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.

[Shangrila00]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

Try dust2dusting Iron Angels while eating Iron Blizzard spam from non-caponly Black Priests.

Iron blizzard gets stopped by arrow fend. It's nice, but it's like the Ulmish version of flaming arrows. Devastating from when you get it to when the enemy gets the counter, and mostly useless thereafter. It's certainly not likely to be a big deal when Iron Angels are in the field.

[parone]

i think this is why cbm nerfed the hammers. just got a little silly

[Shardphoenix]

Iron blizzard gets stopped by arrow fend.

Well, some nations need Conj8 to break into air. And even air pretender can`t be everywhere at once.

[Corinthian]

Further more, Arrow Fend and iron blizzard is of the same level of research, but while most Ulm players prioritize iron blizzard, ench 6 is not all that popular to most air nations.

[Shangrila00]

Originally Posted by Corinthian

Further more, Arrow Fend and iron blizzard is of the same level of research, but while most Ulm players prioritize iron blizzard, ench 6 is not all that popular to most air nations.

Well, if you're right about how Storm works, then it comes one level lower, is an early priority for all air nations, and halves the effect of iron blizzard in addition to the precision malus.

Like I said, it's much like flaming arrows. How easy it is to counter varies depending on the nation. Pythium for instance, laughs at iron blizzard with its ubiquitous tower shields, just like it does flaming arrows.

[Shardphoenix]

Pythium for instance, laughs at iron blizzard with its ubiquitous tower shields

Destruction is easy to research and it deals with tower shields nicely With Summon Earthpower every single master smith can cast it... Followed by bladewind for added carnage.

[Shangrila00]

Eh, that doesn't work as well in practice as it sounds, especially blade wind. I really wish there was a way to stop mages from casting bladewind as soon as their script runs out. That 80 fatigue is ridiculous unless it's an Earth King. Destruction has high fatigue and friendly fire issues, and honestly isn't that great except against small squads of elites. That much fatigue would have been better used just straight up killing enemies instead of only rendering them open to being killed. The whole reason why Iron Blizzard is awesome is that it's tons of damage at low fatigue, so almost endlessly spammable, and you lose that if half your casters are too busy working so the other half actually does damage with Iron Blizzard.

Against lots of shields, it's a better idea to just spend the same caster and fatigue buffing flail troops with strength of giants and letting them go.

[Shardphoenix]

that doesn't work as well in practice as it sounds

That`s my biggest problem - I lack practice.
What about magma eruption? Every master smith can cast it with summon earthpower, and I don`t think it gets stopped by arrow fend, so you still can have combat evocations when your enemy starts bringing arrow fend with him.

[Executor]

Yes Iron Blizzard is an amassing spell and yes arrow fend tends to stop it. But even with arrow fend you still do a fair amount of damage since you cast over 30 projectiles. The shear number of projectiles you can put out is enough to overpower arrow fend sometimes.
I may be getting off topic here but arrow fend doesn't stop Ulm. It more or less equals things out for the other nation. For example those 5 Bows of War Ulm paid 5 gems for effectively become a single Bow of War under arrow fend.

I should state that there are also only a handful of nations that have A3 mages to recruit. Of course there are twice that many much which have A2 mages but you'd still need air boosters or communions or crystal shields and stuff to protect your armies and all those tend to cast. I should also mention that a single turn that some nation takes to put up arrow fend is enough for iron blizzard to annihilate an army and than switch to other stuff such as magma eruption as Shardphoenix stated.

I agree that Destruction + Blade Wind doesn't work as well in practice as it sounds. Here are the five spells I found most potent for Ulm.
-Iron Blizzard
-Magma Eruption
-Strength of Giants
-Weapons of Sharpness
-Legions of Steel/Iron Blessing

The first two basically crush most types of troops. And the 3 boosting spells turn your flail infantry into killing machines. I've seen Grendelkins, Treants, Zmeys and all sort of things chopped under Ulms boosted flail infantry.

I'd say that Ulm is currently the strongest MA nation IMO. Before they were crappy but now they got just too many small boost which combined are a bit OP.

I may not agree on a number of things in CBM 1.9 but so far I've experienced first hand only two things that really need to be removed. Agarthas darkness PD and Ulm Forge.