MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?

[Baalz]

Yes, I don't disagree with anything AOE has said about alteration, it can be extremely powerful and under the right circumstances I'll focus on it. The thing is, alteration is a force multiplier. That's usually a good thing. The problem is it requires sufficient force to multiply.

Iron blizzard is, as I mentioned, a niche spell. Magma bolts is a useful stopgap if you're pressed early. You can't compare petrify to magma bolts, lets be fair and compare petrify to magma eruption, as it's the spell I clearly say should be your focus. By level 6 evocation I'll match your petrify, destruction and curse of stones with magma eruption, blade wind, and earthquake. It's a bit disingenuous to dismiss these spells as satisfying a hunger, taken together there are precious few armies those three spells won't decimate when cast by several mages with an appropriate strategy.

The big consideration though, which I tried to stress is you have to work hard to overcome Ulm's inherent inertia. There's a reason Ulm has an image as a lumbering beast who can't turn around - by default that's what it is. If you focus on force multipliers, your only option is to use it with sufficient force - namely large groups of map move one infantry. If you focus on force generators though, you gain a lot more flexibility on how you deploy them. Keep a stockpile of winged boots in your lab and plan your castles appropriately and you can drop dozens of magma blast spammers and thugs anywhere in your nation on a single turn's notice - or spread out and cover virtually your entire nation with one or two guys who will slaughter small raiding squads. Focusing primarily on alteration is what I alluded to before- you're basically going down the route of marching big, slow blocks of guys around casting the same handful of spells until a nimble opponent hamstrings you.

Of course I'd like to stress one last time that you don't want to ignore alteration, there's obviously some good stuff in there and you don't have to work hard to come up with a scenario that it's exactly what you need. You don't want to focus on it initially though at the expense of the things which give you speed and flexibility - you've already got the strength and you have more urgent things than multiplying it.

You also can't compare a level 9 spell (army of gold) combined with a level 6 spell of another path (enliven statues) with two level 7 spells from the same path (mechanical men and weapons of sharpness). At the point you're casting army of gold, why bother with statues at all? A large part of the benefit of the mechanical men is the point of the game where you field them.

I also object to you saying I underplayed the bloodstones, I didn't talk about them at length because I felt that is belaboring the obvious. Let me quote:

"Blood stones are very, very good for Ulm, giving you the earth income to forge everything you want and boosting your mages (earth random + boots + blood stone = E5 = earth attack, petrify, weapons of sharpness, etc.)"

I will say though that I disagree with you that Ulm doesn't need many blood stones at home, if I'm pulling in 50E per turn I'm putting it all to excellent work. Putting blood stones on key smiths is a powerful tool, but putting them on all your combat smiths is a wasteful use of gems generally and you'll lose your bloodstones that way! I'd rather keep them safe in the castle spamming earth attack...