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Summoning Spells: Summons like the Cave Drake and the Crusher can be effective enough meatshields, but I typically save my gems for Mechanical Men. Smiths who gain an Astral random can summon Golems (with adders). Ritual Spells: Master Smiths can¿t cast many ritual spells, but one worth mentioning is Earth Attack, a potent assassination spell (although they will need earth adders to do so). Research Goals:
If you are under heavy attack from a powerful foe, research priorities change. Construction-4 is still the number one priority, however, because along the way you will gain a battle spell (legions of steel), and the items you can forge will also be useful. After this, switch to Conjuration-3 for Summon Earthpower (so you can cast Legions of Steel) or Evocation to cast Magma Bolts. You can continue with Evocation for Blade Wind, or switch to Enchantment for Strength of Giants. After the war, switch back to Construction as soon as possible. General Strategy:
Once you get Construction-4, build a set of Earth Boots. With these boots, you can start item forging in earnest begin by mass producing Dwarven Hammers (you can do this earlier if you get an Earth random on your smiths). Build maybe 5 of them. Then let the fun begin! You can make Owl Quills if you get an Air random, Swords of Sharpness, Fire Brands, Charcoal Shields, and Burning Pearls for your Black Lord thugs, and most importantly, Sceptres of Authority for your indy commanders, priests, and commanders of Ulm. You will need the extra leadership to ferry around your hoards of troops, and they turn an otherwise useless commander into long-range artillery on the battlefield. Plus, at a mere 2 fire gems a pop, you can easily afford to give them to every single one of your commanders. In fact, build as many commanders as you can and give one of these Sceptres to them, if you have a significant fire gem income. When you reach Construction-6, you have many more options available. However, the first order of business is to mass produce Lightless Lanterns to get a huge increase in your research. Give one to each of your researchers as soon as possible. Then use your Pretender to make as many magic adders as you can (the first goal is a Ring of Wizardry) and give them to your smiths to increase the variety of items they can forge. With these adders, you should be able to cheaply forge many interesting and powerful items, such as: Robes of Invulnerability, a large variety of combat items for your Thugs and SCs, Stone Idols to give to spies, Stone Spheres for scrying, etc. You may wish at this point to empower your smiths in certain paths for which they do not normally gain randoms. I highly recommend doing this for blood for the sole reason of producing Blood Stones. Additionally, Black Hearts are useful on spies or black servants. Nature is another good choice, for producing Fever Fetishes. At this point, you should decide whether you want to continue on to artifacts for the Hammer of the Forge Lord (for a 75% total reduction in item cost..!) or whether you want to start getting more powerful thugs and SCs. This will determine if your next research goal is Construction-8 or Conjuration. However, with the added research of your Lightless Lanterns, getting both is not unreasonable. If you are able to acquire both your choice of artifacts and some of the unique summons (Earth and Fire Kings, for example), victory should be nearly within your grasp.
Comments: -> It's also good to remember that the Arbalests are actually pretty decent infantry. Good hp and protection for archers, and shortsword is a good weapon. They lack shields, of course, but their arbalests work quite well against enemy archers... As such, they have less need for meat shield. -> AFAIK morningstars ignore shields, yes. You might want to use Flails against weakly protected foes for their two attacks, and mauls or battleaxes against high prot or high HP enemies like the Jotun giants - they're going to hit them harder, and when a Jotun hits them then it's game over anyway. Pikes with their extremely long length are perfect for fighting low morale troops with their repel effect. -> Besides having long weapons, pikeneers also have higher morale. 