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

[licker]

I commented on the luck misfortune thing. I can't see Ulm doing that well with misfortune honestly, compared to the difference from taking T3L3.

Map dependent of course.

And yes rangers are useful, and can be useful moving forward, but Ulm lacks the ability (outside of the pretender) to cast wind guide or flaming arrows without boosters/empowerment. Any nation could pack a ton of xbows and achieve much the same effect (less the rangers mobility, which is very useful).

My concern is that following a ranger centric focus ignores your real strengths, especially if you are going to waste time recruiting ranger lords to lead them. If you need stealth commanders you have plenty of other options from blood summons to standard conjuration summons.

A mass of black priests can do just about anything due to you being able to get them in communions (and forge matrices...) So perhaps that is where you are going to get your flaming arrows and wind guide from? But then you still need the mass of black priests to set it up...

Clearly you can play LA Ulm different ways, I'd just be skeptical of a ranger centric strategy being as effective as a mage based strategy. And in any case, it is not as though even with T3L3 you won't be able to mass a sizeable force of rangers at some point if you really want to.

The benefit of O3 seems to only be early game, and early game you simply cannot use wind guide and flaming arrows anyway (unless you design your pretender to do it, and then you have likely handicapped your count production).

[KissBlade]

Where do you get the idea that I was proposing a ranger centric strategy...?

One of my original points for Order 3 is that you have good non cap mages and more steady income = more mages. Ranger floods = good early game. Order 3 = better early game. Order gives you more early game to expand + threaten better => more snowball income than turmoil.

Also there's nothing from stopping Ulm from taking Order and luck anyway. Turmoil/luck doesn't pay off as much as people think nor do misfortune hurt all that much in base game.

[Dedas]

It is all a gamble. Massing one extreme can pay of, but against a good opponent you are taking quite the risk. If your opponent is less experienced however, you will most probably win 9 times out of 10.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by KissBlade

One of my original points for Order 3 is that you have good non cap mages and more steady income = more mages.

I think the point that we can all agree on, is that one of Ulm's great strengths, is their cost effective, and battle ready mages. Regardless of how you staff your armies, having gobs and gobs of Black Priests will be very important to your military goals. That's one of the reasons I like to at least have 4E on my pretender, as you get very solid performance with Summon Earthpower and a bit of reinvig from the bless.

(edit) - NOTE - Each Black Priest spamming Iron Blizzard, is the equivalent (until they pass out) of 60+ Rangers (30+ AP projectiles every round), and that is a very big deal indeed.

[licker]

Well I may have taken a liberty in assigning the ranger specific strat to you, but you did mention a mass of rangers buffed with WG and FA...

In any case, you do not need O3 to pump out mages, especially when you don't need to pump out expensive sacreds or other pricey units. Most ulm units cost ~10g right? Now especially if you are also taking sloth (which doesn't hurt you much either, since you don't need swarms of units with upkeep...) you are probably resource limited in cranking out anything rather than gold limited. Black Priests cost ~110? Members of the 2nd tier cost ~150? Sanguine Counts cost 44 blood slaves (or 33, depending on mods right?)...

Fortune Tellers cost 90?

You don't need O3 to pump these things out. You don't even need O3 to build castles if you save from your L3 gold events until you are ready to do it.

But still, ulm is strong enough that I think it will play well either way, just that at some point you reach a point where you don't really need gold for anything particularly useful.

Units should be free spawn or summons, commanders can also be summoned, or ~1k a turn to recruit ~10 commanders (or am i completely misremembering the costs?). Upkeep will be low, Black Priests are sacred, and free spawn/summons are zero.

It comes down to play style preference at this point I think.

[KissBlade]

Yep, I agree on that. Mind you, I was only pointing out Order 3 isn't a bad pick for Ulm in my original post. Luck 3/turmoil has it's own advantages as well. (I'm actually using it with LA Ulm in one of my test games) I do think CBM makes turmoil/luck able to compete with Order. In base games, I was getting barbarian harrassed more often than not. =\

[licker]

Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention is that if you take T3L3 you probably have room for some growth as well, so over time your income isn't as hammered as it could otherwise be.

Growth is even nice since I think some of your Black Priests come with old age, and if offsets some of the pop decline from blood hunting.

The only question left is do you take the awake fountain of blood with Death and Blood, or do you take some kind of rainbow pretender to help your lacking paths?

I can't see LA Ulm needing an SC pretender.

[Dedas]

Remember that LA Ulm gets a production bonus in each fortress, which is a way of telling you to build many of them. Many fortresses equals many Black Priests and MotST which equals many Wolfherds and Fortune Tellers (the capital only guys). What I'm saying is that freeing up your capital means more freespawns and less bad events overall while you still get the battle mages, the troops etc. Do LA Ulm have cheap fortresses? A quick look in the manual says not really. That is why you need order, just as you did when you played MA Ulm. Not so much for the troops, but rather for the troops AND the ability to constantly build fortresses where ever you go. Also, a nation that has lots of slow troops and aims to build up a blood economy seems rather defensive to me. So turtle on and abuse that ill gotten real estate!

[licker]

Well my experience says otherwise.

You can bank the positive gold luck events for when you are ready for your fortress.

Also you just don't need that much gold anyway, and you don't need to be slow.

You can play them that way, or you can play them 'fast'. Either way will likely meet with success, and become just a difference in play style.

Honestly though, if you spend your time building lots of Ulmish HI I think you are going to lose eventually. While that infantry looks great, it's not really all that tough, and the movement is horrible. So unless you have some way of 'warping' them around (and Ulm doesn't have easy access to any of those methods) they will mostly just cost you upkeep while a more agile opponent dances around them until he's ready to level them.

That doesn't mean you cannot or should not use them, it does mean you should be thinking about how quickly you can retire them...

[Dedas]

That is why you need many fortresses, that way you can mass the right kind of infantry where you most need it. You also have to remember that fortresses don't cost any upkeep, on the contrary, they actually make more money in accordance with their admin value. That is why a more expensive fortress pays of in the long round (it is also more durable and generates more resources generally).
Another thing, please take a look at the Ulmish infantry. What do you see? High protection, slow movement, low gold cost, high resource cost, castle defence bonuses. What does that tell you? Their main purpose is defending your castles and hunting grounds, not embarking on long crusades against enemy players. They can do that too of course, but you rather want to have blood summons, knights and black priests (higher movement) to do that. The rangers and Tiers will infiltrate the enemy while you march. When you conquered territory let your Black Priests and Black Lords preach as they both have the inquisitor bonus (extremely effective when you have 10 BP doing it). At the same time you build a fortress on that spot, a fortress will be defended by Halberdiers (castle defense bonus) you build there. Repeat.
This way every unit is useful in some way.