What is the best pretender for Ulm?

[NTJedi]

SCKnight said:
Middle Age Ulm

In regards to your pretender...

What type of map you playing? A premade map or random?
And what's the size of the map?

Are your opponents human or computer? What nations are they playing?

Any special/different game settings? (such as gold income at 200? or magic sites at 55 instead of 40?)

[PvK]

I like MA Ulm a lot, but I mainly play for fun rather than competetiveness. However some competetive pretender choices seem to me would be:

A rainbow mage. Gives you all the paths you lack at least on the pretender, helps research and accelerates site searching.

A Ghost King can be a rainbow and a strong combattant.

A Lich or Phoenix or Vamp Queen shouldn't take as many paths, but can be defensively annoying to your foes with its immortality. Choose magic that can eventually be very nasty on the battlefield in a disposable way.

A Virtue can be a good mobile supercombattant but don't waste points on more than two (at most) paths. Plan to fully equip her with items, of course.

A strong combattant pretender (Wyrm, Manticore, or whatever you prefer) can also be good to deal with types of foes that your troops won't.

It helps to think of what the heavy infantry can't fight well at all: Giants, poison, mind burn, lightning... and develop something to throw against those threats.

Also I tend to prefer Productivity scale to Order as Ulm, because I usually have plenty of gold anyway, since the troops mainly cost resources rather than gold.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmm doesnt that forging god seem to be form-fitted to Ulm?
Cant make a useful pretender out of him?

[Micah]

Forge Lord is only good thematically. Why would you want to pay a bunch of points for an ability your national mages already have? Plus his paths overlap with the nationals as well, and new paths are expensive for him...Ulm is plenty good at what they do already, they're just horrible at everything else. Your pretender needs to cover at least some of those gaps, exactly as PvK said.

How does one counter lighting? Storm warriors/Gaia's blessing in combo should work, but you need an A4N6E2 pretender with Enchantment 9 for that, which seems a bit prohibitive, especially since even then you can only cover one army at a time.

Mind burn and other MR spells shouldn't be too much of a problem once you get tempering the will...you'll have to have 3-4 smiths casting it for it to get a decent amount of coverage on your army because the chances of it working on each casting are pretty bad, but it's pretty easy to spam when needed, and it should cut the damage from mind burn and similar spells down considerably.

[Gandalf Parker]

Thats the problem with most of the thematic pretenders. As much as I want to play RPG, I cant bring myself to use them. One day I will do some research and try to find some suggestions that fit my favorite nations.

[alexti]

PvK said:
A Ghost King can be a rainbow and a strong combattant.

This one is a good candidate for the optimal MA Ulm pretender. Ulm can forge heavy armor and shield without any research and that's enough for GK to start taking indies. GK can take province, search it, take next, search etc... It's obviously preferrable to use him to conquer mountain/forest/swamp provinces leaving plains and farmlands to regular ulmish troops. That should quickly establish good income of various gems. Researching Alt-2 will quickly help GK. Then after researching some invocation for battlefield magic and construction for magic boosters Ulm can concentrate on conjuration. By that time GK should finish his expansion work and start forging and later summonning to open different magic paths. That needs to be planned from the beginning because Ulm really need to get some better access to magic. I think that it's critical to get some death on GK (for spectres and thugs) and enough nature to be able to summon Ivy Kings (with boosters). Choice of other paths can vary I think, but something like W2A2F2 (or more) is good for searching, forging and buffs. A bit of astral is also an option, though it will prevent one from using GK beyond the expansion phase because of magic duel.

[HoneyBadger]

A quick idea: Certain Pretenders which are thematically ideal for a specific nation-say for instance Forge Lord for Ulm, should for the same price be more powerful for that particular nation. Thus, when you pick Forge Lord for Ulm, he gains a bonus of 50% to Forging, instead of 25%. It's not a huge bonus, and it gives you a decent Pretender which fits the nation's theme. At some point, it might even allow that particular Pretender to forge magical items for free, which again wouldn't be a grossly overpowered ability for a forging nation.

[B0rsuk]

Myself, I prefer Celestial Badger.

[Sandman]

The Forge Lord is terribly expensive for what you get. Most 125 point pretenders have 2/1 magic, but the Forge Lord just has 1/1. His forging bonus isn't that good; with a dwarven hammer he'll get items for half price, but that's still just one item a turn. Has anyone tried gaming the system and turning him into a clam factory? I tried turning him into a blood item factory for Late Era Marignon, but the discount didn't seem to affect soul contracts.

For nations with powerful, diverse magic that include fire and earth, he might be useful to jump-start item production. Machaka and Shinyuyama come to mind. Unfortunately, they don't get him.

[PvK]

Some ideas to combat lightning as MA Ulm:

* Thin screens of cheap/light troops in front of the main army.
* Archers ordered to Fire [at] Archers [and mages].
* Blade Wind.
* Heavy cavalry commanders with shock-resist (and perhaps other items, possibly escorted by Black Knights) and ordered to Attack Rear.

PvK