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| So, focusing on recruiting 10 gold high resource troops, with order and production scales you¿ll be putting castles 2 and 3 up pretty quick, which is good because that¿s urgent. Once you¿ve got 3 castles though, you¿re sitting pretty with a steady flow of infantry and mages, your urgent research done, and gold piling up pretty much before any real rush can materialize.
Now, unless you¿re fighting off somebody who thought you¿d be easy pickings you¿ll want to shift into second gear and you¿ve got a couple options on where to go. You¿ll very likely have a research lead at this point, possibly a production lead, have been focusing on combat spells and have good combat mages. It¿s certainly possible to rush someone yourself, particularly if they¿re reliant on sacred troops (honestly I don¿t see how ie Vanheim has a chance against a good Ulm rush with the addition of black halberds). Equally effective is to go the opposite direction and turtle up. Solid scales and modest upkeep will let you put up castles at a good rate (with a research surge to match), and your pretender out site searching will give you a very respectable gem income. You¿ll be hitting the construction research now, which is an investment which pays dividends. You¿ll want to aim for a couple things at this point. Dwarven hammers, lots of them. Unless it¿s an emergency you never ever want to forge anything without using a dwarven hammer. The strength of Ulm is efficiency, don¿t squander that. It¿ll take a little bit to build up your hammers, but that¿s alright because it gives your gem flow time to establish itself. A single 30 gem empowering in Air for a smith with that random should be affordable fairly early, which is a bargain because you¿ll probably want to crank out a steady flow of flying boots. As I mentioned above smiths need nothing but a few PD blockers to lay a ridiculous hurt on people. If you¿ve got a dozen winged boots in your lab, and several castles spread around you¿ve got the capability for a very rapid response force anywhere in your nation. This is critical as your nation grows, your infantry just moves too slowly to counter a nimble opponent and none of your mages are inheritably able to teleport. Ulm¿s forge bonus lends itself to many things, but perhaps the most obvious is a fire brand and golden shield combo, for the hammer forged price of 8 gems. Black Lords scream to be used as mini thugs with this, and they do work very well with nothing else provided they don¿t need to make MR checks and you use more than one together (I also generally include some black knights set to guard commander). Using your pretender to create a revenant, and then black servants is also a good choice which yields a stealthy thug. What I prefer though is what nobody expects from Ulm a highly mobile flying swarm of thugs. Take one smith with the aforementioned firebrand and golden shield. Add in a pair of winged boots you¿ve been stockpiling. Mix in black plate and a girdle of strength. Garnish with a lucky pendant and fire helm. Price: 21 gems. Summon earth power, invulnerability, hold then attack. That will get you a very respectable raiding thug, but you¿ll still get unlucky with the fatigue you built up causing you to take critical hits, and a point here and there will slowly add up to bring you down. What you really want is just a touch more reinvig and a bit of regen, which is why I suggested E4 and N4 were very nice things to have on your pretender. Substitute in a holy smith and add a blessing in for a dish that¿s best served hot just that little bit extra goes a long way. I mean honestly, who expects Ulm to air drop a dozen thugs on them in year two? Raid aggressively while your behemoth mage supported infantry army grinds its way up to deal with the real resistance. Now on top of the air, you¿ll want to seriously consider empowering smiths in death (can immediately start dark knowledging, crank out fire skulls), water (water braclet, then voice of tiamat, boots of quickness, rune smashers), and nature (half price fever fetishs which will eventually let you crank out a steady stream of phoenix rods and flambeaus). Now, Ulm¿s got a couple strengths which are often ignored because you¿re always recruiting a smith from every castle. For that reason I like to dedicate one castle to not having a lab so I recruit a steady stream of spies, black lords & siege engineers. Black lords are used as outlined above, and siege engineers are great to support your attacks outfitted with cheaply forged range weapons they can contribute to the fighting (piercers, banefire bows, vision¿s foe, bows of war, ethereal xbows, etc.) and make sure enemy forts fall instantly (use them with flying boots in combination with your smiths to take enemy forts without using any troops!). Spies people seem to underestimate, thinking that a scout does the same job unless you¿re trying to cause massive unrest. It seems ridiculous to underestimate the benefit of accurate information! You can see exactly the PD you¿ll be facing to drop your relatively fragile thugs into, if your opponent has 1 PD all over you can hit him with call of the winds, arouse hunger, etc. You can see where their gold income centers are to focus on raiding those, with spies adding unrest and even better popping out with implementor axes to pillage when a response is not coming in that turn. And of course you can use them to incite unrest, which is nothing but an annoyance at peace time but can quickly become game changing if they can¿t respond to it because it just