Dud nations

[Evilhomer]

yes EA r'lyeh and EA oceania can kill atlantis, but that doesn't mean that it makes up for their complete lack of good amphibious units. Basically as someone said before you are forced to stick with indies and some summons when you go ashore, and thats not viable in a MP game. No nation are wrecked, and even the water nations can win a mp game. However they are good contestants for the weakest nation in EA, unless the water section of an mp game is huge.

[Endoperez]

If MA Ulm should get a bonus, I'd suggest making the Black Plate armors and helmets instead of Full Helmets and Full Plates of Ulm. Magical armor is immune to armor destruction, which would let the Master Smiths use Armor of Achilles/Destruction without having to worry about hitting their own units, and the Black Steel Helmet doesn't have a defense penalty, giving all better units of Ulm 1 more defense.

MA Ulm has many good abilities;
- Crossbowmen prot 14, 12 hp, 10 att +1 from shortsword and an arbalest for just 10g/24r. They can go toe-to-toe with many other nations' infantry troops.
- Flails and Morning Stars, making them deadly against all shield-bearers. The flails' multiple attacks also lower enemy defence quite fast, enabling the heavy hitters to strike down hard-to-hit foes as long as Ulm has the advantage in numbers.
- Black Knights and Sappers to act as a mapmove 2 army. Sappers are too expensive to be used this way except in emergencies, but if you haven't happened to find anything else, you'll be glad to have them.

Their weaknesses are:
- Very few ways of increasing morale. Pikeneers have morale 11, Guardians morale 14, Black Knights morale 15, and mixing those with your normal units is about all you can do.
- Slow armies: slow to make, slow to move, slow in killing their enemies due to no high att/high dam units
- No easy access to summons that'd make good thugs, and little reason to use commanders other than Black Lords as thugs.
- Heavy armor and the normal encumberance of 3. They'd benefit from having encumberance 2 of the Machakans in addition to their +2 hp and +1 str.


There were few mods back in DomII that boosted Ulm. The Master Smiths have since received that 10% random, but if you think something is still needed I can warm up my old Ulm Upgrade mod. Noblemen with prec 12, Warlords equal to Lord Guardians (and recruitable everywhere), slightly cheaper Lord Guardians... and perhaps the Full Plate of Ulm to Black Steel Full Plate change as well.

[Arralen]

(MA) Ulm

As Endo correctly points out, the discussion about the "standard" Ulm goes back to the days of Dom 2.
Check out my "Ulm beefed up" mod and thread from 2004.

Interestingly enough, the improved smithes I did in the mod got taken over to vanilla Dom 3 by the devs. Armor got some improvements in general, and the "Full Plate of Ulm" even more so.

Not enough IMHO, though, therefore I'm going to revamp my mod for Dom 3.
Thanks for reminding me of it - stay tuned, shouldn't take too long.

Keep adding suggestions here...

[Sombre]

Well that's given me some ideas for a balance mod I'm working on based on the CB template.

[Endoperez]

I'm almost finished updating my old Ulm Upgrade mod, so I guess we'll have 3 "make Ulm better" mods floating around soon!

[DrPraetorious]

I do not believe that units that default to black steel armor are actually immune to destruction - or that the game even keeps track of which default armor is "magic". The description may refer to magic-items-as-armor, which are not removed from inventory. You can get the broken-armor icon anyway, not sure what it actually does to you.

I propose a fourth fix to Ulm. My preference would be to give Ulm national spells that encourage it to use the units it already has.

- effective, low-research, low precision, non-armor-piercing damage spells for the smiths. Improved versions of Magma Bolts, basically. These would be deadly spells if you have tough units, because you need not worry about friendly fire.

- since Ulm despises both magic and organized religion, they should have anti-type spells for magic beings and for sacred units.

- spells to give haste (not quickness!), recuperation and offensive bonuses to large numbers of infantry. Further boosting the protection of your stuff is deeply pointless.

I'm also working on new and powerful national spells for Marverni and ME Agartha, but I'm waiting for the new patch at the moment.

[Dedas]

I don't agree that it is pointless to raise their protection additionally as there is a big difference between 20 and 25 for instance. Have anyone of you even tried using legions of steel? Also iron will is pretty low level (3) and it is in the same school as gnome lore that your smiths also can cast. After that you obviously have tempering the will which is cheap and bloody excellent for Ulm, a spell that follows the nation between the ages. And don't cast it once but a lot of times as magic resistance negates it on your own troops and you probably have drain 3 when playing MA Ulm because it doesn't affect your smiths research.

And don't forget that pikes ignore shields also so it is actually not so hard to hit knights for example. They also have a morale of 11, which means that they will stay in the fight for a while raising enemies fatigue. So the thing to do is of course to have flail guys, hammerers and battle axes behind them set to hold and attack. A tip is to use the ones with less armor as they have more APs and higher defense whilst the now fatigued enemy have a lot less so they won't hit them so often anyways.

Another thing not to forget is the production bonus Ulm gets in the fortresses - so build a lot of fortresses! Its troops only cost 10 gold anyways.

[Meglobob]

One further point on 'dud' nations, MP is a pretty ruthless playing environment, if a nation gets percieved by a significant amount of people as weak, then in MP it becomes a easy target.

I think I have seen some signs of this in MP with Marverni and the Ulms being targeted early on and eliminated.

In the next patch I believe Helheim is being weakened slightly, so in future patches shouldn't Marverni/Ulms be strengthened slightly, on the lines of Endoperez's and Dr Praetorius suggestions?

Mods strenghening weak nations are always welcome but will they get used in MP? Also in SP, such mods are not needed as the AI is more fun to play against with a weaker nation, I try to give the AI every chance/advantage I can.

[Endoperez]

DrPraetorious said:
I do not believe that units that default to black steel armor are actually immune to destruction - or that the game even keeps track of which default armor is "magic". The description may refer to magic-items-as-armor, which are not removed from inventory. You can get the broken-armor icon anyway, not sure what it actually does to you.

You're right in that black steel armors aren't immune to armor destruction. Found out when updating my mod, now posted in the mod forum in the "Dud nation mods" thread.

Broken armor tag means that all armor is prot 0, and that shields are useless. Prot 0 Black Knights are a sad sight. It goes away when the units end turn in a province with unused resources, but I don't know how many resources it takes to fix a piece of armor.

The spell ideas are all nice. Which schools would you put them at? Would the anti-magic being and anti-sacred unit spells be in Thaumaturgy, giving Ulm a reason to research towards Tempering the Will, or would you move that one to some other school?

[Sombre]

I agree the adding protection to high protection units seems to work very well - same theory as the high def van units having Water blessing.

Meglobob: You don't have to use the mod in SP when you're playing that nation, but it will help the AI out if you're playing against them and /they/ have that nation. I basically only play SP but I'm still very interested in balance.