Re: LA Nation: Ulm Reborn - UPDATE v.085
Well, after having played it some, I'll offer some comments.
Most play experience has come from playing this nation with an S9 Sleeping Oracle with Order3, Productivity3, Growth1, Luck3, Drain 3. So the bless was effective while also allowing other abilities. I also played on 50 Magic Sites.
First, it is quite interesting. There are several new units added to "Iron Faith", plus quite good Priests/Mages. The national summons are effective (though see below).
My main issues with the nation:
1) It is FAR too capital-centric. You have _no_ national mages recruitable outside the capital. This means you must rely on luck to be able to recruit more than one mage/turn. On anything more than the smallest map, this is crippling. One way to fix this is to make the Black Priest recruitable everywhere. This is hardly ideal, as this nation wants Drain scale for points to do a Bless strategy and (AFAIK, certainly implied) the Black Priests are not immune to Drain Scale.
2) Regarding the Magic themselves, I can't think of many nations even in LE that have weaker magic. Not a random among the national mages, and while Earth 3 is certainly nothing to complain about, they are saddled with Astral 1 which is not enough for Teleport without a booster (which they can't make with their national mages). While I understand Ulm is not known for its magic, I feel like some boost should be done here (esp. considering point 1) above).
3) The Penitents are nice, but everything flows from the capital. I'll note that not even _Mictlan_ has a capital-only issue like this nation. The problem with Penitents is that they are chaff (unless going for a heavy Bless strategy that doesn't really work for lack of points) that are tied to capital-only commanders.
4) White Priest? Very nice. But where do you get the money for them? I was lucky enough to get a 1000g event on the 3rd turn so I didn't have to worry _so_ much, but there was a definite 'what to spend money on' that was an interesting conundrum.
5) The general point is that this nation seems to need too many points. It needs Order and Production to have the money to purchase its units (which seem pretty reasonable, though the White halberd unit seems a bit overcosted), and while it can take Drain that mightily interferes with any research you might want to do. OTOH, it also wants at least one 9-level Bless. I chose one that from my experience worked well with the Penitents, and it does at least a bit.
6) National summons looked pretty good, except that, if you play the default LE settings, I'm not exactly sure where you're supposed to get the gems for them. Again, I was _very_ lucky in that my first or second Gnome Lore found the Tower of the Iron Order. I'd suppose a research path for them is to go to Evocation-4 for Blade Wind and the Astral search spell, then go for Thaumaturgy for the Earth search spell and Conjuration for Summon Earthpower/national summons.
The one 'national holy' spell is cute. I guess you could use massed Black Priests to throw them early.
I would stress that the one change I would make to this nation would be to give them _some_ national mage outside their capital.
Oh, they also have a very nice stealth preacher which is about the only commander their non-capital castles will build. Maybe up its cost to 80 or 90 and give it E1, bump the Black Priest to about E1?1(FAES) and its cost a bit and make it non-capital-only. Well, if the Acolyte gets magic, the Priest may not need to lose that status.
The one unit I'm curious about is the Mindless MB non-capital-only sacred troop. It implies that when they die, you get another unit. I never had one die, so some details would be nice.
Am I playing the nation wrong?
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