head protection and size 3.
Slow, very difficult to damage with arrow fire and even resistant against deflectable evocations, yet not your best choices when you want a lot of Arbalest shots quickly.

Those could be backed up by unarmoured arbalests (costing less resources), getting a certain combined arms feature.
Imho, the Arbalest could also get a precision increase. IIRC, Arbalests tend to be more precise than crossbows not the other way round.

[Mightypeon]

While we are at it, apart from slightly lower resource cost, is there any benefit Mauls have on Battle Axes? Currently it seems like you get 1 defense for 2 resources.

[Amorphous]

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?

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.

[Mightypeon]

I heavily disagree that map move does not influence battle performance.
Map move defines how many troops will be present (some special situations in which you have only 1 fort and it will be besieged soon excluded), and will often be more important for "massing" purposes than difference in gold/resource cost. As Tamerlane said, "it is better to be on hand with 10 man than absent with 10 thousand".
If you are reinforcing your advancing army from 2 castles, reinforcements of Sapper will eventually catch up with the army, reinforcements from Arbalests much less so. For 2 Ulmish castles, this can easily be 30 Sappers more in the important battle.
In addition, the speed with which you can storm castles influences the size of the relief force, and the size of the garrisson if the enemy has summoning abilities.
If you are sieging someone, with each turn, the size of the possible relief force (or rather, the area from which a relief force can be recruited by the enemy and arrive in time) increases.
However, if you have enough Sappers to "one shot" the castle (and that number is not very high), the enemy has to stop you with what he has at hand right in that area, and any blocking summons he may conjure in haste will not be organized and thus quite useless in the castle battle. This reduces castle taking casulties more than people commonly imagine.
Also, if you are attacking someone, chances are that there will be viable and important targets for Sappers on the Battlefield.

Dominions 3 has several resources, and a successfull strategy is commonly aimed at exploiting the limiting resource of the enemy.
In Dominions, those resources are gold, gems, resources and time. Sappers are highly efficient in "time" warfare, as Map Move 2 gives you a greater freedom/ greater recruiting area to react to a sudden threat, and secondly, they directly reduce the time the enemy has in responding to threats of your own.
There are situations in which time is not that much of an issue, such as getting rushed with only a single castle, but time, or rather, a turn advantadge will never go "out of fashion" as ressources and to a lesser extent Gold do.

[llamabeast]

I heavily disagree that map move does not influence battle performance.

That wasn't what he said. He said that siege bonus doesn't affect battle performance.

[Mightypeon]

Ups, I read that wrong, sorry for this.
Yet still, even the Siege Bonus may drastically influence what people can throw at your sieging force under some circumstance.

[Amorphous]

Do not worry about it, Mightypeon, such things happen (and thank you, llamabeast).

When it comes to the siege bonus, I have a hard time seeing it as something that should be considered an in-battle effect. In a certain sense it is, of course, but in a similar manner so is everything else in the game (and I mean everything). The springing point here is that for the siege bonus to actually effect a particular battle, a number of conditions outside the battle has to be met. And a number of those are not something you control.

In the end, however, it is just a question of choice of term, and not really important to the actual argument.

Let me try to put it another way:

You need to win battles to be able to siege a castle and you need to win a battle to actually take the castle once you have breached the walls. Arbalests are not there to provide a siege bonus, but to help win those battles.

Certainly, the sapper map move is better than the crossbowman's, but since you are able to bring infantry to the front-line, you are also able to bring arbalests to the front-line. Once there they outperform the sapper given the right - and rather easily predictable - circumstances. It is as easy as that.

To go up a level, a real problem with the argument against the arbalest in this thread, is that it looks like a popularity contest, where the winner is crowned "bestest ranged unit ever" and the loser gets to go home and be forgotten, never to be used again. This is just not appropriate for a strategic evaluation of units in Dominions. Hiring sappers does not prevent you from hiring ulmish crossbowmen in the future and if you then do hire crossbowmen, nothing prevents you from going back to hiring sappers again at some later date. In fact, nothing prevents you from hiring both sappers and crossbowmen at the same time (50/50, 70/30 or whatever) for those occasions where you know you will have use for them both in an impending battle.

If I point out situations where arbalests are better than sappers in order to show that arbalests are sometimes a better choice than sappers, pointing out another example - however elaborate - where the converse is true is not a counter-argument. It is simply an argument to the effect that sappers are also sometimes useful. To the best of my knowledge, though, none in this thread have tried or even wanted to argue that sappers are never useful.


Finally, it may be of use for you to consider a situation when you are not playing Ulm, but instead playing against it. Go through the exercise for a couple of nations and consider what you would and could easily do against Ulm at different stages of the game.

[Mightypeon]

Well, thanks for the usefull post, I am actually using more Arbalests than before this argument now.
Yet there is also the time angle to consider.
In some situations, Sappers and Arbalests may be performing exactly the same (as in f.e. doing nothing) on the tactical map. There are also situation in which an Arbalest heavy approach is a "safer" choice while sapper get stuff done quicker but with greater risk of failure.

[Mightypeon]

Some further arguments concerning the choice of awake or asleep rainbow:
-The Awake rainbow basically costs you 3 scales and some dominion.
Asleep, one can have O3P3L1G1D3 with a neutral Temp Scale, awake one gets closer to O3P3D1H1D3, likely with less Dominion thrown in.
I also believe that the benefit of getting one Bane thug per turn actually is not that great, as early on your research will suffer horribly, and getting the D gems relies on site searching luck.
In my opinion, the actual forging fun starts more at research levels 6 and 8, research 6 gets you very cheap lanterns and other gear (fire ball staffs etc.), and 8 should give your Pretender monopoly on most artificats.

[Mightypeon]

I have linked a hopefully usefull version into the wiki:
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Forge...F_MA_Ulm_guide