Guide: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Dooooooooooooooom!

[licker]

Originally Posted by Dedas

It is not a matter of "doing it all", it is a matter of doing the right things at the right time and that means planning. And planning means you need to know what your enemy is up to all the time.

If you meet a beginner he might try doing just one thing, like the tank rush in C&C, but in this game that makes him weak because there is actually counters to everything. An experienced players sees what he is up to and adapts accordingly. It is easy for him to do so because the enemy is so predictable.

Then you meet an experienced player, he watches you and adapts to what you do, and you do the same. And in the end that means mixed armies. The challenge is to find the perfect mix, and deploy it at the right spot at the right time. And that means planning... and so on.

Yes it means planning, but if you are planning on having a 'mass' of strat move one infantry of different flavors to counter whatever your enemy throws at you, ...

You have no reaction time, you have no slack with that kind of a force. And that force isn't even particularly effective no matter its composition because the counters to slow moving infantry are easy, moderately cheap, and pentiful.

The counters to thugged counts (or flying thugs in general) are much less, and not always as easy for specific nations to come up with. They are also more costly in terms of opportunity cost to defend against flying thugs than to defend against a large slow army.

If you don't think equiped counts make for excellent raiders you've missed the boat somewhere. Also I did not say to use summon lamas with your raiders, you use naked counts in you dominion to attrit down a large invading army. Its rather pointless to use lamas on raiding counts, unless you are planning on throwing them all away, which is usually a desperation gambit anyway.

Infantry has a place for Ulm, just not one worth actually wasting design points on maximizing.

Income is entirely overrated for Ulm as well, so long as you understand what you are maximizing for the reduction in income flow. And anyway, while you may believe that L3 is not a good way to get gold, I think you've perhaps not studied it enough. Sure, it is not a guarenteed income flow, but with proper planning the income events (to say nothing of the mines...) allow you to behave as if you were actually getting that steady income flow.

It seems as though one should spend all their money every turn, but honestly, this is far from the case, even beyond such considerations as saving enough to put up fort/temple/lab in the next turn.