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.
Re: MA Ulm Pretender
Threaded Mode