Mod: Ulm: Order of the Black Rose v0.301b

[Squirrelloid]

15s for 5 troops is quite a lot. You expect high performance from that kind of investment. And there's still plenty of options in the spell arsenal that splat them, even with elemental immunity.

Think of them like super mechanical men. They come one level earlier (but as you pointed out, construction 6 is basically required to summon them) and cost twice as much in raw gem cost, and its S instead of E so its more like 4x as much. Oh yeah, and they have fatigue as a disadvantage relative to mechanical men.

I don't think anyone thinks mechanical men are overpowering... i certainly hope no one does.

Might I suggest that anyone who's still using regular troops by the time Ulm gets to Alt 6 Const 6 is *doing it wrong* and deserves to get steamrolled?

[shatner]

Let me preface all this with the admission that I am a noob, especially once the game shifts more to a gem economy and less from a gold economy. Part of the point of the game Mightypeon is playing is to test Squirrelloid's Ulm mod. As such in the following paragraphs it is important to attempt to distinguish between me playing poorly and Black Rose Ulm being too strong or weak.


I'm the Pythium player who was doing it wrong and being steamrolled. I found BR Ulm to be an implacable opponent who beat me in every major engagement. This is at least partly due to Mightypeon being a clever player who rarely engaged my main forces without softening them up first with anti-communion earthquakes, assassination attempts or other shenanigans. However, another part to it was my inability to find a way to blunt the main BR Ulm advance.

The standard BR Ulm grunt has a base MR of 14 and an armor value that starts at 17. There are spells (global legions of steel, various anti-magic effects, etc.) and higher caliber recruitables (blacksteel infantry vs. baseline) who move those numbers up from there. Furthermore, with the right summoned commanders on the field, all of Ulm's army was enjoying +50% elemental resistance and the reinvigorating effect of the Relief spell. When facing an army of MR 19+, Prot 20+, 50% resistances, reinvigorating, better-stats-than-average troops, I found it really hard to find a good counter. Evocation spam? No. Fatigue? Not really. Stalling spells? Astral save-or-die spells? MR and Moral all too high for those kinds of things. Then you add in BR Ulm's various mage artillery platforms (spamming iron darts/blizzard, magma spells of various sizes, bladewinds, etc.) and you have a force which I, at least, couldn't find a way to meaningfully forestall. While I would almost certainly have lost our engagements after a bloody and protracted battle, having all of my armor preemptively ruined turned the battle from "slugfest" to "slaughter".

Before the war, Ulm and I were about equal in terms of research, gem income, gold income and so on. The war was mine to win, or lose, from the very beginning. My primary tactics were to have a wall of principes acting as a barrier between Ulm's army and my communion. Said communion would lay down some battlefield altering spells and then commence evocation spamming of one variety or another. While the particulars of each battle were unique, the main difference for Pythium was in mage scripting, not in force composition. The war raged on long enough for me to try lightning, cold and astral spams alone and in groups against the forces of Ulm, with and without spam critters (phantasms, false horrors, elementals), with and without battlefield enchantments (quagmire, wind guide, mist, storm, etc.), and never did it really help. I tried massed assassinations, seeking arrows and mind hunts, all to very limited success.

I summoned and equipped a bunch of harbringers and they proved very effective at raiding around Ulm's armies but never effective at facing the army itself. Eventually Ulm was able to cheaply field a number of counters (mainly anti-magic being black lords with lycanthrope amulets) forcing me to further constrain my harbringer forces. Between Ulm's cheaply summoned, magically armed troops and their evocation spam, mistform and body ethereal proved ineffective as buffs for troops or commanders. I didn't really see any good mass-summonable troops that could have faced up to Ulm, though that is almost certainly because of my lack of skill rather than a lack of options.

I would really appreciate some feedback here on where I went about this the wrong way, as well as whether BR Ulm is such that is is imbalanced, at least when facing a nation like MA Pythium. Aside from being helpful to me as a player, it would be revealing for this game to show whether and to what extant Squirrelloid's Ulm mod needs to be tweaked.