Re: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Doooooooom!
I could not disagree more while still agreeing in principle.
You cannot try to be a 'do it all' nation because then you will inevitiably fail against a nation who actually does something very very well.
That said, you don't go into a game saying "I'm going to do this and only this no matter what", but changing your strategy every 10 turns (or whatever an equivilent is) is only good for getting yourself killed, since any STRONG late game play is going to have required you to have played the particular strategy to set it up in the early and mid games.
To that end I cannot fathom wasting time with ghouls or infantry centric strategies (meaning strats where you take order and production to boost their production) since they are quickly rendered useless by anyone who knows what they are doing.
And if you never face anyone who knows what they are doing then it really doesn't matter what kind of a strategy you adopt unless you also don't know what you are doing.
The odd thing to me is that I'm not saying 'never buy ghouls or infantry' I'm saying don't build your nation so that your plan is to buy lots of them. That is don't sacrifice your ultimate strengths by taking scales which become less and less useful as the game progresses, as the benefits they provide you become essentially useless.
I also really do not agree that you need lots of money to buy more castles after around 25 turns in, because by then you are just going to be taking 'free' castles anyway, and pretending that you can turtle doesn't seem that smart either, since you don't research *that* well either, and you probably want/need more area to set up your blood economy, all the while pumping out black priests.
What is more versitile anyway? 11 HI or one black priest with free spawned chaff? Infantry are just really not as useful as I think some of you are making them out to be. Sure, they can have their uses, but guess what? If you don't 'guess' right about what infantry you actually need, you'll never have enough of it in the right place (becasue they are so slow) to respond to anything anyway. And if you just build enough infantry to cover every counter, then you've wasted 3x or 4x the gold and production on a force which is only 33% effective?
All the while you are still paying upkeep on these troops moving around one province at a time who are easilly exploited due to to their sluggishness and crap MR.
I don't know, maybe I'm misreading you all, but it sure seems you are suggesting sacrificing what Ulm actually has as a real strength to gain some minor advantage in the first 20 turns after which you have really nothing to scare anyone with.
Ghouls are nice units, but you NEED production to mass them, and then they are cap only, and ...
Just like any other guide or discussion of nations who wind up reliant on cap only troops you have to be able to justify them as an all game solution. Ghouls are not this, not even close. What they do well you don't even need that many of them (early sacred rush for example). As castle defense you can still get alot of milage out of freespawn (which you can get anywhere) and summons (same) which oyu will still generate even while you are being seiged.
I don't get any strategy which has you sacrificing time and man power defending against sieges while your other 'army' does it's thing somewhere else. Especially when your other army apparently has lots of map move 1 infantry in it.
Mobility? Hardly.
Try throwing a dozen outfitted counts at your opponents lands while his army tries to figure out whether to siege a meaningless castle or push on into your dominion where you can 'suicide' even more naked counts at him, spamming lamashastas (sp?). Even when you 'lose' you obviously 'win'.
|
Threaded Mode