Is black plate worth it?

[Baalz]

When I play Ulm I recruit chainmail for the first 2 or 3 turns, after which I usually switch to plate. At that point I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of expansion speed to hoard my gold and focus on getting a second castle up so I can leverage one of Ulm's primary strengths - cheap units. Cheap smiths, cheap infantry. With Ulm you generally have more gold than other nations so you should put up more castles. More castles mean more smiths which you should be recruiting as fast as possible at that price. As a side effect, having lots of castles means you've got lots of places to recruit infantry, and I find that by the time I'm a little less desperate about throwing up additional castles I usually have more resources than I need to field all the black plate I want. The limiting factor is gold - I'm much more concerned about how many smiths I have than how much infantry. If I'm gonna spend a set amount of gold on my infantry I'd rather have the plate. If you're getting 1.4 chainmail guys, I'm getting 1.4 smiths instead with linebackers at 24 protection. I'll stack that up against your 1.4 chainmail guys any day of the week.