God Design For EA Ulm

[dirtywick]

Thanks JimMorrison. The Enchantress looks good. Ether Gate is a very good spell for Ulm I think. You can forge a bunch of stuff for the commander that comes with it, and besides Bane Lords that might be the first strong commander you get.


haha maybe not sector24! Nah, I guess building forts and more mages would have worked. It seemed kind of unnecessary though.

Probably in MP it'd be different.

[Wrana]

I got beaten when I first tried EA Ulm in MP, so take me with a grain of salt. But as I thought out and tested some more after this, it can still be of some value.
Their sacreds are good enough, but too costly & capital only with move 1. So the only bless I would now seriously consider is Earth - for their mages! A pity Smiths aren't sacred...
An awakened SC isn't really necessary I think - their national troops are pretty good for early expansion and in the game I mentioned I succeeded in beating my closest neighbor before researching anything good. So good scales would be good indeed - which means that the only awakened SC I would consider is Dom 9 Wyrm with Earth 4 & good scales.
Another possibility is to try to increase their already formidable Forging with Forge Lord. Imprisoned I have found out to be too late, so I now think that Dormant with average dominion would work better.
Otherwise we could synergize with Forging by having either a gem-producing Pretender or a Great Sage. My testing have shown that Awakened Sage with Drain & otherwise good scale allows a good enough research together with access to other paths...

[dirtywick]

Keeping an Awakened Sage, or Enchantress maybe, with at least 2 Air, wouldn't be a bad idea. Once you get a smith with an air random, you can continually forge Quills. You'd want to get the gems early, though, so the Sage would help with that by looking manually until you get the site searching spells.

But I also think they have a problem getting SC/Thug commanders, so the pretender can fill that role. You'd be sacrificing that option. You'd have to get lucky or spend a lot of gems empowering to even get a Bane Lord.

Anyway, I agree an awakened pretender isn't really necessary unless the map is really small. Their starting army is kind of crappy, but you can build a good indie conquering force quickly.

[johnarryn]

The awake pretender isn't so much to deal with indies as to deal with the ubiquitous early age rush nations... EA Ulm needs to come out the gate fast and get established quickly to be viable, I feel. Manually site searching with your mages can also be very useful.

The national troops are good, though, so as others have suggested it is possible to take a sleeping or imprisoned pretender for the sake of magical diversity.

[dirtywick]

Oh, right. I suppose. MP is a different ballgame entirely I'd imagine.