The MA Ulm issue.

[Panpiper]

CUnknown said:I never build the Forge as Ulm because there's no point to it. Ulm's forging abilities are equivalent to the Forge, and I have other uses for my earth gems.

In my experience, the forge bonus of the smiths stacks with the forge bonus of the global, making items that much less costly in terms of gems. The bonus of plus one to the caster spell level for the purposes of forging also saves you from having to do that one last empowering on each of your specialty smiths, which saves a lot of gems, far more gems get saved from this that are spent on casting the global.

The idea of making that spell a national spell for Ulm is interesting. I rely (completely) on forging to keep Ulm competitive (though I only play SP).