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| The Conclusion
The inclusion of blood into Ulm isn't to diversify the Ulm strategy, but rather to intensify it. The blood slaves are magically transformed into earth gems. The earth gems allows Ulm to recreate their army. With 10 gems and 140 gold, you can produce a fire 1 earth 4 mage who can use Earth Power in order to reach earth 5 in battle. The gem output of the blood stones allows your battle mages to never run out of gems to power the best earth spells in the game. The randoms the master smiths get can grant you a mage capable of casting Rain of Stones. Every battle mage can fall back on Petrify when the gems are gone, a spell that immobilizes super-combatants even when they make the save versus death. Take earth magic to the max and run with it I say. You could of course ignore my plan and do whatever you like. Either way, good luck. Comments: -> just blood hunt with indy scouts (or commanders), no need to base an entire pretender for a side-strategy. -> First, I don't really consider it a side strategy. Second, I find blood searching with non-blood mages to be highly unreliable. I've had dozens upon dozens of commanders searching before and turned up nothing. In my experience, using non-blood mages as a source of reliable blood slaves is like using luck 2 as a reliable source of water gems. With a blood god you can reliably shell out a magic site a turn around turn 16. That means that by the fifth year you are outputting 50 gems a year from your capital and blood stones alone. That's 1525 Earth gems generated by turn 60 minus the cost of construction, which is only about 261 gems (including the cost of one pair of earth boots and 2 dwarven hammers). 1200+ gems is not a side strategy, it's a winning one, particularly with dozens of earth 4 mages running around and increased gem income from site searching . -> Yes, I did exactly this strategy to good effect using, as suggested, indie scouts. This is almost as effective as a side strategy and then you can use your pretender for whatever else you want (best if you've got a little blood magic on your pretender, but for boosters, not blood hunting). 1) Start very early and aim for 2-3 provinces with 8-10 scouts/commanders blood hunting. 2) Won't take too long to get 50 slaves, empower smith #1. 3) Smith #1 forges a sanguine rod and starts blood hunting 4) You pretty quickly are able to empower smith #2 who blood hunts (with a sanguine rod) until he can empower 3 more times (1-2 times if your pretender can forge a blood booster for him) 5) smith #2 cranks out blood stones 6) As your nation expands, set up another province or two for scout blood hunting 7) New blood stone forgers are now cheaper because you only need to empower them once, smith #2 can forge cheap boosters for the rest of the way 8)Site search everything for earth using gnome lore. 9) By year three you've had 2-3 guys churning out blood stones every turn for awhile and an absurd earth income 9) Stop forging blood stones for a few turns, stockpile all your earth and blood income - have your forgers bloodhunt 10) Use your big pile of earth gems to put up the forge of the ancients while the same turn you empower as many smiths to level one blood as you can 11) Distribute the blood boosters that your original blood stone forgers were using to your new blood guys, you only need B2 to forge blood stones and now you've got 5-6 guys cranking out blood stones. Now, if you planned ahead and have the right path boosters ready, and one of the smiths you empowered in blood had an air random, turn one of having the forge up you can forge: a robe of the magi rings of sorcery (several, depending on how many boosters/astral random smiths you've got) 5-6 blood stones one lightless lantern for each fire gem you have (each smith can forge them for 1 gem without a dwarven hammer) All the other junk you want to forge that requires level 2 in paths smiths get randoms in - starshine caps, chainmail of displacement, crystal coin, etc. The beauty of this is that your forge has paid for itself even if it's dispelled after one turn...and you can easily put it back up in 5 or 6 turns after you've saved up enough gems/slaves for another mass forging. -> Petrify - E5 - 0 gems One of my favorite spells. It's an AoE 1 death effect that paralyzes those that make the save. I can't stress how devastating this spell is. The only way around it is to be one of the few creatures that are immune by virtue of being stone already. This spell doesn't need gems. Army of Gold - E4 - 3 gems This is a nice spell for your army in general. However, I generally don't script it unless I'm facing off with someone using a lot of fire magic, like Abysia. Army of Lead - E5 - 3 gems A much better spell for Ulm then army of gold. It's an earth spell that grants MR and more protection. A good spell to script. Earthquake - E4 - 3 gems Here is a good spell to cast and retreat with in my opinion. It's a defense check to avoid the AP damage so your regular troops will be at a disadvantage. Tempering the Will - E3 - 0 gems I know this isn't a 4+ Earth spell but it's worth noting that a smith with boots + stone + earth gem can cast this at the start of battle and get an additional point of penetration before you even cast Summon Earthpower. Stack on a Spell Focus and the spell really becomes worth it as a first round spell. 