11 still isn't good, but it's a bit of a bonus. Their weapon also deals a bit more damage than flails or morningstars, while still having attack 1 instead of attack 0. Morningstars used to ignore shields, but with the different shield system in Dom3 their bonus changed to +2 attack against units with shields. In effect, they'll be able to strike past the parry value more often than other troops of the same skill. Both morningstars and flails have this bonus, and an attack rating of 1 to boot. And as multiple attacks lower defence, flails are even better against units with extreme defense or very good shields. You WILL get Smiths with randoms, so be sure you can use them for the best possible effect. Earth 2 Fire 2 isn't any better for Magma spells, but together with Phoenix Power you get access to many nice Fire spells. Not many items, though. With access to boosters, spamming Rods of the Phoenix could quickly become nasty... Wands of Wild Fire aren't bad, either. Astral 1 is a bit harder to use: it's mainly Arcane Probing until you can empower one to Astral 2. After that you can start mass-producing Crystal Coins and Starshine Skullcaps and Crystal Shields. Crystal Shields are good for your other randoms as well. There are other good and/or interesting items as well: Crystal Heart, Stone Idol, Stone Sphere, Eye of the Void, and the thug items Faithful/Lucky Coin/Pendant of Luck, Amulet of Antimagic, Elf Bane... Earth 2 Fire 1 Air 1 is hardest to boost. Sure, you can forge Owl Quills, but you can't remote-search unless you empower, and the first booster is from Air 4. There are some nice low-level items, though - Shield of Valor, Piercer (armor-negating Attack Rear, but still worse than Vision's Foe), Silver Hauberk, Chain Mail of Displacement... It might be worth it to take Air 4 with your pretender just for Air boosters. There's also the Earth/Air Staff of Elemental Mastery to consider... Earth 3 Fire 1 is the simplest. Combine with Earth Boots and Earth Power, and blast away. Of the paths you can't get even with randoms, Death is perhaps the most beneficial. Death gives Black Bows of Botulf (good against all SCs without Air Shield, or to force the enemy SCs to use Air Shield instead of something more offensive) and Flaming Skulls (for Fire oomph! Phoenix Power and thus Fire 3 for all your Smiths!) and Bane weapons, as well as site-searching spell. If you manage to get Death 2, you can summon revenants to do the sitesearching, and do Skull Staves and Shadow Brands and Skull Mentors, perhaps even those annoying Vision's Foes and Lantern Shields. And if you're good with spies, as you should be, you might consider Bane Venom Charms... Nature gets you nice items, but you need Nature 2 to really benefit from it. You'd get Nature 3 for the same price then, thanks to Thistle Maces, but supplies aren't enough, and it'll be hard to get something tougher that'd really benefit from Rings of Regeneration, and Charcoal Shield is better than Vine Shield in most cases. There's little Earth/Nature synergy in items, and Fire/Nature doesn't have much besides Fever Fetishes. Water gets you a booster at first level and has some nice items (Quickness from boots or jade armor, demon bane, bottle of living water, and breather items and Wave Breaker for getting underwater), but not much otherwise. Voice of Tiamat and Voice of Apsu aren't bad, either, but Death is still better. Even one Blood mage can potentially kickstart a blood economy, and you'll eventually be able to get lots of nice items (lifedrain, contracts, boots of youth, armor of souls which also doubles as a blood booster...), but as far as summons go it'd probably be too little, too late, and it'd be tedious to collect all those slaves.
Let's say that the mountain province you have adjacent to your capitol is a mountain with 65 visible resources (if you capture it this number will of course go down at first due to the unrest). This figure (65) isn't too far fetched and is pretty standard for a mountain region. After you've captured it you start building your castle here, paying the 1000 gold that you will have on turn 3 if you did everything right; if you have difficulties with this use an Alchemist pretender, or use one so you also can build troops in your capitol on that turn. The castle will take 4 turns to complete, so use your scout pretender to build it the first turn, recruiting a commander or scout to continue it on the next. Attack another province adjacent to your capitol (with good resources) with your unoccupied army.
