MA Ulm Pretender - Page 5

Baalz · #1 December 6th, 2008, 12:01 PM

Nah, I don't take blood on my pretender (rainbow in every other path). Just bootstrap your first 50 blood slaves with about 10 scouts bloodhunting. It'll take several turns to scrape up 50 slaves, but it's a darn sight better (IMO) than using the design points and then having your pretender spend time blood hunting. Ulm needs blood....but they don't need too much of it, and they don't need it early. Towards the end of year one as your expansion is stabilizing and you've got at least three castles start a scout blood farm. If things go smoothly there's no reason not to do this in a couple provinces. You shouldn't have too much problem to be cranking out blood stones sometime in year three with no effort from your pretender, which is about the time you really start needing them.

I tell you, I did a fever fetish farm with Ulm once, and I'm never gonna do it again. It just gets to be a micro management nightmare...it got to he point that every turn I had to cycle through 50 guys to see who was getting ready to die, shuttling fresh bodies around, trying to juggle some regen items. I got so fed up with it I ended up forging regen rings for everybody...what's the ROI on that?

As to the gems, you gotta remember Ulm's philosophy- super efficiency. When you say massive amounts of gems, you're not really thinking about it the right way. You're seeing empower here, forge big item there, but if you look at what you're doing you're not really using a huge amount of one gem type and most everything you do can be incrementally built up. With a rainbow pretender doing some site searching it's pretty much guaranteed that you're gonna have at least several gems of each type coming in per turn. As you're obviously lacking in magic diversity, they're just gonna pile up. With no particular effort you're gonna rack up 50+ air, water, death, and nature gems because you're just not using them. One big investment in an empowering and now you start leveraging that efficiency. Using your strong earth income you should have a bunch of hammers, so that modest (ie) water income is enough to forge an item every turn with the guy you just empowered. You don't need a huge outlay of gems immediately (other than one empowering), you want to make sure you only forge using hammers and steadily build up all the things discussed. You don't want to crank out tons of elemental staffs, rings of wizardry and robes of the magi, you just (optionally) want a handful of these, then steadily crank out the low to mid end items - steadily building up dozens of earth boots, blood stones, flaming skulls, rune smashers, slave matrixes, etc. etc.

Also, I wouldn't underestimate the return you get with a rainbow mage site searching. If you mostly stick to mountains/forests/swamps/wastelands you'll average multiple sites per province, and average multiple gems per site with indubitably a couple really nice finds, so searching a dozen provinces it's not a stretch to imagine you're now pulling in 10+ gems in a couple paths and at least 5 in all of them. Throw in the fact that your smiths can site search in earth, fire, and astral and you've got plenty for the bootstrapping empowerment/boosters discussed. Once you do that initial bootstrapping, well, now it's easy to site search the rest of the paths and get a very solid gem income.

Meglobob · #2 December 7th, 2008, 04:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baalz

I tell you, I did a fever fetish farm with Ulm once, and I'm never gonna do it again. It just gets to be a micro management nightmare...it got to he point that every turn I had to cycle through 50 guys to see who was getting ready to die, shuttling fresh bodies around, trying to juggle some regen items. I got so fed up with it I ended up forging regen rings for everybody...what's the ROI on that?

I recently did a fever fetish farm as Ea Oceania in MP, I got to 100+ fever fetishs and the micro only took me 5 mins per turn.

The key is renaming on. When you recruit your 12 hp fetish victim lets say, simply rename him to 1 turn before he dies. For example current turn is 21, your put a fever fetish on the 12 hp victim and rename 32. Now you can leave him all alone. Just have a quick scroll down using the F1 overall view once a turn looking for the current turn number to change the fetish to another victim.

Easy and very simple.

With renaming off, just don't bother fever fetishing! Its too much micro!

Endoperez · #3 December 6th, 2008, 01:33 PM

When I tried blood-hunting with Scouts, I thought it was way too slow, but I didn't think I'd have two years to do it. I'll have to test that out sometime.

JimMorrison · #4 December 6th, 2008, 03:20 PM

Well, giving my Enchantress a try. At least in this first test, expenses are so low that Luck has furnished me with plenty of gold, and is also helping get that extra gem income from events. She has less diversity than yours (I settled on 1F/4A/4E/5S/1D), with only having F/D because I had ~20 points at the end, not because I couldn't live without them.

This still gives her Staffs, and Skulls, and Rings, but also gives her the ability to remote search Death if need be, as well as giving her more immediate access to several globals.

I do agree that Blood Stones are of incredible value to Ulm..... so, gonna see what the Scouts can do, the one time I tried it, I got 3-5 slaves a turn with ~12 hunters.

Baalz · #5 December 6th, 2008, 05:09 PM

Yeah, it's pretty lumpy but that's pretty much in line with what I got. A bit less than a year to scrape up enough slaves for an empowering, then another half a year for a second empowering (leveraging the first empowering to blood hunt), then pretty steadily cranking out one then two half priced blood stones per turn after that. When I did that in my last Ulm game I ended up having 3 provinces with 10 scouts apiece by the end, cranking out two blood stones per turn and stockpiling enough slaves to pop out a robe of the magi or armor of souls every few turns. If you start right around the end of year one you'll be just ramping up production around the end of year three which is around when the real fireworks often start.

vfb · #6 December 7th, 2008, 09:08 AM

Don't they lose 2HP every late winter though?

For more micro madness you can pre-poison the replacements so they spew gems right away without having to wait for the HP drop. I don't think I'd like to try that with a 100-fetish farm.

Yomi in CBM can got nuts with Kappas because they stay diseased with the fetish on but recuperate once you switch, so you don't need to keep hiring scouts or barbarians.

Fever-fetish scouts can also pull dual-duty blood hunting for non-blood nations.