8.34.1.5 Tips with MA Ulm -> You want Petrification, from Alteration 7. It's an Earth 5 spell. Most of your Master Smiths are Earth 2, can forge Earth Boots to get up to Earth 3 and cast Summon Earthpower to get up to Earth 4. You could spend an extra gem for every Petrify you cast, but that would become very expensive very quickly. So, how can you get that last level of Earth? All-magic boosters: Ring of Wizardry (S6) or Robe of the Archmagi (A5B5) Elemental boosters: Staff of Elemental Mastery (E4A4 or F4W4) or an artifact an additional Earth booster: Blood Stone (B3E2) or an artifact Keeping in mind that Blood is easier to get into that other paths and that Blood Stone actually generates Earth gems, and you can see why Blood Stone is clearly the best choice for Ulm. To learn more, go to the stickied strategy guide, search for MA Ulm and find the Blood Stone thread. Other than that... A group of about 15 non-Black Plate infantries of Ulm can take surprising number of independents. If you're lucky, you can conquer four or five provinces in three turns' worth of battles and started building your first fortress. I'm not yet sure whether Order or Luck is better. Taking even Turmoil 1 means that you don't get enough gold to recruit fully and build a fort in turn 3 or 4, but on the other hand, Luck gives you bucketloads of gems and your Master Smiths absolutely need them. I think the key to successful Ulm has to be empowering Master Smiths. A Water-empowered Smith can forge himself a Water Bracelet, making him F1W2E2 and letting him forge Staves of Corrosion (fires Acid Bolts), Boots of Quickness, Jade Armors and other fun stuff. A Death-empowered Smith can forge Flaming Skulls for so cheap basically all your smiths are F2, and then they can cast Phoenix Power and they are Fire 3. A Nature-empowered Smith can make Fever Fetishes and then start generating the Fire gems. And Blood-empowered Smiths, of course, are essential to both boost your Smiths and to generate more Earth gems. Your pretender is important. My pretender design project is still underway, but I suggest taking at least Blood for getting the economy rolling. After that, you have several choices. Astral - for Starshine Skullcap, Crystal Coin, Rings of Sorcery and Wizardry? Fire/Death/Nature, for fever fetishes and flaming skulls? Water/Nature, for summoning W3N3 Naiads and forging Clams? Fire/Water or Air/Earth for Staff of Elemental Mastery? I'm trying to build a rainbow that can fill multiple roles, but specializing might be more efficient. -> Blacksteel infantry are more effective than chainmail infantry in general, particularly as of a couple of patches ago, though there are a few circumstances where not so. However chainmail infantry is probably best to begin with at first because you can recruit them more quickly and numbers matter - if you have too few men in an army against independents, they will get worn down and may break and run, but if you have enough, they will tend to overpower conventional independents easily, and having more men makes more of a difference than having some men have blacksteel plate. Infantry without shields though is somewhat vulnerable to missiles - start them behind infantry with shields. It's valuable to include some of them because of their varied weapons. -> 8.34.1.6 MA Ulm Pretender -> Quote: Baalz said: Admittedly I haven't been on the receiving end of an elephant rush orchestrated by you, that might be fun to try as I have beat back other rushes playing Ulm. Ignoring castle-recruitment constraints for a second, for the price of 3 elephants you get 2 smiths plus change. Obviously this isn't scalable because you can only recruit one smith per castle, but still given Ulm's typical early gold advantage and urgent castle building it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to field 10-12 smiths by the time you're looking at a 20 strong elephant force threatening you - and without permanently crippling your research curve. Assuming you marched a force as you describe into my territory at the end of year one I'd counter by trying to catch you as you attacked (shouldn't be hard) so you're running into about 40 PD backed by the dozen or so smiths leading whatever of the halberd wielding infantry I could scrape up over a couple turns from my multiple castles and prod-3 edge (likely in the 100-120 man range). Your initial elephant charge will be broken by 7 or 8 smiths spamming Bonds of Fire. It won't stop them all but they'll trickle in several at a time rather than in one overwhelming mass as even the ones not hit will have to run around those that are. While causing some damage, they'll quickly be surrounded and hacked to pieces by halberds. Meanwhile my remaining smiths begin raining magma bolts down into the elephants strung out by the fire bonds while my black plate keeps friendly fire from being too much of an issue. All the while your astrologers are popping 4-5 of my infantry per turn out of probably close to 200. By the end of the battle you've killed mostly my PD (which were in the front) and are out close to 2000 gold of elephants. I tried this out to see how it worked.
