Suggestions to the devs: improving ME Ulm

[Sorlakind]

Middle era Ulm is a difficult nation to play competitively. It has weak priests and weak mages, and since magics end up dominating the game, it has a hard time surviving. Notice also that it has no sacred troops, so no bless strategies. I have never played MP, but from what I gather (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), Ulm is in the low end of the scale. I'd like to make three suggestions to improve the situation a little - no big changes intended.

1. Raise the chance of an extra magic pick for the smiths to 50%. Those extra picks are sorely needed but at 10%, even with smiths being relatively cheap (140g) they are hard to come by.

2. An additional *crossbow* unit. Ulm has arbalests which have lower precision - and Ulm units already have low precision to boot. The extra damage (14 vs 10) and extra range (45 vs 35) does not compensate for this. One *could* buy sappers, but it does not pay off: you can buy 2 arbalests for 1 sapper, which means that at the end of 6 rounds, the arbalests have fired 4 arrows while the sapper has fired only 3. So what I suggest is an extra crossbow unit, with a cost around 10g (possibly a *little* higher, like 11-12g), but with lower protection, that is, even less fitted for melee - an Ulm specific version of the independent crossbow unit.

3. This is not an Ulm-specific improvement, but it would help Ulm a lot. The Ulm smiths have a builtin forge bonus and with a dwarven hammer this bonus is even larger. So they are well fitted for a construction strategy: build lots of commanders (e.g. black lords, guardians) and deck them with trinkets. They can then serve as mini-mini-thugs in support of your armies. Of course, this is a micromanagement hell to pull off, so please, please, please, could we have a monthly forge command?

Best regards

[Zebion]

I still say ME Ulm should have national item forges,make them a bit more interesting to say the least. But the final one you ask sounds like something it needs

[Stryke11]

Or a national spell that perhaps evens out the magic differences. A battlefield wide "anti-magic" or somesuch which would make Ulm troops' martial superiority actually useful. The spell could either lower penetration, cause spells to randomly fail (or small chance to overload/kill the enemy mage), raise cost of spells like a mini drain dominion, or something of that type.

I love Ulm and I play them SP all the time. Don't think I'd MP them, but I'm not very good at MP so I'd probably lose with dual blessed Helheim.

[Endoperez]

Stryke11 said:
Or a national spell that perhaps evens out the magic differences. A battlefield wide "anti-magic" or somesuch which would make Ulm troops' martial superiority actually useful. The spell could either lower penetration, cause spells to randomly fail (or small chance to overload/kill the enemy mage), raise cost of spells like a mini drain dominion, or something of that type.

I love Ulm and I play them SP all the time. Don't think I'd MP them, but I'm not very good at MP so I'd probably lose with dual blessed Helheim.



Ulm does have one national battlefield-wide spell. It's called Tempering the Will. It takes an E3 mage (any Master Smith with one of: Earth Boots, Earth Power, gem), doesn't cost any gems, and gives +4 MR to any friendly unit that fails an easy magic resistance roll. Thau 5, though. The chance for spell to have an effect is from 18% (MR 10 (drain dominion) - penetrating bonus of 6 for an easy spell and E3 caster) to 24% (MR 9, or neutral dominion) to 30% (MR 8, Magic dominion). With two-three mages casting the spell, most of your army will get +4 magic resistance.

[Stryke11]

Whoops, sorry. I should have checked that before I posted.





Still think causing an enemy mage's head to explode when they cast a spell (even if only 5% chance or so) would be super cool.

[Ighalli]

According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.

[Endoperez]

Ighalli said:
According to page 86, the penality for penetration with an easy spell is -4, not -6. Also, the caster wins ties, so unless I'm mistaken the MR 10 value is 24%, the MR 9 is 30% and the MR 8 is 38%. Not that it makes a very significant difference. If you have access to any astral, you can forge some penetration items (up to +3 penetration at con 4) for your smiths that would help the process. With both items you'd be up to 46%/54%/62% respectively.



I counted the penetrating bonus [MR - 6] as [MR - (10-4)]. I'm not sure whether or not the caster wins ties.

[curtadams]

Well, having 3 equipped smiths to boost *some* of your army's MR by 4 doesn't seem too thrilling to me. Large area destruction spells are mostly damage. This really doesn't seem like the kind of spell your army should be resisting. Is this a bug?

[Teraswaerto]

MR increase can be great against R'lyeh (mindblast), and there are spells like Polymorph that you'll really wish you had high MR against. Most of the time it wont make much difference though.

ME Ulm seems quite weak, it's true. It has always been thus.

[Sandman]

Ulm needs more trickery up its sleeve. Assassins and a stealthy preacher, for example, making it the equal of Marignon in that department (it was originally supposed to be a counterpart to Marignon anyway). And reduce the old age on Master Smiths; they're a 'young kingdom'.

