MA Ulm Pretender

[Baalz]

Yes, a bootstrap blood economy works very well for Ulm. When you're empowering your smiths I like to use one with an air random. You're forging those air boosters anyway, might as well open the door to robes of the magi (awesome for getting that boost with free hands for a hammer). Robe + ring of wizardry + every path has a least one non-hand booster puts almost everything at full discount, and of course the robe does wonderful things if you're using a rainbow pretender.

Ulm's ability to forge cheap boosters open up some fantastic flexibility that most people don't associate with Ulm.

Astral cap + crystal coin = every smith with an astral random should be ready to teleport at a moment's notice and throw down an antimagic for those guys hoping to take advantage of your MR. Throw in a crystal shield and...what's that? Ulm is dropping doom and will of the fates on top of army of lead and weapons of sharpness in every fight? Stack a light of the northern star on top and you've got solar brilliance. Throw some rune smashers in and spam enslave mind, or an eye of aiming and drop gifts from heaven on that SC thinking Ulm is a unmaneuverable easy target.

Blood stones + earth boots = every smith (after earthpower) can spam petrify, weapons of sharpness, army of lead, and invulnerability/earthquake (go ahead and chain 10 together round 2!). With an earth random (or an elemental staff) they can spam earth attack, crumble, and melancholia (which is great for the price against anybody with resource intensive troops)

Fire helm + fire skull (death empowering a smith is a very good idea) + crystal shield = every smith can drop a Flame Storm. Go ahead and chain 10 together turn 2! Alternatively, Fire Storm works fabulously with army of gold and Ulm's heavy armor.

1 air booster = every air random smith is a cloud trapezing rain of stone dropper.

Also consider that slave matrixes can be mass produced for 4 gems apiece. Magma eruption's AOE and damage scale with mage power. Earth boots + blood stone + crystal shield + earthpower + leading an 4 man communion = +6E. Use 2-3 earth random smiths and you're dropping 9E magma eruptions that never stop. Talk about a battlefield clearer...

[JimMorrison]

I guess I'm just having a really hard time wrapping my head around accomplishing all of this with the pretender. There are massive amounts of gems being thrown around in these plans, and no real way to get the incomes going, other than indies, or manual site searching with the pretender. Manual site searching, it will take 2 years of game time to search 12 provinces, which will probably net ~30 gems/turn or so, depending on site frequency, and of course dispersed between the available paths.

This leads me to three conclusions -

The first being, that you need to narrow the focus of the pretender, to be able to assume actualization of your intent, in most games. You can plan for minimum needed to accomplish what you want with maximal use of boosters, but ultimately this means you are either searching with pretender, or relying on indies. But you get the indies whether or not you have the path on your pretender, and if you don't get any indies, you are unlikely to leverage your pretender's paths into doing anything really large scale in a diversification path.

Second, this means drop the Blood. Again, you're either Blood Hunting with your pretender (hard to do while they are crawling around, site-searching, and vice-versa), or you are relying on indies/0Bs to do your hunting. In the former case, your pretender just has too much on their plate, and in the latter, you are hunting with someone else, to empower someone else. Your pretender hardly has time to forge a Blood Stone a turn and do anything else useful, so this is a sideline for other people, no?

Which brings us to third, Astral will get you further than most paths, as you can use RoS/RoW to boost mages on a task specific basis. Also indies with Astral are more common than anything other than Nature, so while you could build up a Lizard Shaman to do what you need, I would consider it better to have someone ready to rock already, so that you can get the most bang out of your Pearls.


All of these other things sound good in theory, and probably work like gangbusters in SP, but they appear to need perfect luck, and perfect circumstance to have viability in MP, in the timescale of a competitive game. I know I must be crazy to be arguing these points with Baalz and Endoperez, but I've never been afraid to put my balls where my mouth is.... errr.....