Early Game, Mid Game, and End Game... What's the goal of each?

[Taqwus]

Vanheim's Van units are actually rather brutal, considering halfway good prot of 14 plus Glamour. I tried them out with a Water-9 dragon to assist; the dragon, a Vanjarl prophet, Vanlade the Hero and roughly a dozen Vans whomp independent forces of 3 commanders plus 80-90 HI/militia quite handily. If I'd bothered bringing along air gems for Arrow Fend, perhaps casualties would be zero instead of ~1-2.
'course, it was basically game over when the Ancient Presence event apparently killed approximately 26000 people in my capital, but that's beside the point.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by ywl:

Consequently, you can afford an expensive pretender, and more importantly use a pretender with low dominion strength (e.g. mage or dragon).

Low dominion strength can potentially be risky for Ulm, as a poor dominion can leave you rather vulnerable to being priested or dominioned. I ended up having my dominion creeping into Condors' territory despite making no real attempt to push it simply because Ulm isn't any good at maintaining dominion, and a low dominion score just exacerbates the problem.