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

[licker]

forutune tellers are only useful where you put them. No way are you going to have them in more than a handful of places, so you will still suffer from the barbs type of event hitting your provinces. Your PD is pretty mediocre until you go over 20.

Ulm also has some interesting heros you'd probably like to get. Mot3rd is really really nice to help you diversify into fire and often get another high astral mage.

Of course you can go O3M2 and do fine, alot of nations take this as some kind of default anyway. However, it really doesn't provide some of the support Ulm can use in expanding your off path gem pool specifically. Of course luck can be fickle, you may not get much, or you may get a ring of wizardry in the 1st year.

How do you plan on defending your empire from barbs and knights and bloodslave losses due to events? Or do you just accept them and divert a portion of your army to retaking what you may lose? Counts can do this as easilly as anything of course.

[vfb]

LA Ulm PD is great against barbarians. 15 will stop it nearly all the time, 12 stops it most of the time, unless you get unlucky with a huge horde.

LA Ulm PD gets pikes and archers (not crossbows), and archers are better against barbarians because of the higher rate of fire. I'm talking about CBM with better pikes BTW, so they repel a lot of the barbarian attacks.

When you have castles spaces so they aren't adjacent (adjacent castles is a terrible plan anyway since adjacent castles waste resources), you will have armies and mages in these castles which are very capable of taking back provinces the next month from indy events when you add one turn of recruitment. Even against knight events.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by licker

Ulm cannot get boots of flying without their pretender, or willing trading partners (which cuts both ways for any strategy) and adds an additional 10 air gems (9 or 6 with boni) to the cost of equipping your thugs.

I will agree that using Winged Shoes does increase costs of thugs.

But I have to absolutely disagree 100% that LA Ulm can't get the Shoes without their pretender. You have national mages that at least get 1 Air. If you can't get one of the Mercenary Air mages, then you at least have someone that can manually search some mountains until you are getting a few a turn. (and there is -always- significant chance of a crosspath site, Singing Stones, anyone?) From there it's a short matter of time before you can empower someone to A2, and you should be able to find your way from there.

Diversifying rarely has to be as hard as "use your pretender". If you can get even a random pick in a path, it's not that hard to gear into it. LA Ulm will never be an Air power, but they have no excuse at all to go without.

[licker]

You're right jim, I overstated that.

However, you are taking a big a risk at getting into air without some kind of 'assistance'. You may get there 'quickly' you may not. To guarantee it you need to make a sacrifice somewhere.

But why would you? You don't need air for anything do you (other than what you already can do with the EA combo or communions)? Use your innate advantages (which are your counts) and run with it. Is it easier for Ulm to forge some Boots of Stone or Marble armor than it is to find a way to A2 and air gem income (since you already burned 35 of them...) to get reliable flying onto other thugs?

Anyway diversifying into air is clearly much more difficult than the other paths.

[JimMorrison]

It's 30 for level 2. But still, you're going to want Air sooner or later, for battlefield enchants, and those all take gems to cast.

Personally, I do agree that in many cases, the Vampire Count is a superior thug chassis choice for LA Ulm. I just couldn't swallow poor Air access as a primary reasoning for it.

But bear in mind, that the Vampire Count *is* the easy way, and it *is* the expected answer. Especially if you let your opponent know (by using them) that you have Vampires, you might well give him a big surprise when your other choices start making appearances.

Generally, I try to make a point of always diversifying into every path (other than Blood, often too big a bother) during the course of a game. Taking your opponent off guard by introducing weapons that he didn't think you had any access to, can be a priceless advantage. Or in some cases, waiting until your enemy comes at you with his "secret weapon", only to find that with a little effort, you are already prepared to drop a Storm Warriors on your army. Honestly, for the small amount of actual effort required to diversify most paths (a couple of Priests manual searching, they're doing Holy as well anyways), I tend to feel that even just access to a few items you otherwise couldn't get, justifies the expense. Then I let the gems pile up, even at 4-5 a turn, you will have enough to pull off some interesting surprises eventually, and a couple of stray items won't tip off your opponent, as they could have come from victories in combat, or random events.

[Dedas]

Jim is absolutely right, and that is what makes Dominions so great. If this game was linear like: you should only build that unit because the other sucks, or you should only use this spell instead of any other, I would have stopped playing it years ago. I can sense a lesson in this thread, don't be so rash in judging good from bad. There are of course things that are better to use in some situations, but that depends on the, well, situation. So much work must be put to anticipating those situations or creating them yourself. And that is hard work.

[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.