Help, I suck with Ulm!

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Schmoe:
I don't really know a good counter to Wrathful Skies, though. What does Construction 7 give? Mechanical Men?

Mechanical Mans have the benefit of being immune to Wrathing, as well as all other elemental and poison attacks, as well as being nationally constructible in bulk by Ulm.

Enchantment 5 can grant Thunder Ward, but that requires you to have an Air mage to begin with.

Thunderward is nearly useless: It only grants partial lightning resistance, which is insufficient to actually stop it from killing you. Unless it can stack with something else to achieve full immunity, it will not prevent everyone from dying, because in Dominions, anything which can kill you, will, when applied as indiscriminately as Wrathing is.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Norfleet:

quote:

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Originally posted by Schmoe:
I don't really know a good counter to Wrathful Skies, though. (...) Enchantment 5 can grant Thunder Ward, but that requires you to have an Air mage to begin with.

Thunderward is nearly useless: It only grants partial lightning resistance, which is insufficient to actually stop it from killing you. Unless it can stack with something else to achieve full immunity, it will not prevent everyone from dying, because in Dominions, anything which can kill you, will, when applied as indiscriminately as Wrathing is.

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Hrm. Well - Thunderward would stack with an air 9 blessing, except Ulm doesn't get sacred troops. Nonetheless, I have to disagree slightly.

Given decent troops, seems like Thunderward might keep them alive long enough to kill the caster of Wrathful Skies. Caster dies, the spell dies, right? If the caster brings troops (which Wrathing commanders may not), again, Thunderward allows even militia to have a chance at surviving long enough to inflict some casualties.

However - barring a nice indie site, Ulm isn't going to get Air mages. Kind of a shame, given their Earth magic strengths, that there isn't an Earth based spell for avoiding / reducing lightning damage - after all, that heavy iron / steel armor should, with magic, act as lightning rods.

Really - Earth seems like the perfect area of magic to get lightning resistance as a mass spell, while Air, I can see it giving individual lightning resistance, but for the entire army? Air magic should want to _maximize_ the effects of lightning and storms, not avoid it.

[CUnknown]

Schmoe--

I'm the one playing Ulm in our game, not SlyFrog. No, I wouldn't complain about being weak, but I'm not exactly sure if I'm the strongest. Abyssia seems pretty scary to me. Man is pretty powerful, too!

SlyFrog--

I've refined my Ulm strategy a bit since we started that game (in which you were Jotunheim), but it's mostly still the same. I make no claims to being an expert at this game (of course), but I think I can give some advice on Ulm. Here is my strategy:

Rainbow pretender (for searching, forging all those cool items the smiths can't). I took the Great Enchantress to get astral income, so I can more easily make clams to get more astral to have item-forging flexibility.

Scales: Order 2, Production 3, Misfortune 2, Drain 3. This means I have a -ton- of cash, especially in the beginning. As Ulm, you can hire every mercenary available and just crush anything close to you in the beginning. Ulm has got to be the strongest faction early on.

Castle: Fortified city. I know people would doubt that choice since they're so expensive, but with this combo, you get the best production possible in the game. Making black plates even relatively early on is no problem. Crank those suckers out. And with all your money, making another city isn't too terribly hard. Although you could always go with the Castle and make another one earlier on.

Commanders: I forge items like mad and equip all my commanders (including even some items for my priests). I love those barbarian commanders, they're cheap and they kick *** once properly equipped.

Magic: Independent mages are important, but those smiths can lay some serious smack down just by themselves. Blade wind, magma bolts.. Also the unit pumping spells like legions of steel and strength of giants can really help. Suddenly your units all have 14 str and 23-27 protection.

I'm not sure how all of this will work in the late game, but it seems to do great from the beginning to the midgame.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Cainehill:
Hrm. Well - Thunderward would stack with an air 9 blessing, except Ulm doesn't get sacred troops. Nonetheless, I have to disagree slightly.

The problem being that due to the way resists are evaluated, your mage will balk at the prospect of casting Thunder Ward upon your troops once they are blessed. The coverage on Thunder Ward is also a bit hard to control. There's higher level alternative with much better coverage, "Storm Warriors", which does the same thing for all your units. This one is less likely to balk or miss.

Given decent troops, seems like Thunderward might keep them alive long enough to kill the caster of Wrathful Skies. Caster dies, the spell dies, right?

If the caster is still *THERE*, yeah. If the caster decides to remove his august presence from the battlefield, it won't end until every Last enemy is dead.

Thunderward allows even militia to have a chance at surviving long enough to inflict some casualties.

Empirical evidence from the field says that this is not the case: I am unable to observe any obvious difference between an army protected solely by Storm Warriors or Thunder Ward, and an army that isn't, under wrathing. They all seem to die just the same. Maybe if your troops were exceptionally fast, some would survive, but Ulmish infantries are slow. Even if they were fast, this is not likely to change the fact that they will still be savaged! This is no way to fight!

after all, that heavy iron / steel armor should, with magic, act as lightning rods.

There *IS* an earth-gem based item, which provides this lightning rod benefit...to your commanders, anyway. I don't think that being part of the lightning rod is beneficial to your health, though.

The primary thing to remember as Ulm is that you should not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are flammable and conduct electricity.

