Suggestions to the devs: improving ME Ulm

Sorlakind · #1 December 6th, 2006, 01:01 PM

Middle era Ulm is a difficult nation to play competitively. It has weak priests and weak mages, and since magics end up dominating the game, it has a hard time surviving. Notice also that it has no sacred troops, so no bless strategies. I have never played MP, but from what I gather (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), Ulm is in the low end of the scale. I'd like to make three suggestions to improve the situation a little - no big changes intended.

1. Raise the chance of an extra magic pick for the smiths to 50%. Those extra picks are sorely needed but at 10%, even with smiths being relatively cheap (140g) they are hard to come by.

2. An additional *crossbow* unit. Ulm has arbalests which have lower precision - and Ulm units already have low precision to boot. The extra damage (14 vs 10) and extra range (45 vs 35) does not compensate for this. One *could* buy sappers, but it does not pay off: you can buy 2 arbalests for 1 sapper, which means that at the end of 6 rounds, the arbalests have fired 4 arrows while the sapper has fired only 3. So what I suggest is an extra crossbow unit, with a cost around 10g (possibly a *little* higher, like 11-12g), but with lower protection, that is, even less fitted for melee - an Ulm specific version of the independent crossbow unit.

3. This is not an Ulm-specific improvement, but it would help Ulm a lot. The Ulm smiths have a builtin forge bonus and with a dwarven hammer this bonus is even larger. So they are well fitted for a construction strategy: build lots of commanders (e.g. black lords, guardians) and deck them with trinkets. They can then serve as mini-mini-thugs in support of your armies. Of course, this is a micromanagement hell to pull off, so please, please, please, could we have a monthly forge command?

Best regards

Zebion · #2 December 6th, 2006, 05:11 PM

I still say ME Ulm should have national item forges,make them a bit more interesting to say the least. But the final one you ask sounds like something it needs

Stryke11 · #3 December 6th, 2006, 06:08 PM

Or a national spell that perhaps evens out the magic differences. A battlefield wide "anti-magic" or somesuch which would make Ulm troops' martial superiority actually useful. The spell could either lower penetration, cause spells to randomly fail (or small chance to overload/kill the enemy mage), raise cost of spells like a mini drain dominion, or something of that type.

I love Ulm and I play them SP all the time. Don't think I'd MP them, but I'm not very good at MP so I'd probably lose with dual blessed Helheim.

Endoperez · #4 December 6th, 2006, 06:54 PM

Quote:

Stryke11 said:
Or a national spell that perhaps evens out the magic differences. A battlefield wide "anti-magic" or somesuch which would make Ulm troops' martial superiority actually useful. The spell could either lower penetration, cause spells to randomly fail (or small chance to overload/kill the enemy mage), raise cost of spells like a mini drain dominion, or something of that type.

I love Ulm and I play them SP all the time. Don't think I'd MP them, but I'm not very good at MP so I'd probably lose with dual blessed Helheim.

Ulm does have one national battlefield-wide spell. It's called Tempering the Will. It takes an E3 mage (any Master Smith with one of: Earth Boots, Earth Power, gem), doesn't cost any gems, and gives +4 MR to any friendly unit that fails an easy magic resistance roll. Thau 5, though. The chance for spell to have an effect is from 18% (MR 10 (drain dominion) - penetrating bonus of 6 for an easy spell and E3 caster) to 24% (MR 9, or neutral dominion) to 30% (MR 8, Magic dominion). With two-three mages casting the spell, most of your army will get +4 magic resistance.

Stryke11 · #5 December 7th, 2006, 12:16 AM

Whoops, sorry. I should have checked that before I posted.

Still think causing an enemy mage's head to explode when they cast a spell (even if only 5% chance or so) would be super cool.

Ighalli · #6 December 7th, 2006, 03:06 AM

According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.

Endoperez · #7 December 7th, 2006, 01:07 PM

Quote:

Ighalli said:
According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.

I counted the penetrating bonus [MR - 6] as [MR - (10-4)]. I'm not sure whether or not the caster wins ties.

curtadams · #8 December 7th, 2006, 02:09 PM

Well, having 3 equipped smiths to boost *some* of your army's MR by 4 doesn't seem too thrilling to me. Large area destruction spells are mostly damage. This really doesn't seem like the kind of spell your army should be resisting. Is this a bug?

Teraswaerto · #9 December 7th, 2006, 03:59 PM

MR increase can be great against R'lyeh (mindblast), and there are spells like Polymorph that you'll really wish you had high MR against. Most of the time it wont make much difference though.

ME Ulm seems quite weak, it's true. It has always been thus.

Sandman · #10 December 7th, 2006, 05:33 PM

Ulm needs more trickery up its sleeve. Assassins and a stealthy preacher, for example, making it the equal of Marignon in that department (it was originally supposed to be a counterpart to Marignon anyway). And reduce the old age on Master Smiths; they're a 'young kingdom'.