[Gandalf Parker]

I could see assassin and stealth preacher. It seems to me that Ulm is supposed to be fairly non-magical, and rely on armor/weapons but those two things might fit in.

[TomD]

I don't see an assasin as very fitting. I've always read Ulm as not believing in all the corrupt politicing of some of the other human nations. An Ulmish noble would surely prefer to bash in his enemies head personally than pay for some sneaky low-life to do it.

And surely ME Ulm is stronger now than before, what with the new focus on armies rather than magic/SCs?

[Reverend Zombie]

TomD said:
I don't see an assasin as very fitting. I've always read Ulm as not believing in all the corrupt politicing of some of the other human nations. An Ulmish noble would surely prefer to bash in his enemies head personally than pay for some sneaky low-life to do it.




Give the stealth/assasin ability to all Ulmish leaders and think of it less as an assassination than a challenge to a one-on-one duel: "the Ulmish hero crosses the enemy lines under flag of truce to challenge their leader to a trial by might..."

[TomD]

Good idea, that works for me. And bodyguards just show that you can't trust foreign scum.

Of course a Black Lord (I think that's the name, the commander version of the Black Knight) would be an awesome assasin even without items. It probably needs a nerf somewhere to make it balanced.

[BigJMoney]

Ulm got rid of its stealthiness in EA to embrace the fielding of horses. I particlarly think a national forge item would make Ulm complete. Then again, I suppose this isn't something the Doms 3 system is built to support.

On another note, Sorlakind's best point is that a monthly construct command is sorely lacking from the game. It's rather surprising there is monthly spell-casting and not monthly forging.

=$= Big J Money =$=

[olaf73]

Yeah we need monthly forgings.

[Sandman]

Regarding Ulmish assassins, how about a 'mage hunter', with very high magic resistance and a magic weapon?

[Gandalf Parker]

Ahhh now that makes sense. I like that. And a nice rock-paper-scissors balance to it also.

"Ulm, having learned its lessons in the Early Era, has trained special assassins to target other nations mages."

[Taqwus]

After all, there have been plenty of spies in the mundane world. :p

A spy with a siege bonus would be interesting; let the bonus reflect having sufficient knowledge of engineering to identify likely weaknesses in fortifications.

[Tyrant]

Not sure the assasins would help. My experience with non-glamoured stealth units so far in Dom3 is that they have a very hard time. With the bigger economies and better troops, PDs of 25 are very common and 40+ is not rare, but stealth rating have not gone up. Thus- lots of assasins killed by PD. For instance, in one game i'm playing atm, 6 out of 7 enemy assasins have been nailed by my PD.

[Sorlakind]

Great suggestion, sandman: a mage-hunter with high mr and a magic weapon to hunt for enemy mages. Very thematic and well balanced. Nevertheless, as Tyrant points out, with the high values of PD available, you would have to give him at least the stealth of a spy and even then, they probably would die easily. I still would like to see 2 of my suggestions implemented (I dropped the crossbow one, one can always compose things with independents):

- Raise chance of an extra magic pick to 50%. Even 20% (1 out of 5 instead 1 out of 10) would already be a big help. Even if it would mean a little more expensive smiths.

- Monthly forge command: this is the only way to *really* take advantage of the forge bonus and earth picks that Ulm has for a construction strategy. As things are right now, it's a micromanagement hell.

Best regards

[Sandman]

Assassins have a lot of limitations, but the threat of them would force enemies to treat Ulm with a bit more respect. Even for purely defensive operations, they'd be useful, disrupting the enemy advance ahead of the slow-moving Ulmish armies.

I'd also give Ulm a standard-bearer and cheaper (non-elite) cavalry, so they've got more options on the battlefield.

[Endoperez]

Few things:

MA Ulm's PD is WONDERFUL! It's insane, really. Arbalests don't fire that often, but they can damage anything without Air Shield, and they are medium infantry with shortswords against that something WITH Air Shield, often accompanied by the very heavy infantry you get from PD over 20.

Ulm Arbalests are very good, actually. They're VERY slow to make, but work surprisingly well even without support from the other troops.


Re: 10% chance on Master Smiths:
Turn 26 on a blitz game. I had had at most 6 provinces in the blitz. I had acquired a second castle late into the game, but hadn't gotten any Master Smiths with funny randoms from there. I had pretty much managed to keep to the 1 mage/turn rule. I had one Master Smith with Earth random, two with Air, and one with Astral. Statistically, I was a bit ahead - 23 or so Smiths and 4 Master Smiths makes for almost 18 per cent... but I was "due" two any way. One in ten adds up pretty fast when you don't recruit anything else. Ulm is also one of the nations that can pretty easily aim for a second castle early in the game without forgoing military - they just build Black Plate inanftry.