started on the same turn a war did (an evil person would goad an opponent into patrolling for spies then teleport a golem in to squish the patrollers who are probably without magic support). Blood is a very good thing to bootstrap into for Ulm. Set 10 scouts to bloodhunt and they¿ll eventually scrape up 50 blood slaves to empower a smith. Forge a sanguine rod and you¿re quickly up to popping out a blood stone every couple turns at half price (also slap boots of youth on any of your smiths who are old and have a good random). If things are going well set up another scout bloodhunting province and you¿ll get to the point you¿re cranking out multiple blood stones per turn. Blood stones are very, very good for Ulm, giving you the earth income to forge everything you want and boosting your mages (earth random + boots + blood stone = E5 = earth attack, petrify, weapons of sharpness, etc.). Tip: you can often trade a blood nation for your initial 50 blood slaves Ulm should be a fantastic trader. Your pretender was E4, so with a solid earth income you should look at earthblood deepwell, it¿ll turn your strong earth income into a torrent. Now, what to do with all those earth gems? Mechanical men, buffed with weapons of sharpness & strength of giants are pretty difficult to stop once they hit critical mass. Add in almost any elemental battlefield enchantment (heat from hell, firestorm, wrathful skies, foul vapors etc. etc.) for heavy lifting. Earth attack is probably the best assassination spell, set yourself up to spam this incessantly and it¿s pretty crippling against most opponents. And enter the iron angel. The perfect complement to a surging earth income and forging focus is a SC chassis for a reasonable earth gem price. It¿s not unreasonably you might be summoning and equipping two of these guys per turn by the early end game. While they¿re not top shelf SCs, they¿re definitely solidly in the SC category and can¿t be beat for the price. Their lack of magic and thus lack of need to buff, with their strength, flying and toughness makes them excellent anti-SCs who fly in round one to whack the guy trying to buff himself. A couple of these guys with flambeaus set to attack large monsters is exactly what everybody wants a very effective budget tartarian counter, and their heretic abilities will make them quite effective against sacred SCs like most of the various high end national summons (and they¿re *much* more mobile than the guardians). Heck, with that ubiquitous fire brand & golden shield (throw in a girdle of might) these guys will whacking anything large for 37 AP damage before chewing up the chaff with the flame blast and will chew up most anything without counter-SC tactics. Not bad for under 35 gems apiece. For real anti-SC though use boots of quickness and go with either the aforementioned flambeaus against undead/demons (for double 114 point AP attacks) or a gate cleaver (for double 54 AN damage attacks) which will explode pretty much anybody even if they manage to make a shield block. Let¿s see, other fun stuff to do with Ulm. Your focus on construction will give you early access to golems which is one more thing to add to your mobility. Gargoyles are good to, either have your pretender gift of reason a couple or just lead a flock by ye old fly booted smiths if you're short on N gems. Earthquake each cheap smith with a 5 gem pair of earth boots is like an IED in the path of any big army. If you get prissy you can slap some armor and iron skin him and he¿ll probably even survive unscratched. Don¿t be shy, use several of them! Similarly rain of stones is open to your air random smiths, and it works very well with your heavily armored troops (enemy mages are likely not so lucky). You¿ll certainly want to crank out a steady stream of 2 gem lightless lanterns. Crystal/slave matrixes can be forged cheaply and open up a whole lot of options I won¿t explore here but keep them in mind if what you¿d really like is something Ulm can¿t otherwise do easily like foul vapors for your mechanical men to play in. If your blood economy ramps up well look into robes of the magi, they¿re actually affordable at half price (and can often be traded for a huge profit). Finally, I wanted to point out that putting up the forge of the ancients can generally pay for itself even if it is dispelled after one round. With smiths, any item costing 5 gems only costs 1 under the forge without even using a hammer! Fire brands and golden shields for 2 gems apiece. Plan on forging 50 items the turn the forge goes up, and you¿ll easily save more than you paid for it, not even counting the benefit of being able to forge items you weren¿t able to before. Careful though, the forge has been known to start wars! The Ulm caricature is a big lumbering beast, unable to move or respond to its nimble opponents. Keep that picture in your mind, and don¿t play like that! Your heavy infantry will take care of itself, focus on mobility and flexibility to transform Ulm into a very competitive nation. 