65 base
*2 - for fortress built 30% bonus - your dominion 25% bonus - Ulm production bonus = 201,5 resources + 20% from adjacent provinces without a castle. Say 4 provinces with 45 resources each after your dominion Remember now that it draws from the hidden pool so this won't affect your capitol. Total = 237,5 resources
Your capitol will still have way over 200 resources as it begins with 130 (if you play production 3) and draws 50% from adjacent provinces. Another good thing with this is that your new fortress is only one move away eliminating the dangerous travel later for your troops, who almost everyone has mapmove 1. You could of course build a citadel (admin 40) if you only have standard provinces around you, but this would lead to draining problems later when trying to maximize outcome. The strategy is to build a long chain of castles as fast as possible. Your capitol will form the center. After you've built around 4-5 castles in the first year and a half and labs here and there, start mass producing troops and smiths. You will find that this castle chain is not something your enemies wants to siege as you can ship reinforcements between your castles fast and safely. In your capitol you should build lord guardians for defense of the chain. In the other try to build one troop of each type useful for the campaign you are planning. The smiths should of course forge like earth boots with their earlier forged dwarven hammers (a final 50% forge bonus) and later good equipment for you commanders. Also build some siege engineers and siege troops (they have crossbows) with any spare resources. They will come in handy, I promise. -> Yes "real" mountains are very helpful if you want to build that strong chain of Castles (Peg-Castles, 700 defense 20 admin) without any draining from adjacent provinces; provinces where you in the future might want to build additional fortresses. Forests are also good but not nearly as good as mountains because you only get to build Forest Fortresses (300 defense, 15 admin) and they cost the same amount of gold (1000). The main strategy is that you want to cram in as may fortresses as possible, as resource effective as possible, within a small area so that they can help each other in with defense. You also want them to have maximum defense for Ulm, thus Peg-Castles. If you later want more gold you should build a fortress on a high population farmland (they tend to have high pop), so that you get the 25% income bonus. But this is a much later worry, so don't spend those 1200 gold on that Fortified City in the beginning. Mainly because it won't give you much resources if it hasn't mountains and forests around it (that you have to clear out of course, taking time and resources in form of losses). Building a Fortified City or Citadel (the latter is the standard type, meaning it gets built on border mountains) makes those provinces around them quite useless for further fortress building. Because if you do build additional fortresses there you cut of the (main) resource income to the Fortified City or Citadel. You still have some of the money though, but in the beginning it isn't worth it. Another thing, as you get the 25% resource bonus in every Ulmish castle it is wise to try to have as MANY castles as possible instead of focusing on a small amount of high admin ones. With some races you should do the opposite but not with Ulm. To summarize: Mountains, and to some extent forests, are the thing you want to look for when playing Ulm; or any resource heavy nation for that matter. -> Yes I stated that above. This is no problem though as one more castle (another commander slot) is much better than the few resources you lose in your capitol. And remember: you do not lose resources per se, as they now are inside your new castle on top of that extra 50% that your capitol couldn't draw. This does not mean that you should surround your capitol with fortresses. Just build one or two to begin the chain. Also, this is the only good way to get competitive in research (yes you need to... especially with Ulm) as you can crank out hordes of the cheap and useful smiths eventually.
8.34.1.2 MA Ulm vs Elephants -> -lots and lots of archers scripted to fire largest. -Spells that hurt single targets badly, mind burn, frozen heart etc. -dont waste money on elite troops since they will just get trampled anyway. -flanking and killing leaders is always good -spells that hurt moral are GREAT -if you have acess to large troops like Trogs, buy/summon them. -> Magma bolt and blade wind are going to probably be your best bets for your smiths. General evocation spells. Ideally you'll pull an F2 smith random or a pretender with fire magic so you can cast flaming arrows (on indies, not your arbalests). Research this over evo if you can pull it off. You'll need conj 3 for power summoning regardless. Dropping a few Curse of stones will help as well in a big battle, but it won't help much til your troops start getting trampled to death, and you want to keep them away with ranged attacks if at all possible. For flaming arrows: Phoenix Power to F3 and then an extra gem to bump your level to 4 since it only takes 1 to cast. I referenced needing conjuration 3 in my post. (You need it for blade wind even if you go the evocation route, which is a large upgrade over magma bolts) -> Arbalests with orders to Fire at Large Monsters. Avoid directly engaging with heavily armored troops. Although in a last ditch effort(and with good timing) some flail troops can finish off the elephants. 8.34.1.3 Build me an MA Ulm thug
