Winning w/o a SC???

[PvK]

Ya, I don't really care if my fodder can easily hurt the giants or not. That's not their job. Their job is to get attacked instead of the units who are hurting the giants. Preferably, those who really hurt the giants are out of range of thrown boulders, and are probably casting spells or firing arrows.

Ulm doesn't have anyone unarmored except mage types. The arbalests aren't a bad choice for the rear ranks. I usually have arbalests in a seperate army from my national Ulm HI anyway. I wouldn't send more than 1/3 Ulmish national troops in the main body against giants. They can sort of do that "nationally" by taking their best fodder indy province and building a fort there, using their usual high productivity on low-resource troops of the cheapest kind, to get a bunch of dummy targets for the Jotuns to try to kill. The Jotuns will tend to be stopped for several turns just trying to hit all the targets, and wearing themselves out trying to hit them all, while whatever else hits the giants.

There are various ways to help make this work when arranging the army on the field. If you do want to use some strong melee units on them, I'd likely send a wave of all-fodder first, followed by a wave of fodder mixed with good troops (mixed spacially - not necessarily in the same squad).

PvK