Suggestions to the devs: improving ME Ulm

[Endoperez]

Stryke11 said:
Or a national spell that perhaps evens out the magic differences. A battlefield wide "anti-magic" or somesuch which would make Ulm troops' martial superiority actually useful. The spell could either lower penetration, cause spells to randomly fail (or small chance to overload/kill the enemy mage), raise cost of spells like a mini drain dominion, or something of that type.

I love Ulm and I play them SP all the time. Don't think I'd MP them, but I'm not very good at MP so I'd probably lose with dual blessed Helheim.

Ulm does have one national battlefield-wide spell. It's called Tempering the Will. It takes an E3 mage (any Master Smith with one of: Earth Boots, Earth Power, gem), doesn't cost any gems, and gives +4 MR to any friendly unit that fails an easy magic resistance roll. Thau 5, though. The chance for spell to have an effect is from 18% (MR 10 (drain dominion) - penetrating bonus of 6 for an easy spell and E3 caster) to 24% (MR 9, or neutral dominion) to 30% (MR 8, Magic dominion). With two-three mages casting the spell, most of your army will get +4 magic resistance.

[Stryke11]

Whoops, sorry. I should have checked that before I posted.





Still think causing an enemy mage's head to explode when they cast a spell (even if only 5% chance or so) would be super cool.

[Ighalli]

According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.

[Endoperez]

Ighalli said:
According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.

I counted the penetrating bonus [MR - 6] as [MR - (10-4)]. I'm not sure whether or not the caster wins ties.

[curtadams]

Well, having 3 equipped smiths to boost *some* of your army's MR by 4 doesn't seem too thrilling to me. Large area destruction spells are mostly damage. This really doesn't seem like the kind of spell your army should be resisting. Is this a bug?

[Teraswaerto]

MR increase can be great against R'lyeh (mindblast), and there are spells like Polymorph that you'll really wish you had high MR against. Most of the time it wont make much difference though.

ME Ulm seems quite weak, it's true. It has always been thus.

[Sandman]

Ulm needs more trickery up its sleeve. Assassins and a stealthy preacher, for example, making it the equal of Marignon in that department (it was originally supposed to be a counterpart to Marignon anyway). And reduce the old age on Master Smiths; they're a 'young kingdom'.