Good hitpoints or mistform Very good protection (25+) Very good defense (25+) As many ways as possible to negate some percentage of attacks (ethereal, lucky, awe, vine shield, fire immunity, etc.) An area of effect weapon (fire/frost brands are obvious choices) Regeneration and/or a lifedraining attack Good reinvigoration and/or a lifedraining attack Low encumberance A cheap price tag - thugs should be relatively disposable Now, usually you can't get all that in one package and some nations have better choices available than others. Ulm's Black Knight has more than one achillies heel, but he does have a couple things going for him. First and foremost, he's one of the cheapest thug chasises you'll find and with Ulm's forge bonus he's also gonna be one of the cheapest to equip as well. With a dwarven hammer Ulm's smiths only pay 2 gems for a 5 gem item, and that's were you want to aim for your disposable thugs. Since they're so cheap, you also want to use more than one at a time together(a bit different than most thugs), 2 or 3 riding together is more along the lines cost wise of other thugs - what else can you field for just over 100 gold and around 10 gems? You've also got to keep in mind their weaknesses and only deploy them where they're effective - generally raiding PD and avoiding any mages. Most any player with any experience will drop them like flies when they run into any real magic opposition so stay away if possible. Obviously you'll want to configure them differently depending on what they're actually fighting, but here are some things I found to be very effective: Barkskin amulet - get an indie mage to forge. You don't get a forge bonus but this still only costs 3 gems and ups their protection over 30. Fire brand - 2f 2e, AOE and armor piercing Shield of gleaming gold - awe +0 can go a long way against chaff Pendant of Luck - 2 pearls? Hell yeah Girdle of strength - 2 earth reinvig goodness and the extra strength makes that AP firebrand that much better against larger foes. Amulet of MR /Lead Shield - still not great MR, but better than nothing. Charcoal shield - killer against some PDs Resistance items - fire/lightning rings with smiths, frost/poison however you can will counteract the focus of many nations. They're not unstoppable killing machines, but properly deployed they can be well worth their cost. -> 8.34.1.4 MA Ulm Blood guide Foward The next time you go to play a MA game, please consider Ulm. Don't consider it for any of the changes made to it recently. Honestly, I'm not big on the new stuff. Nothing I'm about to say includes the use of anything new to Ulm. In my opinion, mages with earth 2 and a forge bonus, 5 earth gems a turn from your capital, and an awakened blood god is everything you need to make a powerful late game MA Ulm. Before We Begin I'm not about to advocate using blood spells without national blood mages. That is not what the blood god is for. Don't try to make devil commanders, or spawn swarms of vile creatures. MA Ulm doesn't have it's own blood economy outside of a pretender. Personally, I advise you to not research blood magic with MA Ulm... ever. Instead I advise you to research Construction. The Gist of Things Specifically, I advise you to research construction 4. The center-piece of Ulm with blood magic is the production of blood stones. Blood stones do two things for Ulm, the first is that it increases the effectiveness of their mages by granting a bonus to earth magic. The second thing it does is it grants an earth gem a turn. Surprisingly this amounts to a huge advantage for Ulm by widening it's selection of battle spells and in allowing them to amass a huge army of constructs. Construction 4 is also enough to get you earth boots and dwarven hammers, both are essential to boosting your magic levels and earth gem supply. The Plan The plan is to create a blood stone factory as soon as possible. The steps are listed below: Step 1) Start with an awakened blood god. Ulm has the advantage of being able to choose the blood fountain, the most economical pretender aside from the oracle. The blood fountain can be substituted for another god with decent blood, but it will start to get expensive. I say blood 4 is a minimum. Step 2) Begin your research. Even without the aid of your god and full drain you can reach construction 4 by the early part of the first year. If you feel another path is needed to be researched so that you can survive then by all means do so, but construction 4 should be a priority. Step 3) Construct a couple of dwarven hammers. You can do this when you reach construction 2 if you have an earth 3 pretender or if you get a random earth 3 master smith. Otherwise you'll need to forge a set of earth boots after you reach construction 4. Step 4) Begin to collect slaves so that when you get to construction 4 you have collected 112 slaves. Use the slaves to empower a young master smith to blood 2. Use the remaining 25 blood slaves to forge a brazen vessel. The remaining 7 is to forge your first blood stone. From now on your god should collect slaves as needed. Step 5) Give the empowered Master Smith the brazen vessel and a dwarven hammer. What you created is a blood stone factory that uses only 5 earth gems a turn. With a decent blood god, you will never run out of blood slaves to feed the machine and still have turns to use your god for other tasks.
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