8.34.2 LA Ulm 8.34.2.1 Initial setup for LA Ulm -> At the _very_ first, just to get started, recruit many of the reasource-cheapest units for earliest expansion (maybe mainly just for the provinces adjacent the capital). IIRC it is the Ranger Crossbowmen who can be recruited so quickly it doesn't matter if they die. Then start to work up to the higher-resource units with longer life expectancy. Secure the provinces adjacent the home province ASAP to get the resources for the better-equipped troops. -> For your army mass rangers, use a few indies for meatshield and when you get a good flow of resources into your capitol make a mix of rangers and the guys with greatswords(dont make me spell their name ) -> I recently played LA Ulm in a MP and I agree that this nation is excellent, it is potentially very, very powerful. Sadly I started on a island with Patala, who rushed and crushed me with elephants by turn 13, so I will probably never find out. I am of the opinion, that its too hard to have a high bless strategy with this nation. The black templars are just too damn expensive and the other sacred is undead and therefore too easily destroyed. So forget a bless strategy. I think your design points should be concentrated in good scales and your pretender. What really got me excited was the astral magic wielding spy who has +20 stealth. This one unit, recruitable from any castle can virtually single handly win you the end game if used correctly and you have the economy to churn loads out. The other excellent unit, sadly capital only, is the wolf trainer, who only costs 50 gp and can summon 2 free wolves a turn. Unlimited free chaff, excellent for patrolling your provinces well you blood hunt, add bulk to your armies and later on you can buff them up to make them more dangerous in battle. Then the whole vampire, limitless blood magic going on as well, with immortal vampire SC's to give you one of the best late game defense ever...well wow...really WOW, this is the most powerful Ulm ever... -> My blood economy works like this: Before turn 12:Members of the second tier hunt for blood slaves until i have atleast 44 Turn 12-whenever i get boosters so a count can summon more counts: My counts and possibly members of the second tier hunt for slaves to make yet more counts and dousing rods Once i get a D3B3 count: Only regular counts with dousing rods searching, count production really steps up Rather than use wolves to patrol i use thralls, they are auto-summoned by the counts so an indie commander in the province with the counts can just take command of them and patrol. For my pretender, rather than maxing out scales and taking enough magic to summon a count i like a versatile(often 4-5 paths ranging from level 2-4), sleeping master lich with average scales(order3, growth1, misfortune2, magic1) though im definitely no LA Ulm expert so this could be a complete mess(a big bonus is being able to get nicely equipped counts) -> With LA Ulm its really all about getting time to develop, get your vampire/wolf/thralls/blood economy going and it just multiplies into a awesome totally unstoppable juggernaut from turn 30'ish onwards. Your troops are really there just there to forge a reasonable sized empire out and defend it until this happens. LA Ulm benefits considerably from peace and diplomacy early in the game. Try to sign NAP's with everyone of your neighbours. -> For any blood nation, you can't go wrong with a pretender that can forge Soul Contracts without boosters. They are only Construction 2, but require high paths to make, so your pretender is perfect for the job. -> Well personally, I think blood can stand on its own against the other spheres of magic. But, I also like to do the following with any astral nation. Get arcane probing, hit every province you own. Get the highest priest level you can out site searching. You are trying to get as many astral pearls as possible. Research to Arcashic record when possible. Hit every province you own with this spell. You will need to empower a lvl 2S mage to cast it for LA Ulm or get lucky like I did and find the 2S2E crystal forgers site with astral probing. They can make the crystal coin naturally. Yes, I know its expensive and long term. But its worth doing as a dual strategy alongside blood, blood is always no.1 priority however. Only try this when sites are high like 45+, most MP have 50. -> We must have different research priorities. I personally go straight for construction so i dont need any empowerment, just a second tier mage forging himself a skullcap(const 6, s2). I guess that massed acashic record could get you various indy mages but i dont see you getting many, atleast not many that will help your magic as much as needed. Instead of taking a master lich(although i do like him) how about a fountain of blood? You can get a sleeping F2W3E4D3B6 Fountain of Blood with Dom8, order3, sloth2, cold2, growth3, misfortune2, magic1. The dom9 makes your vampire counts alot more flexible in what they can do(More dominion spread means more places to use them), the scales are pretty good for your playstyle(growth helps in lategame and with bloodhunting, sloth dosnt bother your undead armies) and the magic on the pretender can do a variety of useful things such as: Summon vampire counts, summon all unique blood summons other than demon lords, forge soul contracts, cast infernal forces/forces of ice/infernal crusade and, of course, forge a variety of useful items, boosters and artifacts. edit: ive found another nice use for the vampire counts with a very simple script: summon lammashtas, attack closest. In friendly dominion you have nothing to use but a single death gem per caster, 5 counts produce 10 lammashtas(fear causing, flying, wraitsword wielding undead angels for those who dont know) at the cost of 5 death gems. Even if your counts rout for some reason the lammashtas keep fighting and if they dont and they end up dying, no big loss, you'll have them back at your capitol ready to re-use. -> I think Death magic can get him Spectral Mages (who have some random magic skills) which can (eventually with luck and forged boosters, maybe via Streams from Hades?) get him Unfrozen mages