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

[licker]

Again, if the main advantage of ghoul gardians is that they count 2x as defense then why the #@$# would you buy them again? (they are also undead right?)
Because their upkeep is lower for the amount of defense you get? You can't reliably patrol with them anyway, since if you lose they will not be in your castle defending anyway...

That is if you need patrolers you are going to use wolves or thralls or whatever free chaff you can come up with.

And to mass them quickly you NEED not just order (which you still don't really need, but whatever) you NEED to take production which further cuts into the real advantage LA Ulm has. Production becomes more and more useless the longer the game goes on anyway, no amount of ulmish infantry is going to stand up to proper SCs or likely even a handful of thugs designed to counter them. Their magic resistance isn't even the issue, it's still their mobility which makes them expensive targets who are unlikely to be where you actually need them. And if nothing else, provide no kind of strategic problem for your opponents, who are more than happy (at least i would be) to see you turtle up in your 'impregnable' fortresses while they just do whatever they want. On a small map I can see them providing enough of an early advantage that different scales may be warrented. On mid-large maps, not so much.


But I think Chris has the right idea with his test game, though I'm not so sure about the 100 counts in 40 turns, but what the hell, even half that would still be giving you a ton of chaff and rapid defense/offense.

You don't need to give your counts much equipment to make them reliable raiders afterall, and Ulm (even LA) can still manage to out forge just about anyone else.

[Dedas]

High production is a given if you want to use the strategy I have outlined.

As for Ghoul Guardians, you buy them all the time, marching them up to your front fortresses to tie up the enemy while he attacks you as he sees you as an harmless turtle. At the same time you slowly grind away at him with your own army of summons and faster troops, building fortresses as you go along, stuffing them with those cheap defence troops. And if he attacks your main army you just fall back to your fortresses while you attack on another spot. Mobility and defence combined.

[vfb]

Ghoul Guardians have map move 2, zero encumbrance, base 14MR, good protection, 100%PR, and frikking laser beams in their skulls!

Wait, scratch the laser beams. But they do have Black Halberds.

I don't see why you'd buy any other troop in your capitol once you've got another fort up. Maybe if you desperately needed some cavalry ... but in LA you should be able to pump some out some indy cav at at least one of your forts.

[Tolkien]

Ghoul Guardians are extremely useful and when you have new forts up, they should be your primary unit recruit at your capital (unless you need a few Templars).

In my opinion, the best part of LA Ulm is the flexibility. Being a one-trick horse is a fatal strategic and tactical decision, as sure enough, your enemies will find counters and use them. You've got plenty of strategic and tactical options as LA Ulm: stealthy ranger armies and stealthy communions (think Helheim/Vanheim and mass glamoured stealthy armies for some ideas what you can do with those). You've got a versatile array of heavy infantry that all excel in certain situations and against certain opponents (pikemen have better survivability against giants for example). You've got ghoul guardians that will simply TEAR any bless heavy nation (like Mictlan) to shreds and have map move 2. You've also got Shields and Zweihanders that are just all around useful. You also have armies of chaff: wolves and thralls (I believe the wolves have gotten a boost in the new CBM and got a patrol bonus), which makes for an excellent buffer for your iron blizzard spamming iron priests and main army. You've got heavy cavalry for those rare situations when they're needed (charge against elephants, for example). Hell, you've got an easily spammable shortbowman (villans) if you are REALLY drowning against armies of chaff (like against R'lyeh: they also benefit from having +1 MR compared to the rest of Ulm's infantry), though you'll probably forgo them for the crap morale.

My point is that Ulm has so many options in terms of tactics and strategies that it's ALWAYS a good idea to keep all options on the table when you're playing with them. LA Ulm is incredibly versatile, both army and magicwise, and my philosophy is summed up by Napoleon:
One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority.
So my opinion is that focusing on one strength at the cost of the whole (and Ulm's blood potential is VERY strong already) is a poor plan, as by focusing JUST on blood cuts out the other options.

[licker]

I could not disagree more while still agreeing in principle.

You cannot try to be a 'do it all' nation because then you will inevitiably fail against a nation who actually does something very very well.

That said, you don't go into a game saying "I'm going to do this and only this no matter what", but changing your strategy every 10 turns (or whatever an equivilent is) is only good for getting yourself killed, since any STRONG late game play is going to have required you to have played the particular strategy to set it up in the early and mid games.

To that end I cannot fathom wasting time with ghouls or infantry centric strategies (meaning strats where you take order and production to boost their production) since they are quickly rendered useless by anyone who knows what they are doing.

And if you never face anyone who knows what they are doing then it really doesn't matter what kind of a strategy you adopt unless you also don't know what you are doing.

The odd thing to me is that I'm not saying 'never buy ghouls or infantry' I'm saying don't build your nation so that your plan is to buy lots of them. That is don't sacrifice your ultimate strengths by taking scales which become less and less useful as the game progresses, as the benefits they provide you become essentially useless.