12 Master smiths: 1680 gold 90 chainmail + battleaxe infantry = 900 gold 16 arbalests (had them sitting around from initial expansion) = 160 gold 40 PD = 820 gold total : 3560 Infantry set just back and flanking PD on each side. All smiths set to magma bolt X2, bonds of fire X3 Round 1: Magma bolts & arbalests kill 4 elephants and severely damage many more as they charge across the open ground. A couple Ulmish infantry popped by mind burn. Round 2: Several more elephants dropped by magma bolts and over half of them are at least down to 2/3rds HP, elephants hit PD and cause minor damage having used most of their movement to close so only a little trampling. Round 3: About a third of the remaining elephants are trapped by bonds of fire and another third killed by the infantry (many of the elephants were quite low on HP from the magma bolts). Arco breaks, but most of the elephants are trapped by bonds of fire and killed by the advancing infantry. Final tally (excluding PD deaths): 20 elephants killed (the 5 that got away were badly afflicted) 6 hypaspists killed 0 astrologers killed 14 Ulmish infantry killed So, there's a fairly concrete response to those who claim Ulm has no chance against elephants. This is a simple case and I'd expect the Arco player to pull a trick or two, but it's clearly not impossible for Ulm to win. -> If you take, as suggested, an awake rainbow pretender and spend the first several turns researching you hit bonds of fire and magma bolts very quickly, and soul slay isn't really much better than mind burn against Ulmish infantry - I don't think that would have made any difference at all. I actually did use astrologers in the test, just mistyped. As to the dragon, that's really kind of a different question, we were talking about elephants. A dragon sitting on your cap on turn 4 is quite a different ball of wax and is a challenge for many nations outside of whatever is following it up. Lets give this a try though...you've got an awake rainbow mage and in a total surprise a dom-10 dragon plops down and takes out all the PD in your capital on turn 4. I'll go ahead and make some assumptions: you've got a 4 strength dominion on your cap (you've had a pretender sitting there plus a temple plus the capital spread for 4 turns), you've got 3 master smiths, and you've got one expansion army with an arbalest squad outside your capital as well as a handful of infantry, you've also been researching thaumaturgy to pick up bonds of fire. Depending on what the research actually is on your pretender, stall for a turn or two until you hit thaum-2. In the mean time your expansion army grabs a few more provinces (make sure you cut off all retreat routes for the dragon) and you try to find barbarians, or lizards, or any low resource/high damage indies to recruit (bonus, you'll probably take them easily with your arbalests) or mercenaries. A couple turns after the dragon appeared you attack with whatever you've been able to scrape up - which obviously will vary quite a bit, but you open the fight with your pretender cursing the dragon then casting berserkers a couple times on your biggest weapon carrying dudes, while your three smiths spam bonds of fire. Your prophet casts a bunch of sermons of courage and your expansion forces probably have a star or two so they've got fairly good moral and can hopefully take a swing or two despite the awe even without the berserk. The dragon is in significant enemy dominion with the accompanying penalties, is held for awhile with no real defense or chance to cause damage or make fear rolls, is cursed, and is being hacked at by berserk battleaxes (dare I hope you had a couple black knights?) who ignore his awe as well as being focussed on by arbalests at presumably short range. After the berserkers you can have your pretender cast frighten X 2. Dragon, taking some damage, is in enemy dominion, hit with 2 15 fear attacks and facing the extra moral check of lone combatants will route and die. Depending on how many arbalests and your actual mix of troops you might do better to skip the berserkers and just do frighten X4. Now, this set you back a couple turns, but your enemy lost his pretender and you're hardly crippled. Heck though, seems like the dragon would potentially have trouble just