Defeating Ulm

[Soapyfrog]

Elemental armour is still damn fine.

bolstered by other 50% resistance items you can get 100% resistance and some excellent stat boosts... e.g. burning pearl, scutata volturnis plus a decent helm will put your prot up above 24, and you get a nice attack boost form the pearl, and a free armor-negating lightning attack every round. Add to that boots of quickness, and AMA, and a decent melee weapon (sword of swiftness, or frost brand would be my preference, but a blood thorn works too if you can get it... offsetting lower defence with life drain) and you should have also a decent defence and MR.

When elemental armour was 100% resistances, it was just gross!

Back to the issue of Ulmish troops, they have generally poor morale (except the knights) so fear items/spells work extremely well on them, and additionally their MR is surprisingly low.

At some point they can certainly be overwhelmed... I my current MP game as Ulm, I lost my national army in a standup fight with a marginally larger, and certainly much cheaper, Pangaean army made up of maenads, centaurs, and decent caster support.

[Yvelina]

I used to be an Ulm player until my boyfriend talked and beat me out of it. Ulm has no mobility, and no matter how well you equip your commanders, you are always leaving something. In the above example (Sword of swiftness, scutata, etc...) you get horrible encumberance, unless your thug is undead. Even mounted commanders, even damn fine ones like Ulm's, will quickly run out of steam, and fall to mobs.

And on top of that, it is not as if you can forge much with Ulm. Sure, with Forge of the Ancients, you get great bonuses, but you still have to get the gems from somewhere. And by the time you have the Forge up, enemy magic will be more than enough to rip your armies apart.

And to really rub it in, 'Ulm has the best troops' is total nonsense. Vanheim, Pythium, and C'tis, which have some of the very best mages in the game, have troops that I consider generally superior to Ulm's. Oh, and Abysia, Jotunheim, Atlantis, R'lyeh have trick troops that can cripple Ulm's.

Ulm needs AN AWFUL LOT OF LOVE before it can compare with the other races.

[CUnknown]

I love Ulm, it rocks. In the mid-late game, it is a little weak unless you can find good independent mages and/or sages, but in the early game basically no one is better. You can get a nice jump-start taking out a lot of indies, without even the use of an SC pretender, and anyone next to you is generally dead.

[Come_Get_Some]

Thanks to all for the replies. Time to fry some Dwarven hordes...