Guide: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Dooooooooooooooom!

[licker]

You are less likely to suffer brigands/barbarians if you take luck than anything Order may give you.

You also seem to completely underrate flying. Flying (and stealth on top of it) is absolutely huge when you are raiding someone. Ulm cannot get boots of flying without their pretender, or willing trading partners (which cuts both ways for any strategy) and adds an additional 10 air gems (9 or 6 with boni) to the cost of equipping your thugs.

Counts require zero research as well, any other thug summon requires some (no matter how little in some cases).

But this is all tangential to the crux of this disagreement, which is over taking O3 and how necessary that is, vs having either better scales elsewhere, or a more rounded pretender.

My contention is that Ulm is better off with an awake pretender to get some counts out year one, than they are paying for O3 with a sleeping pretender and delaying count production into year 2.

Of course you can get pretty far using infantry and rangers, but I don't think you get much farther maximizing them at the expense of the rest of your strengths.