MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?

[AreaOfEffect]

I felt that Ulm was an overlooked nation well before they were patched. The new stuff, to me, feels like it's over the top. I like Ulm because it is efficient and elegant. I think Baalz makes a point that I've believed is true the whole time. As Ulm, other players need you, not the other way around.

I do feel that the roll of blood magic for Ulm is underplayed a lot in this guide. Blood stones, in my opinion, move Ulm to a whole new level of dangerous. Not because of the gem income it produces, but rather because they are overlooked as an earth booster. Ulm doesn't need more then a few blood stones at home. The rest ought to be fielded on smiths moving with your armies. Combined with a pair of earth boots and summon earthpower you have an earth 5 mage who can use the constant supply of earth gems to great effect.

Another thing overlooked I feel is alteration. Sure, iron blizzard is a handy evocation spell, and magma bolts satisfies a player's hunger for mass destruction, but it just isn't the path I would choose if I was given a lot of earth mages. Armor destruction, immobilization, battlefield fatigue, and protection are just a few of the spells under alteration. One of the most overlooked spells in my opinion is petrify, most likely because it requires an earth 5 caster. Yet, I just pointed out how easy it is to generate one of these in battle. Later on you can support your thugs with Crumble, fortify your position with iron walls and wizard's tower. Finally you can field those living statues in place of mechanical men without much a draw back as you can then cast army of gold. That's just the earth magic, their is also spells like blindness and doom. Doom is a spell you only need to cast once. Have your god show up, cast, and then retreat or cast returning. The enemy units will never be the same. Will of Fates is just further down. If your fielding golems you can provide them with a starshine cap and crystal coin, now everyone of your armies are nearly unstoppable.

[Baalz]

Oh, perhaps I wasn't clear. You definitely can't afford everything I suggest is beneficial on your pretender and get the scales you need, you have to pick out of the choices as to what is most important for you. I would not at all suggest going with heat and misfortune, that will significantly cut into your vital income. I'd probably go with something like order-3, production-3, drain-3, death-3, dom-4, E4 N4 S3 D3 F2 A2 W2.

The blessing is the critical factor that puts you up into the "almost invincible" category rather than "really tough". When you're talking about a 12 hitpoint guy, the difference between taking a hit every 3-4 turns while regenerating 1 point per turn is *huge* compared to taking 2 hits every 3-4 turns while not regenerating. Using winged boots and a lucky pendant (again, a huge difference in halving your hits...plus it's cheap) you don't have a whole lot of choices for more reinvig and regen, and nothing using your smiths to forge. To be honest, I just find the cost/benefit for the smith thug with no blessing is too high with his mortality rate. You could make the call that you think other options are better an opt not to use the holy smith thugs, but its hard to argue the cost of the blessing is too high if you do plan to use them.

Additionally, having an E4 pretender helps a lot in casting the larger spells you might be considering like Earth Blood Deep Well or Forge of the ancients or iron angel. Of course you can always forge boosters, but one extra level often makes such endeavors *much* cheaper rather than depending on an elemental staff or ring of wizardry. Finally, as you may have noticed you'll want to be spending a bunch of earth gems, so having E4 on the guy you already planned to send extensively site searching is hard to classify as a waste.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

I agree that Turmoil-Luck is a good choice with MA ulm, particularly if you are playing CBM. Ulm has relatively cheap mages and troops, and a forging strategy loves more gems. It also gives you some more design points to play with and taking death becomes a lot more attractive.

I disagree, even though I usually stay clear away from Misfortune.

While more gems are good and Ulm's mages and units are cheap, Ulm needs castles, and since the mundane armies are slow you preferably want to have several, and since research is slow you preferably want secondary research center up as soon as possible. Without Order 3, you just can't afford new castles fast enough.

Luck really helps Ulm, especially if you get coastal provinces, since there are events that easily produce betweeen 15 and 25 water gems or blood slaves (huge number of water gems have been blown ashore// a slave ship was captured) - but you need the castles more, and even Order1/Luck3 builds don't get enough many reliably.

[Baalz]

Yes, I don't disagree with anything AOE has said about alteration, it can be extremely powerful and under the right circumstances I'll focus on it. The thing is, alteration is a force multiplier. That's usually a good thing. The problem is it requires sufficient force to multiply.

Iron blizzard is, as I mentioned, a niche spell. Magma bolts is a useful stopgap if you're pressed early. You can't compare petrify to magma bolts, lets be fair and compare petrify to magma eruption, as it's the spell I clearly say should be your focus. By level 6 evocation I'll match your petrify, destruction and curse of stones with magma eruption, blade wind, and earthquake. It's a bit disingenuous to dismiss these spells as satisfying a hunger, taken together there are precious few armies those three spells won't decimate when cast by several mages with an appropriate strategy.

