Ulm - what items do you build w/Smiths?

[Baalz]

lightless lanterns
fire brands
boots of stone
blood stones (worth empowering one or two if you can get a small blood economy going)
charcoal shield
shield of beaten gold
marble armor

With boosters/randoms (you'll have several of each if you recruit a bunch of smiths, and hey, they're cheap):
dwarven hammers
chainmail of displacement
gate cleavers
astral caps
crystal coins
stymian wings
winged boots
owl quills
robe of shadows
lucky pendant
amulet of MR
flambeau
herald lance
crystal shield
slave/crystal matrixes


With Forge of the Ancients plus randoms/boosters - you can crank all this stuff out at about 30% cost when using a hammer
rods of the phoenix
robe of invulnerability
rings of sorcery
rings of wizardry
robe of the magi (assuming you empowered an air random smith for forging blood stones)
flame helm
winged helm
bag of winds
staff of storms
staff of elemental mastery

[KissBlade]

Oh right, I forget, I get lightless lanterns too =).

[thejeff]

Everything I can. I try to make sure my pretender can make boosters for all the smith's random paths, so they can forge more things.

The Air and Astral randoms on the smiths open up whole new areas of cheap items.

[Potatoman]

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but why are charcoal shields so good? I almost never see units suffer damage from the fire effect in my tests, and even then rarely more than 3 or 4.

[DrPraetorious]

Well, that depends on the unit.

A Prot 16 unit isn't going to suffer very much damage from a Dam 4 fire shield.

OTOH, A prot 0 unit is going to be fried eventually.

So if you are concerned that your SC is going to be swarmed by summoned undead or something and bottled up, you give him a charcoal shield.

[Baalz]

DrPraetorious said:
Well, that depends on the unit.

A Prot 16 unit isn't going to suffer very much damage from a Dam 4 fire shield.

OTOH, A prot 0 unit is going to be fried eventually.

So if you are concerned that your SC is going to be swarmed by summoned undead or something and bottled up, you give him a charcoal shield.

Also realize that the fire damage is reduced by the weapon length of the attacker, so it's not going to do much to armored pikeneers. If you're getting attacked by ghosts though, low protection, short ranged attack, fire ignores their etherealness....quite effective.

[Folket]

How do you build SCs with Ulm? I would just be happy with thugs.