taking out the capital PD. Facing 25 arbalests in enemy dominion...14 AP damage focussed on a single guy with no shield or buffs and ignoring awe...seems like he'd need to win before they reloaded and fired at close range to have a chance. -> I think you script the dragon to hold 4 times then attack archers. Your mages would be casting spells that tire themselves out, but the dragon is oor of bonds fire etc. Meanwhile arcos teleports in 5 astologers to support the dragon and they are casting mind burn the entire time. Assuming also arcos capital is 3 provinces from ulm's as seems to be the case in most mp games with spacing, then the reinfocement elephants should be getting close as well. Baalz you have excellent ideas, and are a very good player. But the fact remains Ulm in my experience always dies early. Not every person playing ulm is going to be a hall of fame player. While it is certainly possible you could put up a good defense against a rush, I have seen proof with my own eyes that most players cannot. And that is why my suggestion to take an awake sc pretender is a good idea for the average player. And I am using gameextremeists's arcos rush tactics as an example, but he was better than the typical player at rushing with arcos. But he did use an awake dragon to bolster his early rush. And teleporting astrologers in to bolster his forces was another of his common tactics. -> " 8.34.1.7 MA Ulm - you called me a forge what? Article Author: Baalz CUnknown¿s guide to Ulm is solid, and a bit similar to what I write here, but I have several other angles I want to explore particularly since Ulm¿s face lift. Ulm fits right into my usual guide MO, an under appreciated nation who can be a real gem once you polish them up and present the right angles. Many people consider Ulm a very weak nation without much flexibility. Line up a bunch of slow, tough guys and march around casting the same 2 or 3 spells until somebody exploits your weakness and squishes you. Or you could just be a forge ***** the whole game, that¿s always fun. And that¿s exactly what¿s gonna happen if you don¿t anticipate your weaknesses and have a plan. As I¿ve said elsewhere I think the strongest choice for Ulm is an awake rainbow pretender. Many fear a rush when playing Ulm and think a combat pretender is necessary, but with Ulm¿s new units and a little planning there¿s no rush you need fear (more on this in a moment), and lets look at what a rainbow pretender gets you. 1) The most obvious is magic diversity. Ulm doesn¿t have terrible magic diversity as far as the spread goes you¿ll get F/E/S/A and N indies are easy to come by. The problem is most of those are level one and insufficient to site search. With a booster though things rapidly start opening up, and for the paths which you can¿t easily forge a booster (generally air) a modest income will pretty quickly build up to 30 gems for a cheap empowering. Which leads us to¿ 2) Gem income. Everyone knows Ulm is the forge champion, and this is a critical national advantage you can¿t afford to neglect for lack of gems. You need a constant stream of gems from an early point through the whole game and manually site searching with level one mages is *not* going to cut it. Having your pretender prime the pump by site searching is pretty much the difference between having access to that path or not (other than earth). 3) Initial research. This is the thing that requires you have an awake rather than sleeping pretender. You could probably scrape by with no site searching until the second year. What you can¿t do is fight off certain kinds of rushes with no research. An awake rainbow pretender is going to give you a powerful jumpstart on research in the first couple turns, easily clearing a level three school before even the fastest rush could possibly materialize, and into level 4 if you push before much can materialize. At this point your mages are better support than a poorly equipped and buffed SC pretender would be. As with any good strategy, design points get very tight at this point. You need an awake pretender. You need production 3. You want order 3. You want on your pretender A4 & F4 (for boosters), S4 (rings of wizardry, golems, end game astral), W3 & D3 (for site searching to prime the pump), N4 & E4 (for reasons I¿ll explain in a minute). Good news is of course you¿re taking drain 3 and death is a good option, and you don¿t need a high dominion. Still, you can¿t afford all the things you want so you¿ll have to decide what¿s most important to you. With a rainbow chasis though, there¿s really no reason to not take at least 1 in every path (with the exception of blood) since you¿ll be site searching anyway and 10 design points buys you a modest income in that path. For initial expansion against the indies, you can¿t go too wrong with any of Ulm¿s troops. Still, your troops take so many resources (and thus time to mass) it¿s good to steadily build up the army you¿ll