I also really do not agree that you need lots of money to buy more castles after around 25 turns in, because by then you are just going to be taking 'free' castles anyway, and pretending that you can turtle doesn't seem that smart either, since you don't research *that* well either, and you probably want/need more area to set up your blood economy, all the while pumping out black priests.

What is more versitile anyway? 11 HI or one black priest with free spawned chaff? Infantry are just really not as useful as I think some of you are making them out to be. Sure, they can have their uses, but guess what? If you don't 'guess' right about what infantry you actually need, you'll never have enough of it in the right place (becasue they are so slow) to respond to anything anyway. And if you just build enough infantry to cover every counter, then you've wasted 3x or 4x the gold and production on a force which is only 33% effective?

All the while you are still paying upkeep on these troops moving around one province at a time who are easilly exploited due to to their sluggishness and crap MR.

I don't know, maybe I'm misreading you all, but it sure seems you are suggesting sacrificing what Ulm actually has as a real strength to gain some minor advantage in the first 20 turns after which you have really nothing to scare anyone with.

Ghouls are nice units, but you NEED production to mass them, and then they are cap only, and ...

Just like any other guide or discussion of nations who wind up reliant on cap only troops you have to be able to justify them as an all game solution. Ghouls are not this, not even close. What they do well you don't even need that many of them (early sacred rush for example). As castle defense you can still get alot of milage out of freespawn (which you can get anywhere) and summons (same) which oyu will still generate even while you are being seiged.

I don't get any strategy which has you sacrificing time and man power defending against sieges while your other 'army' does it's thing somewhere else. Especially when your other army apparently has lots of map move 1 infantry in it.

Mobility? Hardly.

Try throwing a dozen outfitted counts at your opponents lands while his army tries to figure out whether to siege a meaningless castle or push on into your dominion where you can 'suicide' even more naked counts at him, spamming lamashastas (sp?). Even when you 'lose' you obviously 'win'.

[KissBlade]

I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of vampire counts as anything but very effective blood hunters. They make /ok/ raiders but so does a black servant with a lycan ammie and it doesn't require a constant stock of death gems if you're using summon lamm's. Furthermore, you still keep bringing up the trade of infantry versus mages/vampires where people are pointing out you can just get both.

[JimMorrison]

Also, the MR horse is dead. We Soul Slayed it.

To sum up - you are not likely to win a war with Ulmish heavy infantry alone, but the other side of that coin shows you are unlikely to win a war with Vampire Counts alone.


Besides, people spend enormous amounts of design points on awake SC pretenders, sometimes -mostly- to slingshot them to a strong mid-late game, and sometimes with a very diminished usefulness after that. I see Production scales as performing the same role, except that they cost less design points, and they provide a consistent increase in gold income, in contrast to the awake SC that usually erodes your ability to take good scales, thus reducing your income potential through the entire game.


To be fair, I will do some early game expansion tests with just Rangers, but I admit I am quite skeptical.

[Dedas]

Originally Posted by licker

You cannot try to be a 'do it all' nation because then you will inevitiably fail against a nation who actually does something very very well.

It is not a matter of "doing it all", it is a matter of doing the right things at the right time and that means planning. And planning means you need to know what your enemy is up to all the time.

If you meet a beginner he might try doing just one thing, like the tank rush in C&C, but in this game that makes him weak because there is actually counters to everything. An experienced players sees what he is up to and adapts accordingly. It is easy for him to do so because the enemy is so predictable.

Then you meet an experienced player, he watches you and adapts to what you do, and you do the same. And in the end that means mixed armies. The challenge is to find the perfect mix, and deploy it at the right spot at the right time. And that means planning... and so on.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by KissBlade

I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of vampire counts as anything but very effective blood hunters. They make /ok/ raiders but so does a black servant with a lycan ammie and it doesn't require a constant stock of death gems if you're using summon lamm's. Furthermore, you still keep bringing up the trade of infantry versus mages/vampires where people are pointing out you can just get both.

1 vampire count + 1 horror = 1 taken province.

Ok, sometimes it will take 2 horrors...

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Also, the MR horse is dead. We Soul Slayed it.

To sum up - you are not likely to win a war with Ulmish heavy infantry alone, but the other side of that coin shows you are unlikely to win a war with Vampire Counts alone.


Besides, people spend enormous amounts of design points on awake SC pretenders, sometimes -mostly- to slingshot them to a strong mid-late game, and sometimes with a very diminished usefulness after that. I see Production scales as performing the same role, except that they cost less design points, and they provide a consistent increase in gold income, in contrast to the awake SC that usually erodes your ability to take good scales, thus reducing your income potential through the entire game.


To be fair, I will do some early game expansion tests with just Rangers, but I admit I am quite skeptical.

If by enormous you mean 150...

And gold is pointless in the late game anyway.