taking on ulm

[MezMerrick]

How does one go about effectively destroying armies like 1st era Ulm who can flood the field with decent troops, including archers who love to mow my guys down before they reach them?

I've played with just about every race but not enough to form specific anti-missle tactics. The best I could come up with was Abysians and their big fire spells; set to take out archers (I would have mentioned cavalry but when taking on my buddy he usually has the field flooded with troops all standing in the way of the archers). I've gone the air route before, with Abysia and Helheim and found both to be pathetically weak. You need almost them in the hundreds for the flyers not to die the instant they land amongst missle troops. Maybe some buff spells for the flyers? Any advice would be welcome.

[Edratman]

I am inferring from your post that you are playing a head on head blitz game.

I would use the Neif giants to stop this Ulm tactic. Amass 7 or 8 squads of 4 man sacred giants (nature and earth bless of course). Have your prophet with them and script him for the big bless, then the big bravery spell,smite, smite, smite, spells. Put 2 squads on each flank, one slight staggered behind the other with hold and attack archers and attack rear orders on one of each. Scatter the other four squads around the middle with attack closest orders. This should draw the melee troops to the four center squads clearing the flanks for the other four to get around them.


Anything else depends upon how long you are into the game before you meet your friend regarding spells, buffs and equipment. But it sounds to me that you are about 10 turns into the game.

[MezMerrick]

Thanks for all the advice. No, the last time his Ulm trounced me was end-game, with numbers in the 600-700's. I was Abysia and despite burning over a 1/4 of his army down and sending almost a 100 of those bat flying things to his rear I was still trounced (of course him picking up Elephants in one of his conquered countries didn't help me much). I expect by the endgame of this one he will have stolen someones elephants again, confounding the problem even more. Still, I'm going to implement your strat recommendations and see where this goes.

[Saxon]

One thing to look at is that Ulm tends to be all about good troops, while most everyone else is about magic. If you are trying to take Ulm on in the late game with only troops, you are going to have a bad day. I would suggest taking a look at some of the mid and high level spells again and seeing what you can come up with. Some mid level spells like Destruction are going to help you take Ulm down faster. Arrow Fend is a natural for stopping missiles, as is the Storm summoning spell and the Staff of Storms. Darkness is another option, as is that Astral spell that takes over entire enemy armies; keep poking around the spell book.

Also, look at the summoning spells. Late game tends to see large numbers of powerful summons that eat regular troops for breakfast. If you have not tried them out, you are in for a good surprise and will find several more options to sort out your missile problem.

Finally, Abysia magic is very straight forward – blast them with fire. The other magic paths tend to be more powerful overall, but more subtle. Destruction for example, doesn’t seem to do much at first, but your troops then hammer the units Destruction hit. You might not see it, but it ends up killing more than Fireball. Play with this a bit more and you will find the Ulmish units have a much harder time.

As for flying units, I personally find them very hard to use effectively. I am not a great player, so feel free to listen to others, but I would suggest finding other ways to hit the missile troops. Cavalry for example.

[Edratman]

If he has elephants, the most effective spell is to spam soul slay. But if you are Abysia, you have trouble getting access to it and I am not familiar enough with them to help. There's one guy with astral plus an astral random, but IIRC you have trouble forging astral boosts.

Soul slay is an level 3 astral spell that seems to always target the largest opponent and is a guaranteed killer of elephants, or anything else. It requires a MR check, but it kills, it does not do partial damage and it has 100% precision IIRC. I love it. A coin and a star cap can get any minor one astral mage up to casting it. Throw in a crystal shield and 2 pearls apiece and 5 or 6 six buffed up 1 astral mages placed in the back row will evaporate virtually any trampling army and also get the large sized commanders as a bonus.

But it is also like everything else in DOM3, that is, it has its time and place where it is great but times where it is the wrong thing. When you are facing hordes of skelly spam you will lose your mages and equipment, as one example.
Of course that is why this game is so much damn fun. In CIV, tanks are always tanks and always work the same way.

[Sombre]

Boosting an S2 caster to use soul slay isn't worth it. Just use paralyze - they're effectively dead when that hits them, just a formality for your troops to chop them up.

[Lord_Bob]

Build magic shields to protect your mages from arrow fire. You need to stop them from dying.

[thejeff]

Shields or robes/amulets of missile protection.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Elephants are low morale. There's that short range Thaumaturgy 2 spell, Bonds of Fire, and Thau 4 spell Prison of Fire (with better range). If you're dealing with just a few elephants, a few magicians should be able to lock down the elephants with Bonds of Fire.

There's some blood spells that may be of use against Elephants. Hellbind Heart - instead of taking Elephants out of the battle, turn them to your side.

Morales' a strength of regular Ulm infantry, on the other hand. Though magic resistantce is still a weakness.

Harm is a rather long range spell, though you need a decent blood sabbath to make it effective. Both its AOE and DMG increase as your level goes up. I'm not sure exactly how the damage scales, so I can't say whether its worth it compared to your fire spells, but considered Ulm's level of armor, its worth taking a look.

If your mages are dying, the shields are definetly a good idea,and you can add some extra protection to your blood mages with Pain Transfer.

For fire... your mages won't be much use after its triggered, but Phoenix Fire can reduce your casulties during a win. Unless they're in the middle of your troops when you die- but hey, you're abysia, fire doesn't bother you, just any independents you may have picked up along the way.

[Baalz]

Hmmm, I'm not 100% sure from your posts if you're asking about Abyssian strategies to deal with EA Ulm, or more general advice. Sounds like you've got 2 main problems, elephants and archers/good infantry.

Here's a good thread with just about every effective way to deal with elephants:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...=&fpart=1&vc=1

As to the troops you've got several options to deal with arrows ranging from simple heavy, shield bearing infantry (basically ignores arrows even with no magic support, but hard to come by in EA) to battlefield enchantments like arrow fend or storm. Also, anything which just generally makes you tougher will help against arrows as well, so consider things like mass protection, legions of steel, an astral bless, etc.

Outside of the arrows EA Ulm has fairly offensive units, a lot of dual wield weapons and no shields so depending on what you've got available and what he's fielding consider things like blade wind, bows of war, archers of your own, etc. as well as the more generally effective falling flames etc. Thugs are going to get torn up from concentrated arrow fire and dual wielding swarms so they're not the best choice until you can start fielding real SCs.