Help, I suck with Ulm!

[Sly Frog]

All very useful advice. I guess my general problem is that black plate is supposed to be the strength of Ulm, yet it seems to not really have that much of an advantage against other factions' normal troops, particularly in light of the cost difference. Yet the other factions certainly have a major magic advantage against Ulm.

I guess if I were to suggest a juice, which as a novice I clearly cannot say is necessary, but would seem to me to fit with the Ulm theme and have an interesting impact on play, it would be to increase the ordinary Ulmish magic resistance. In this way, you would give them a bit of a boost against their magic using counterparts, and it would fit in with the Ulmish idea of a race of iron and steel resistant to magic.

[PvK]

The heavy armor is a great advantage against most conventional troops. You just have to learn how to deploy it effectively. Again, have enough numbers, include fodder, flank with knights, and (not mentioned before here) don't have arbalests shooting into the main battle line, since they are one of the few missile types that can hurt your own men. Drain scale helps a bit with magic resistance.

While enemies may be able to out-produce your troops at first, you should generally be able to keep your troops alive longer, win more battles once you have enough of them, and they don't cost much gold, so you end up with a nice amount of extra cash, which means you can do lots of other things like hire independent mages, build castles that multiply the number of heavy ulm inf you can build, hire mercenaries, get more smiths, afford to raise and "use" a bunch of cannon fodder, hire knights, etc.

Practice makes perfect.

PvK

P.S. The other thing to realize is that like most things, Ulm units are good at some things, and not good at others. The thing to do about this is to make a point of acquiring other abilities (from research, the pretender, independents, summons, empowerment, etc.) so that you have other things with different strengths and weaknesses, so you can deal with different situations.

Removing the weaknesses will let you win without having to think (see Crusader mod), but isn't very interesting once you realize how overpowered it is. It's not a bad idea though for learning the game (a different way to give yourself an "easy" setting, I guess - just make a mod that gives Ulm units higher MR, or change Antimagic into an Earth spell. ).

[ July 03, 2004, 21:25: Message edited by: PvK ]