and maybe an Ether Lord. Zweihanders vs. heavy shield infantry - the shield infantry are the sturdier block, but Zweihanders can do higher damage to penetrate with. I tend to use a few Zweihanders starting behind the main body of shielded troops. Pikemen are faster to recruit and good for staving off lower-morale troops, so yes they might be a reasonable choice against giants. Better than the shielded heavy infantry, anyway. Villains? Faster to recruit than the crossbowmen, and usable for light stealthy raiders. Their low morale and protection are major weaknesses though. -> Villians are inferior to rangers against almost every late era unit(due to shortbows sucking vrs armour). They are also less survivable and worse in close combat. [ True, but against light independents and weak PD, they can still sneak in and pick and choose their fights, taking provinces for cheap. [[ Feel free meglo. Other options are summon lammashtas, retreat(since the lammashtas keep fighting) which is useful in enemy dominion and summon lammashtas(this would probably need 2 gems to keep fatigue down/only some counts summoning lammashtas) followed by skele spam. If your short on gems a regular flying, stealthy, immortal skelespam defensive raiding tactic is nice and flying in to cast things such as mass dust to dust vrs undead armies or decay+desintigrate vrs SCs can be helpful. ]]
-> One of the big reasons i suggested the fountain as an option was the high start dominion and blood magic(high dom really helps counts) and for your starting problems do NOT use LA ulms high resource troops atleast at the start. Use your starting army as a meatshield set to hold and attack with rangers on fire closest/archers/cavalry and keep churning out rangers at your capitol. If your starting army takes too many losses use indies for your meatshield instead. The rangers(firing basically with precision 18 due to all above 10 being doubled) with their crossbows do serious damage and arent too bad in melee against medium or low defence troops(armour isnt too dangerous to them in melee due to high strength and axes) -> I totally forgot about blood stones in my last posting, but in game they work exceptionally well. Your earth priests + boots + blood stone -> Troll King + boots + blood stone -> Forge, and empowering with blood to get a few priests capable of forging blood stones isn't so bad given the ease of picking up blood slaves. It's certainly far easier than getting someone else capable of fever fetish spamming. -> Also, even with your cheap counts summoning a few vampire lords(77 slaves iirc) can be worth it. Instead of auto-summoning thralls they can use summon allies to get vampires. They also have +1 to a few stats and +1 on both types of magic(cant summon more counts without boosters and can cast soul vortex in battle) -> I definitely use a mix of Vampire Lords and Mound Fiends for my D3 needs. It's 77 blood for the Lord, vs 65 blood and 10 death for an item boosted Count to reach the same levels, the Lords obviously have the free item slots, and in addition blood is always easier to come by. Still, I use mostly Counts for light raiding (and thanks to your Lammashta trick, army smashing), bloodhunting, and their freespawn. I now kind of enjoy LA Ulm's slow build to magical dominance via death/blood/earth - it makes their starting crappy picks almost enjoyable. I suspect I would get annihilated before I ever got out of the gate in MP, but I haven't played a nation yet that changes so much from beginning to end. It's particularly sweet to boost a mage of the second tier (+1 astral and blood empowerment, + items galore) to cast Astral Corruption and shut down everyone else's magic while your endless Vampire Counts just keep growing and growing. -> I tend to stick with counts too as they work just as well in most cases but, if im going to completely equip some-one(and dont have any unique blood summons) it will probably be a vampire lord due to the slightly raised stats and the ability to cast soul vortex. Im glad you liked the fountain, at the start i was set on using a master lich but when i realised i was taking blood higher than death and that a high dominion score made the vampire strategy more flexible/offensive i switched to the fountain. Also, aswell as your counts, lords, uniques and items dont be afraid to splash out some gems for a bunch of regular vampires-if you can get a good amount of them and only use them within friendly dominion they can be a very nasty suprise(and can provide some extra punch/meatshield for the raise skeleton/summon lammashta tactic. -> Followup - I find that the vampire troop types invariably tangle with the Lammashtas, diluting the punch of either approach. On the other hand, troopless Vampire Counts invariably run away after casting Lammashtas regardless of what orders I give if there are two or less of them (you'd think immortal troops would get an extra morale bonus in friendly dominion). I don't mind, though - there's still a lot of killing going on, and I'm not the one who is dying... -> Sometimes my counts flee too, not always though. The vampire troops can get in the way of lammashtas but they will go in, do some damage and then either die or rout and either way, provided you stayed in friendly dominion, all you lose is the death gems for the lammashtas. -> I'm really liking LA Ulm. Just to be different I went with this pretender: Great Sage (Body 251, 10 hits) Magic: Fire 1 Earth 2 Astral 4 Death 4 Blood 4 Dominion 6 Scales: Turmoil 3 Growth 1 Fortune 3 Drain 2 Awake
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