want when you start fighting another player. This is going to vary depending on what you¿re anticipating facing in the near to mid term. You¿ve got good, cheap units, but they¿re not holy and you¿re gonna be cranking out a lot of them. Be mindful of the upkeep, I generally only recruit 10 gold units unless there is a specific need I¿m addressing. After the first couple turns I always recruit the black plate infantry rather than the chainmail guys resources don¿t have upkeep. Pikes are probably the best general use weapon, with a good attack, damage, and a repel that does a surprising amount against rank and file troops (particularly combined with the armor). Flails are good against high defense guys as they give you a second attack (try to land a strength of giants to compensate for the lower damage). Battleaxes are made for giants (strength of giants¿.well that basically goes for everything). Tower shields are of course where you¿re gonna want to go vs heavy ranged attacks (keep in mind shields can block some mage spells to), but they do give up a good amount of offense so it¿s often best to try to use the shields as archer screens while the two handed weapon guys do most of the damage (bonus, the shields make them move slower so its not hard to accomplish this). Arbalests are *devastating* to anything without a shield. Unfortunately, most things you¿ll be worried about will have shields, so I don¿t tend to recruit these guys for general use. Start cranking them out though when an enemy dragon or wyrm pretender tries to bully you, or somebody actually believes the elephant vs Ulm propaganda. Heck, even with a shield 50 guys firing at point blank range will land enough AP damage to cause considerable pain. If you do use arbalests consider trying to scrape up an air mage for wind guide it¿ll help considerably, and flaming arrows should be a no brainer if it¿s researched. The knights can be very good, but they¿re too easy to counter. The only solution I¿ve really come up with is to use them sparingly enough that your opponent doesn¿t invest in a counter to them just a few on the flanks or supporting a black lord. If your opponent has counters anyway, just shelve them and consider their job done in tying up your opponents resources in their counters. I wanted to make special note of the black halberd guardians. They¿re capital only and pretty expensive relative to your other troops, but with good reason. This weapon will handily dispatch any sacred unit in the game, including fully decked out SCs. It does AOE 1 fatigue damage to holy units¿which means there¿s no way to dodge, block, or resist it. Against cheaper masses of units like eagle warriors it¿s merely very good, but against high end sacred units like Vans, Knights of the Chalice, or Black Spiders it is retarded good. I pity Pythium¿s angels, or Bandar Log¿s celestials should they decide Ulm looks like easy pickings. A surprising amount of SC/thugs are holy, all of them are neutered against a prepared Ulm. Note, the guardians are not sacred so you can crank them out at whatever your production limit is, which means you¿ll want to wait until you¿ve got a good use for them before building them (and paying their upkeep). Use your much cheaper general issue infantry for most tasks. But what about non-sacred bad guys? Baalz, didn¿t you know Ulm is the poster boy for elephant bait! I¿d like to go ahead and lay this myth to bed for once and all. Yes, Ulm will get slaughtered if you just line up all your troops and march towards a bunch of tramplers. Why in the world would you do that? With the early research push by your pretender you need never face anybody without Evo-3 researched, and really you¿ll have evo-4. This gives you magma bolts, iron darts, and then blade wind. Elephants do not have a remote chance of overrunning ten smiths spamming these spells with a couple score arbalests playing backup. The smiths are awesome battle mages once your research matures, with reinvig from earthpower, blade wind, magma eruption, destruction and earth elementals. They are the answer to most things which would otherwise give Ulm problems. They¿re cheap for mages, so make sure you use them, send a couple with any moderately sized force. If you¿re pressed into an early fight you¿ll probably want to research evocation with a laser beam focus until you get magma eruption with it every one of your cheap smiths (well, with earthpower which you¿ll want to pick up immediately after) is a top of the line carnage machine. The other option depending on what you¿re facing (ie abyssia) is to switch over to alteration and pick up destruction. Also, don¿t forget about iron blizzard, it¿s easier to spam than blade wind, is AP, and slaughters magic beings, but its only castable by your cap only holy smiths and has a shorter range so it¿s a niche spell. Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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