Mod: MA Ulm : \

[Dedas]

Try to build more castles than usual when playing Ulm. Remember that they get 25% more resources from every castle and that almost all their troops only cost 10 gold each. That gives you a lot of gold to build those castles with. Try order 3 and production 3. Build your second castle on turn 3. It really, really helps.
Vanilla Ulm has potential, you just have to play it "Ulm style".

Good luck mate.

[Xietor]

That is very good advice!

Yeah, i build castles, but i do not like building castles that take away from my main castles resources, so i cant build another one on turn 3 heh. Those black knights are hard to mass produce at 75 resources a pop though.

[VedalkenBear]

Er, just recruit Dukes. There's your Black Knights right there.

[Dedas]

If you have a mountain province adjacent to your capitol and your capitol has more than 2 adjacent other provinces, build a castle there. The peg-fortresses Ulm has are great with their 700 defense and admin 20, and they do not drain the capitol's provinces, only the province their built on. Read it up in the manual. There is "hidden" 50% resource pool in every province that is used for admin first. Building a castle on a province unlocks all the resources in that province of course.

A small walkthrough:
Let's say that the mountain province you have adjacent to your capitol is a mountain with 65 visible resources (if you capture it this number will of course go down at first due to the unrest). This figure (65) isn't too far fetched and is pretty standard for a mountain region.
After you've captured it you start building your castle here, paying the 1000 gold that you will have on turn 3 if you did everything right; if you have difficulties with this use an Alchemist pretender, or use one so you also can build troops in your capitol on that turn. The castle will take 4 turns to complete, so use your scout pretender to build it the first turn, recruiting a commander or scout to continue it on the next. Attack another province adjacent to your capitol (with good resources) with your unoccupied army.

This is what the new castle will get in resources:
65 base
*2 - for fortress built
30% bonus - your dominion
25% bonus - Ulm production bonus
= 201,5 resources
+ 20% from adjacent provinces without a castle.
Say 4 provinces with 45 resources each after your dominion Remember now that it draws from the hidden pool so this won't affect your capitol.
Total = 237,5 resources

Not too bad is it.
Your capitol will still have way over 200 resources as it begins with 130 (if you play production 3) and draws 50% from adjacent provinces.

Another good thing with this is that your new fortress is only one move away eliminating the dangerous travel later for your troops, who almost everyone has mapmove 1.

You could of course build a citadel (admin 40) if you only have standard provinces around you, but this would lead to draining problems later when trying to maximize outcome.

The strategy is to build a long chain of castles as fast as possible. Your capitol will form the center.

After you've built around 4-5 castles in the first year and a half and labs here and there, start mass producing troops and smiths.

You will find that this castle chain is not something your enemies wants to siege as you can ship reinforcements between your castles fast and safely. In your capitol you should build lord guardians for defense of the chain. In the other try to build one troop of each type useful for the campaign you are planning. The smiths should of course forge like earth boots with their earlier forged dwarven hammers (a final 50% forge bonus) and later good equipment for you commanders. Also build some siege engineers and siege troops (they have crossbows) with any spare resources. They will come in handy, I promise.

Good luck.

[Sombre]

I think you just might be my favourite poster Dedas. You're inspiring me to go on a heavy resource Ulm, Ulm Reborn and Abysia rampage.

[Amhazair]

Sombre said:
I think you just might be my favourite poster Dedas. You're inspiring me to go on a heavy resource Ulm, Ulm Reborn and Abysia rampage.

Keep in mind though that there's a big difference between Abysia and Ulm. True, they both have slow, heavily armoured, resource heavy troops, but that's where the similarity ends. The strategy Dedas posted for Ulm works so great because Ulm has cheap troops and cheap mages, and thus has tons of free money lying around to build new castles. Abysia on the other hand has expensive troops, expensive mages, and will loose part of its income to blood hunting...

[Dedas]

Yes "real" mountains are very helpful if you want to build that strong chain of Castles (Peg-Castles, 700 defense 20 admin) without any draining from adjacent provinces; provinces where you in the future might want to build additional fortresses.
Forests are also good but not nearly as good as mountains because you only get to build Forest Fortresses (300 defense, 15 admin) and they cost the same amount of gold (1000).

The main strategy is that you want to cram in as may fortresses as possible, as resource effective as possible, within a small area so that they can help each other in with defense. You also want them to have maximum defense for Ulm, thus Peg-Castles.

If you later want more gold you should build a fortress on a high population farmland (they tend to have high pop), so that you get the 25% income bonus. But this is a much later worry, so don't spend those 1200 gold on that Fortified City in the beginning. Mainly because it won't give you much resources if it hasn't mountains and forests around it (that you have to clear out of course, taking time and resources in form of losses).

Building a Fortified City or Citadel (the latter is the standard type, meaning it gets built on border mountains) makes those provinces around them quite useless for further fortress building. Because if you do build additional fortresses there you cut of the (main) resource income to the Fortified City or Citadel. You still have some of the money though, but in the beginning it isn't worth it.

Another thing, as you get the 25% resource bonus in every Ulmish castle it is wise to try to have as MANY castles as possible instead of focusing on a small amount of high admin ones. With some races you should do the opposite but not with Ulm.

To summarize: Mountains, and to some extent forests, are the thing you want to look for when playing Ulm; or any resource heavy nation for that matter.

[Sombre]

Oh I know Abysia is very different, I just want to try a resource focused strategy with them. I normally see high resource cost due to equipment as a handicap rather than a plus, but with the right strat that could change.

[Sombre]

I think you just might be my favourite poster Dedas. You're inspiring me to go on a heavy resource Ulm, Ulm Reborn and Abysia rampage.

[Xietor]

Very informative post! So if you were playing on a map with only "border mountains" would you still build a castle line next to your castle(ie no peg castles?).

Well, at least i know your strategy in our new game, and i know why you had the host put in "real" mountains on the map lol.

Ded, try the black steel ulm mode and see if you think it is balanced. it does improve ulm a good bit.

I played the newest version for a few hours last night, and I think free knights the black duke summons are too much. And there has to be a way to limit the free troops to 1 duke at a time.

It is unbalancing to have more than 1 duke summoning.