EA Ulm advice wanted

Edi · #1 February 25th, 2007, 02:56 AM

Troglodytes are size 5 tramplers and have far better morale than elephants, but not as many hit points. 47 is still tough, though.

Flaming arrows is good, but you need a fire booster to get it going. Fortunately the shamans have FEDN randoms so it's just a matter of time before you land one who gets both F and D from those, allowing you to make a skull of fire for one of your F2E1 warrior smiths. If you put a F9N4 bless on your steel warriors, they can and will hurt anything that comes up against them rather brutally. An air bless would not be bad either, because the steel warriors WILL be taking fire from archers, both enemy and your own.

Massed warrior smiths and strong evocation is the way to go. Something like trogs and elephants are really NOT going to like magma bolts, fireballs, and magma eruption and blade wind is a staple.

One of the strengths of EA Ulm is that even though its mages are not very powerful, they are very versatile. Also, except for your mountain, iron and steel warriors and warrior smiths, all of your units are stealthy and every single one of them has both mountain and forest survival. So you have excellent raiding potential. Lots and lots of scouts should give you eyes to see and warrior chiefs with lots of archers and warrior maidens should make for good raiding groups that can take care of most PD garrisons easily since the otehr players will be using their money for mages and troops.

You will probably want to take at least some production scale since EA Ulm needs lots of troops quickly and that requires comparatively more resources than money.

Edi

Meglobob · #2 February 25th, 2007, 06:07 AM

If you want to keep your sacreds alive, a single lvl 9 astral bless is good. It gives twist fate. Working very well on my Marverni sacreds. Also its a very, very cheap bless, so you can have good scales. It also means you have a pretender with lvl 9 astral magic which gives you access to alot of nasty late game spells.

It won't help much against tramplers, but hopefully you will not start any where near Agartha.

Covenant · #3 February 26th, 2007, 06:54 PM

Ulm has fairly strong archers, but these are one of the easiest types of units to negate. They also have axemen with throwing axes--which do a suprisingly heavy amount of damage.

Mixing unit types leads to stronger armies, but the real question is, what do you mix with what? To my knowledge, it seems like the Axemen are the most lethal, since they can throw axes on approach and then use these high-damage weapons to hack up troops when they get into melee, striking twice a turn.

But there's no real reason to use the advanced soldiers, is there? A little bit of armor for half again as much cost?

Also, much was said of the warrior smiths. Besides the smithing bonus, what help are they? They have a little bit of command skill, but the shamans also get priest spells, and stealth. They also cost fewer resources, which is Ulm's main limitation.

I think EA Ulm's sacreds are pretty worthless in any major strategic sense. Being that they're Capitol Only and rather basic (and without shields), there's not much worth to the added cost. The chance to drop a high bless on them is tempting, but I think it's more tempting to heavily tip the scales and produce more units. What do you guys think?

Edi · #4 February 27th, 2007, 02:27 AM

Most of the Ulmish warrior units are useless. The ones with throwing axes may do some good but the rest are rubbish. The reason why they are rubbish is because they have a basic attack of 10 or 11 that gets cut down to 8 or 9 due to ambidexterity penalties, meaning that the first time they go up against any high defense medium armor units like almost everything EA Ermor, Vanheim or Helheim and possibly other have, they will accomplish precisely nothing.

If you want to use double attack melee units, use the Steel Maidens. Twin short swords mean only a penalty of 1 to a base attack higher than that of the various warriors and mixing them in with the Shield Maidens will give them some more durability. The Steel Maidens have fairly high defense for line units and are tougher than most other national infantries anyway.

The Steel Warriors (sacred) do suffer from one pretty severe limitation and that is slow movement with mapmove 1. So they will become more or less obsolete as soon as you expand more than five provinces outward (assuming you get that far, of course). Takes too long to get them to the front and you don't have any astral mages (or means to get them unless you get Athalwolf the Maker of Heroes) to gate them to a friendly lab in the frontlines. So instead of a ?9 bless, you can go the route of several minor blesses, which would also give you magical versatility. The main problem there is that the most useful minor blesses would be E4F4W4N4 and you get rather the abundance of those magics already. D4 doesn't do much but gives you death magic and S4 likewise for astral. A4+ gives them some survivability against arrows and you and you need that much to produce the air boosters. A4E4 will give a couple of minor blesses and allow you to construct the more useful type of elemental staff later on. B4 will also help your sacreds, but it's a waste of points since you're not a blood nation. Astral and death is where you really hurt nationally. You can get a fairly cheap N4W4 bless with a dormant Lady of Springs if you're so inclined and have good scales left over.

Several minor blesses or rainbow picks to patch up your magical deficiencies and good scales, especially production, is the way to go.

Edi

Covenant · #5 February 27th, 2007, 09:18 AM

Let's assume that we don't even use the blesses for anything. What then is the purpose of our Pretender? Do we go with a SC to take out starting Indies, or with some kind of researcher/mage to compliment our magic summons?

Kalin · #6 February 27th, 2007, 11:27 AM

If you want blesses, I think the best for Ulm would be S9A4, more Air if you can afford it. This gives +3 MR, Twist fate and some arrow defense. If you go with a Dormant Oracle, you could easily go S9A6 and still have plenty left over for scales. Astral/Air bless covers your sacred's greatest weakness, no shield, and terrible MR (all of EA Ulm's units have 8), having twist fate also allow them to live longer, which is always a plus.

If you don't want blesses, the best path is to go for scales and/or an SC. My choice would be an awake D4 Prince of Death with 9 dominion. For scales, I'd go with a 2 Drain (to help your low MR troops), 3 production (to make lots of troops), 1 cold (your preference), the rest into order/growth (depends on how you like to play).

Sombre · #7 February 27th, 2007, 01:08 PM

I hadn't noticed that about the Ulmish warriors. Seems like they're in drastic need of a rebalance (with more #ambi bonus).

Personally I wouldn't consider playing EA Ulm without strong positive scales - you need to be able to crank out hordes to make up for dodgy sacreds and lack of magic firepower.

Saxon · #8 May 15th, 2007, 01:59 AM

The more I play, the more I like Luck. Lots of free gold and gems and the natinoal heroes are a nice bonus. In this case, they bring something you can not get otherwise.

So, would people say this is a fairly strong nation, but a fairly straightforward one?

johnarryn · #9 May 15th, 2007, 09:01 AM

In the early game, EA Ulm is very straightforward, relying on national troops to kill stuff. late game you can path up like crazy, diversifying your magic through your access to most magical paths... and that is much more complicated, giving you access to a wide variety of summons and battlefield spells.

Shovah32 · #10 May 15th, 2007, 12:21 PM

With a high astral pretender(possibly with other, booster forging paths you may not have access to) EA Ulm can have some insane magic diversity(their mages+summoned mages+path booster+rings of wizardry/sorcery)