[Arralen]

I don't play Ulm, but I play Last of Tuatha quite often, so I might shed some light on the issue from a different perspective. There seem to be several shortcomings in your strategy ...

• Sidhe ain't ordinary, they are holy, capital-only troops. Danoine Sidhe (troops) cost 35/16 (vs. Ulm inf 10/18+ and Black Knights 60/70+), the commanders are nearly prohibitive expensive. Add to this the fact that LoT has forced Luck-1 and Magic-1 and needs the magic for a decent blessing (Air-9 for lightning resistance in this case?). Result: The LoT player is hard pressed to get an decent income via order scale. But with taking order he nullifies his luck advantage. If he manages to outnumber your black knights by 30:8, you have build to few units. Did you choose order/prod scale and a high admin castle?
  -
• danoine sidhe have medium prot (13 - 1pt less than Blade Wind does damage), but high defense (15). With a Lvl-4 water blessing they'll be at 17, with 1-Star-Exp at 18, plus the glamour ability. Your inf has an attack of 10 (black knights 12), chances of your troops hitting his are rather slim (Check out the spreadsheet .. you'll find it on various sites).
  His attack strength isn't that great either, but with 4 units of his attacking one of yours your defense is at -3 with the 4th attack - hit almost assured.
  Conclusion: Make shure you'll have numerical superiority - this will nullify his high defense. Shouldn't be too hard, as you should have the better eco and the cheaper troops.
  -
• Use indy shortbows firing at short range into the melee. Storm wouldn't matter much this way. They won't do much damage to your heavily armored troops, but each hit will kill the glamour of the unit hit. (chances are 10+2d6/10+2d6+2)
  Keep in mind, though, that this will cause moral checks for both sides, as there will be friendly fire incidences. so make shure you keep your morale high.
  -
• items on commanders
  Looks like you spend way too much mage-time on forging items for commanders which die anyway.
  Better convert your earth gems to gold to buy more troops in the beginning, so you can expand faster and with fewer losses.
  So first send your commanders into melee (bodyguards!), and if anyone survives long enough to get a heroic ability, than deck him out with items. Keep their defense high enough not to get hit by every attack. Black Plate works only on mounted commanders, which do not suffer from negative defense from armor. First priority should be to make them more survivable, killing speed comes second.
  -
• spells
  Blade wind is fine against fodder and ethereal summons, but doesn't do much damage against medium armored troop, if at all. Buy cheap Ulm Inf as fodder and boost them with "Legions of Steel" .. they'll soak up some arrows and javelin/spear attacks from danoine sidhe.
  Clockwork horrors are lightning resistant as mechanical men are.
  -
• setting up your troops
  Have your knights flank his front line and go for "attack rear". Set some fodder inf. with "hold and attack" a little bit in front of you main force, as far to the right as possible. They will be targeted first - and DOM units do not switch target before it's destroyed/routed.
  Have all others just behind them with attack orders.
  Choose their targets carefully.
  -
• indy mages
  If you're lucky enough to find sages, make shure to keep them out of your dominion in a secluded lab where they can safely boost your research.

Hope this is helpful.
A.

[Huzurdaddi]

No, I wouldn't complain about being weak, but I'm not exactly sure if I'm the strongest. Abyssia seems pretty scary to me

He just scales better than you do. Right now you are more powerful, but in the end he will be more powerful since blood scales so well.

It was an interesting game I'll give it that. Too bad I got dog piled.

BTW, I think that Daoine Sidhe are one of the best if not the best price/performance holy troops in the game. If they were not capital only they would be real terrors.

[ July 02, 2004, 06:52: Message edited by: Huzurdaddi ]

[reverend]

The key to winning with Ulm is keeping a steady supply of K�ssp�tzle and Schupfnudeln. Honestly.


Personally, I prefer large amounts of contructs (Mechanical Men, Crusher, etc) backed up by blade-wind casting mages. Add to that some cavalry and you're good. And forge as many items as possible.

Then, of course, I'm not exactly an expert in Dom2.

[Ivan Pedroso]

@Reverend

Are you really from Ulm ?

City map of Ulm

[reverend]

Yep. You can almost see the school I went to on the starting section of that map.

[Vynd]

I think a heavy-duty combat Pretender helps Ulm. Obviously it helps in the early game in taking territory. But it also helps in the mid-game, because it may deter people from attacking you at a time when your national troops are not so scary. Hopefully this gets you over the hump to the point when you can summon some nice commanders to put your nifty items on. Note that it you can get an Earth/Astral mage then you can make Golems to fight for you, and skip the Conjuration school. Also, if you can get any sort of non-Earth/Fire gem income going at all then Forge of the Ancients is your friend, since it will open up lower-level items from all magic paths. Best pump a ton of Earth gems into it if you want it to Last at all, however.

With that said, it does seem to me that base Ulm is a bit lacking. It's good at forging weak Earth and Fire items. And its troops have high protection. Those are the only tricks it has, and they aren't all that good. What I think would be cool is if Ulm had some (expensive) national spells that let them make heavy weapon constructs, things like Ballistas or Catapults or Cannons.

[ July 02, 2004, 14:19: Message edited by: Vynd ]