EA Ulm advice wanted

[PvK]

EA Ulm can be very powerful, especially early on before they have to worry about nasty magic.

Of their national troops, I prefer the female warriors with shields (skilled, shielded, good value for gold and resources), and archers. Armored archers in front of unarmored archers.

Blessable two-handed sword guys can be good too, especially depending on the blessing.

The axe throwers can be ok - a blizzard of axes can be deadly, but they are vulnerable.

Warrior Smiths are of course nice. Sometimes they can make nice combat participants in various unexpected ways.

PvK

[Covenant]

PvK, what sort of blesses are worth stacking on their sacreds? And what function to the Warrior Smiths have? I usually just made as many standard Warriors as possible (10/10 is as cheap as Ulm gets, really). When I was playing against AI's, a F10 bless on the Steel Warriors was good at slicing right through Glamour, but I felt it may have been overkill.

[Edi]

A low level nature bless on the steel warriors makes them a lot more durable since regen reduces the chance of afflictions by a large margin. It's especially good since they don't have shields.

I also used primarily warrior maidens and archers in absolute masses. First unarmored but later armored archers, and hordes of warrior smiths. The best kind of battle mage warrior smiths are the E3, E2F1 and F2E1 types, because when you give them earth boots and a girdle, they will be brutal at casting blade wind, magma eruption and fireball respectively. Magma eruption is easily my favorite of those, it REALLY gets rid of the annoying enemies in quantity even if they have shields.

Shamans and antlered shamans are good for casting panic and those should be the best against big low morale things like elephants.

Edi

[mivayan]

Meglobob said:
Pray, pray very hard you do not start next to Kailasa.

News of happiness: Kailasa doesn't have elephants. Does anyone actually have elephants in EA? There are trologdytes(?), but they are... probably... not as bad.

[Edi]

No, not as bad. Worse.

[Covenant]

Ick. And I know there IS an Agartha in the upcoming game.

This lack of Cavalary or shield use is really pretty distressing. If I use massive amounts of the Warrior Maidens, who seem to have much better accuracy than the cheaper archer gals, would flaming arrows be a must? Seems a tad risky to bet so hard on such an easily negated form of combat, but like I said in the beginning, Ulm is really pretty hamstrung in EA.

[Edi]

Troglodytes are size 5 tramplers and have far better morale than elephants, but not as many hit points. 47 is still tough, though.

Flaming arrows is good, but you need a fire booster to get it going. Fortunately the shamans have FEDN randoms so it's just a matter of time before you land one who gets both F and D from those, allowing you to make a skull of fire for one of your F2E1 warrior smiths. If you put a F9N4 bless on your steel warriors, they can and will hurt anything that comes up against them rather brutally. An air bless would not be bad either, because the steel warriors WILL be taking fire from archers, both enemy and your own.

Massed warrior smiths and strong evocation is the way to go. Something like trogs and elephants are really NOT going to like magma bolts, fireballs, and magma eruption and blade wind is a staple.

One of the strengths of EA Ulm is that even though its mages are not very powerful, they are very versatile. Also, except for your mountain, iron and steel warriors and warrior smiths, all of your units are stealthy and every single one of them has both mountain and forest survival. So you have excellent raiding potential. Lots and lots of scouts should give you eyes to see and warrior chiefs with lots of archers and warrior maidens should make for good raiding groups that can take care of most PD garrisons easily since the otehr players will be using their money for mages and troops.

You will probably want to take at least some production scale since EA Ulm needs lots of troops quickly and that requires comparatively more resources than money.

Edi

[Meglobob]

If you want to keep your sacreds alive, a single lvl 9 astral bless is good. It gives twist fate. Working very well on my Marverni sacreds. Also its a very, very cheap bless, so you can have good scales. It also means you have a pretender with lvl 9 astral magic which gives you access to alot of nasty late game spells.

It won't help much against tramplers, but hopefully you will not start any where near Agartha.

[Covenant]

Ulm has fairly strong archers, but these are one of the easiest types of units to negate. They also have axemen with throwing axes--which do a suprisingly heavy amount of damage.

Mixing unit types leads to stronger armies, but the real question is, what do you mix with what? To my knowledge, it seems like the Axemen are the most lethal, since they can throw axes on approach and then use these high-damage weapons to hack up troops when they get into melee, striking twice a turn.

But there's no real reason to use the advanced soldiers, is there? A little bit of armor for half again as much cost?

Also, much was said of the warrior smiths. Besides the smithing bonus, what help are they? They have a little bit of command skill, but the shamans also get priest spells, and stealth. They also cost fewer resources, which is Ulm's main limitation.

I think EA Ulm's sacreds are pretty worthless in any major strategic sense. Being that they're Capitol Only and rather basic (and without shields), there's not much worth to the added cost. The chance to drop a high bless on them is tempting, but I think it's more tempting to heavily tip the scales and produce more units. What do you guys think?

[Edi]

Most of the Ulmish warrior units are useless. The ones with throwing axes may do some good but the rest are rubbish. The reason why they are rubbish is because they have a basic attack of 10 or 11 that gets cut down to 8 or 9 due to ambidexterity penalties, meaning that the first time they go up against any high defense medium armor units like almost everything EA Ermor, Vanheim or Helheim and possibly other have, they will accomplish precisely nothing.

If you want to use double attack melee units, use the Steel Maidens. Twin short swords mean only a penalty of 1 to a base attack higher than that of the various warriors and mixing them in with the Shield Maidens will give them some more durability. The Steel Maidens have fairly high defense for line units and are tougher than most other national infantries anyway.

The Steel Warriors (sacred) do suffer from one pretty severe limitation and that is slow movement with mapmove 1. So they will become more or less obsolete as soon as you expand more than five provinces outward (assuming you get that far, of course). Takes too long to get them to the front and you don't have any astral mages (or means to get them unless you get Athalwolf the Maker of Heroes) to gate them to a friendly lab in the frontlines. So instead of a ?9 bless, you can go the route of several minor blesses, which would also give you magical versatility. The main problem there is that the most useful minor blesses would be E4F4W4N4 and you get rather the abundance of those magics already. D4 doesn't do much but gives you death magic and S4 likewise for astral. A4+ gives them some survivability against arrows and you and you need that much to produce the air boosters. A4E4 will give a couple of minor blesses and allow you to construct the more useful type of elemental staff later on. B4 will also help your sacreds, but it's a waste of points since you're not a blood nation. Astral and death is where you really hurt nationally. You can get a fairly cheap N4W4 bless with a dormant Lady of Springs if you're so inclined and have good scales left over.

Several minor blesses or rainbow picks to patch up your magical deficiencies and good scales, especially production, is the way to go.

Edi