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

[licker]

This is all sound advice, but has little to do with the actual question of how necessary O3 is.

As some of you have been want to tell me, you can summon counts with O3, well guess what?

You can summon and forge whatever you like more easily with L3! (and don't forget the fun of improved cross breeding for even more free chaff, some of it actually very useful, and very able to provide resistances and abilities your opponent may not easily counter).

So unless you want to go back to discussing how Order and production scales (since you need the production more if you plan on massing ghouls or other HI) the rest of this is largely just us agreeing with each other.

That is, no where have I said that Ulm should rely on anything? What I have said is Ulm should look first to their strengths (as should any nation). And Ulms ultimate strengths are NOT in infantry, as such there is no reason to play a strategy which involves massing them more than you may want to to have some of them around for whatever purpose they wind up serving.

What is going to to be your late game bread and butter and how are you going to get to it? Astral? Death? Blood? No matter how flexible you want to be, you have to make some choice in this matter from the start, at least to minimize the expense (or reliance on luck in finding sites) of actually making your A9, D9, B9 mage to pull out the big summons.

The late game is certainly not going to be 100s of HI moving around at a snails pace.

[chrispedersen]

Jim, (or anyone with an ax in this argument) We need one more for ulmish civil wars...

Whose theory reigns supreme... who takes it....

[JimMorrison]

I was very tempted by that game, I love this nation and have been wanting to play it in MP for awhile..... But I'm trying to slim down my roster a little (currently back down to 8 games atm, woo?), and it's not proving easy. And as I mentioned before, I haven't gotten my timing down for the transition to later game stuff..... in SP tests so far, getting my Blood started has been especially slow for some reason. (largely due to dealing with overzealous AI neighbors, surely, but still)

As far as Order/Misf vs Turmoil/Luck - I'll let one thing out of the bag - my current concept build uses 2Death AND 2Drain, so Misf is certainly out of the question, for me at least. But it's a tricky build, to say the least. I think that while Ulm can survive through leaner times than some nations, that it doesn't truly thrive unless it can afford to build a lot. I'd argue that while you aren't going to be pumping out massive amounts of infantry all game, it's unwise to just ignore the "Steel Tide", and thus without Production scales, you probably want to very much maximize your castle construction, so you are supplanting your need for resources/castle, with a need for gold/turn to optimize your opportunity to use your national troops as much as necessary.

I suppose that since my Shinuyama SP that I was fooling around with just got ruined by an AI casting BoT, I can get around to that promised test of primarily using Rangers for the early game. But honestly, I would feel more comfortable facing a human player that was relying almost entirely on Rangers, than a human who had large amounts of Ulm's heavy infantry. I mean, you'll need foot troops all game for some things, unless you intend to utilize thugs with Gate Cleavers to take down gates, and other thugs who somehow manage to get full immunities so your enemy can't just send a few Frozen Heart (et al) spammers to ruin your entire military capacity.

[chrispedersen]

Cool beans - welcome aboard. I can't imagine how you handle 13 games.... or 8..

This will be 5 for me- the most ever.

[JimMorrison]

Well, I've spent the afternoon showing myself that no matter how I try, it's the Drain that is killing me. The difference between 5RP and 3RP is dramatic, to say the least.