Forge of Ulm

[Executor]

Ulm smiths have E/S/A/F. Forging vice that covers a damn lot.

Magic vice, Ulm can brew up such a **** storm you can hardly see it coming. Boosting Smiths to S3/A3/E4/F3 is rather easy and cheap (crystal shield + spell booster), and boosting that with say 4 communion slaves which would cost you 8 gems to forge would give you a S5/A5/E6/F5 smith. Of course you can add more boosters as needed. And besides, the black priests do a pretty decent job of tearing apart any conventional army to shreds.

Along side those mages you can add 1 gem ethereal bows, thunder bows, bows of war, (which equal to 26 archer at 1 gem). Get a smith to cast flamming arrows and completely humiliate anyone who tries to attack. If someone tires to use SCs or thugs get some 5 gem incineration rods, or 1 gem vision bows or piercers. Then there are 3 gem wand of wild fire for troops, 1 gem herald lances for any sort of undead, heck even recruiting indie commanders and sending them off with medallions of vengeance is a viable option!

Research vice, I'll just say 1 gem lanterns.

And than you get to the "big guns". Super cheap thugs and reasonably cheap SCs. Heck, you can even thug out smiths with half a dozen gems if you don't know how to spend you gems.
For example do this. Take some smiths, give them fire brends, gold shields, braces of protection and a slave matrix. Than get an astral or air OR preferably both smiths and give them a crystal matrix and cast mistform, mirror image, personal luck, body ethereal, earth power, etc.
Nice isn't it? You could get all that by turn 20 probably.

BTW, I'd just say the contrary, MA Ulm is vulnerable early on (and even early on is damn hard to kill) but is a mid-late game powerhouse.