The big consideration though, which I tried to stress is you have to work hard to overcome Ulm's inherent inertia. There's a reason Ulm has an image as a lumbering beast who can't turn around - by default that's what it is. If you focus on force multipliers, your only option is to use it with sufficient force - namely large groups of map move one infantry. If you focus on force generators though, you gain a lot more flexibility on how you deploy them. Keep a stockpile of winged boots in your lab and plan your castles appropriately and you can drop dozens of magma blast spammers and thugs anywhere in your nation on a single turn's notice - or spread out and cover virtually your entire nation with one or two guys who will slaughter small raiding squads. Focusing primarily on alteration is what I alluded to before- you're basically going down the route of marching big, slow blocks of guys around casting the same handful of spells until a nimble opponent hamstrings you.

Of course I'd like to stress one last time that you don't want to ignore alteration, there's obviously some good stuff in there and you don't have to work hard to come up with a scenario that it's exactly what you need. You don't want to focus on it initially though at the expense of the things which give you speed and flexibility - you've already got the strength and you have more urgent things than multiplying it.

You also can't compare a level 9 spell (army of gold) combined with a level 6 spell of another path (enliven statues) with two level 7 spells from the same path (mechanical men and weapons of sharpness). At the point you're casting army of gold, why bother with statues at all? A large part of the benefit of the mechanical men is the point of the game where you field them.

I also object to you saying I underplayed the bloodstones, I didn't talk about them at length because I felt that is belaboring the obvious. Let me quote:

"Blood stones are very, very good for Ulm, giving you the earth income to forge everything you want and boosting your mages (earth random + boots + blood stone = E5 = earth attack, petrify, weapons of sharpness, etc.)"

I will say though that I disagree with you that Ulm doesn't need many blood stones at home, if I'm pulling in 50E per turn I'm putting it all to excellent work. Putting blood stones on key smiths is a powerful tool, but putting them on all your combat smiths is a wasteful use of gems generally and you'll lose your bloodstones that way! I'd rather keep them safe in the castle spamming earth attack...

[MaxWilson]

Force multipler vs. force generator: good thoughts, Baalz. Thanks. This will be useful to me with nations that have nothing to do with Ulm, and goes into the same bucket as other thoughts like "the keys to endgame strength are flexibility and mobility."

-Max

[Baalz]

Lord knows I'll take turmoil/luck sometimes, but this is not the time to do it. Your initial expansion is going to be average because of the speed your troops are produced, you have to get your second and third castle up very quickly. Getting those castles up a couple turns earlier makes a big difference in the number of indies you're able to grab before they're all taken, which largely sets the stage for how your initial interaction with your neighbors is going to be. Being below average puts you in the prey bucket for the initial tilt, and by and large turmoil vs order is that margin for Ulm.

[AreaOfEffect]

My apologies, I didn't want to come off as saying that alteration is somehow greater then evocation. They each clearly fill in a different roles. If Ry'leh is knocking on the door with a bunch of shambler thralls, you want iron blizzard. No doubt about that. I would even agree that evocation is likely to be my first pick for research. I wasn't trying to make a serious comparison between spells of completely different levels if you can believe that.

My main point is that a few spells, like petrify, are under-appreciated, mostly because they appear to be out of reach for most casters. However, earth is surprisingly easy to boost, particularly with a nation that has a forge bonus and starting earth gem income. In the case of petrify versus magma eruption, it depends highly on what units each of us are using against each other. Destruction and petrification is much more useful against a barrage of thugs then earthquake and magma eruption.

I'm a little surprised that you are much more conservative about the fielding of blood stones then you are about the fielding of thugs and gear. I've always felt that the best place for the stones is on the field of battle, not stocked away at home. Yes, they are indeed valuable and produce gems of their own, but they save you more gems and resources in battle then out. It is wonderful to have a huge supply of gems each turn, but blood stones are not clams. You can make them work for you right away and in a very powerful way. Granted, you shouldn't field all but one of them all of the time. However, you should be willing to take those flying shoes and bloody stones and place them on the field when things start to happen. Don't treat them like treasures, treat them like tools is all I say.

[thejeff]

I like the priest smith thug idea and am starting to play around with it. (Or will if I ever get a air random How necessary is the full black plate? It seems to me the high encumbrance from that is the only reason you need the extra reinvig from the earth bless. Is ironskin + fire plate sufficient? Or even one of the robes? Shroud would let you use master smiths, Shadows for etherealness or missile protection? Assuming the appropriate gems/paths on your forgers.

[Baalz]

No, you want the black steel plate, the 5 gem one with 2 encumbrance. Alternatively you can go with fire plate for essentially the same thing. The one with 4 encumbrance is a bad idea, the point of the extra reinvig is not to have a net 0 encumbrance, it's to have a high negative net encumberance so you can recover the fatigue from your buffs before many people start trying to make critical hits on you. That's why you want to stick to summon earthpower, then blessing, then invulernability, then wait twice before attacking rather than stacking on a fireshield or some other buff.

[Wrana]

Excellent as usual. I wonder how much of this is applicable to EA Ulm...
Certainly this would call for using Shamans as thugs (somewhat counterintuitive...). Also, Evocation probably shouldn't be first priority there...
(sorry for OT, I just interested in making that nation work more than in case of MA)