Starting setup for LA Ulm

[PvK]

I think Death magic can get him Spectral Mages (who have some random magic skills) which can (eventually with luck and forged boosters, maybe via Streams from Hades?) get him Unfrozen mages and maybe an Ether Lord.

Zweihanders vs. heavy shield infantry - the shield infantry are the sturdier block, but Zweihanders can do higher damage to penetrate with. I tend to use a few Zweihanders starting behind the main body of shielded troops.

Pikemen are faster to recruit and good for staving off lower-morale troops, so yes they might be a reasonable choice against giants. Better than the shielded heavy infantry, anyway.

Villains? Faster to recruit than the crossbowmen, and usable for light stealthy raiders. Their low morale and protection are major weaknesses though.

[Shovah32]

Villians are inferior to rangers against almost every late era unit(due to shortbows sucking vrs armour). They are also less survivable and worse in close combat.

[Aleph]

Thanks very much, all - a lot of good material here, everyone contributing something different. Spectres are definitely a good pickup for Ulm, making me think about prioritizing conjuration more than I had initially been.

The sleeping master lich sounds good, and the lammashtas trick is brutal.

I'm not really in love with an immobile pretender with paths that I don't have anyone else capable of searching for/casting spells to search for. I don't see how to get started with such paths, although I suppose you could get lucky on indeps, or alchemy -> searching spells. On reflection, though, I could definitely see throwing F2N2E2 in as a nice boost to catalyze boots/mace production to get your E priests and N enabled fortune tellers able to cast their site spells, kicking off fever fetish spam, enabling soul contracts, and for the late late game having Infernal Prison to enable continued casting while under the affects of Astral Corruption.

I also cringe at seeing sloth and cold on Ulm, since I'm having trouble getting solidly established early - I need those resources. Maybe I'm missing the point (and Meglobob's sleeping giant premise implies that I might be) but it seems to me that you need to take advantage of Ulm's excellent high resource cost troops in order to "get" them. They have awful conventional magics in exchange for strong blood economy, hard as nails troops, two kinds of freespawn, and excellent stealth capabilities. I realize that good players can probably dominate without relying on all of these, but it just hurts my brain to have such good troops and cripple them with -40% production rates.

I'll think about what I'd have to give up to have a B6D3N2F2E2 master liche.

[Shovah32]

One of the big reasons i suggested the fountain as an option was the high start dominion and blood magic(high dom really helps counts) and for your starting problems do NOT use LA ulms high resource troops atleast at the start. Use your starting army as a meatshield set to hold and attack with rangers on fire closest/archers/cavalry and keep churning out rangers at your capitol. If your starting army takes too many losses use indies for your meatshield instead. The rangers(firing basically with precision 18 due to all above 10 being doubled) with their crossbows do serious damage and arent too bad in melee against medium or low defence troops(armour isnt too dangerous to them in melee due to high strength and axes)

[Aleph]

Shovah - on reflection, thanks for the pickup on fountain. I've been running a B6D3F2N2E2 Dom 7 sleeping fountain with Order 3 Misfortune 2 Growth 2 Magic 1 and he's working pretty well.

I totally forgot about blood stones in my last posting, but in game they work exceptionally well. Your earth priests + boots + blood stone -> Troll King + boots + blood stone -> Forge, and empowering with blood to get a few priests capable of forging blood stones isn't so bad given the ease of picking up blood slaves. It's certainly far easier than getting someone else capable of fever fetish spamming.

[Shovah32]

Also, even with your cheap counts summoning a few vampire lords(77 slaves iirc) can be worth it. Instead of auto-summoning thralls they can use summon allies to get vampires. They also have +1 to a few stats and +1 on both types of magic(cant summon more counts without boosters and can cast soul vortex in battle)

[Aleph]

I definitely use a mix of Vampire Lords and Mound Fiends for my D3 needs. It's 77 blood for the Lord, vs 65 blood and 10 death for an item boosted Count to reach the same levels, the Lords obviously have the free item slots, and in addition blood is always easier to come by. Still, I use mostly Counts for light raiding (and thanks to your Lammashta trick, army smashing), bloodhunting, and their freespawn.

I now kind of enjoy LA Ulm's slow build to magical dominance via death/blood/earth - it makes their starting crappy picks almost enjoyable. I suspect I would get annihilated before I ever got out of the gate in MP, but I haven't played a nation yet that changes so much from beginning to end. It's particularly sweet to boost a mage of the second tier (+1 astral and blood empowerment, + items galore) to cast Astral Corruption and shut down everyone else's magic while your endless Vampire Counts just keep growing and growing.

[Shovah32]

I tend to stick with counts too as they work just as well in most cases but, if im going to completely equip some-one(and dont have any unique blood summons) it will probably be a vampire lord due to the slightly raised stats and the ability to cast soul vortex.

Im glad you liked the fountain, at the start i was set on using a master lich but when i realised i was taking blood higher than death and that a high dominion score made the vampire strategy more flexible/offensive i switched to the fountain.

Also, aswell as your counts, lords, uniques and items dont be afraid to splash out some gems for a bunch of regular vampires-if you can get a good amount of them and only use them within friendly dominion they can be a very nasty suprise(and can provide some extra punch/meatshield for the raise skeleton/summon lammashta tactic.

[Aleph]

Followup - I find that the vampire troop types invariably tangle with the Lammashtas, diluting the punch of either approach. On the other hand, troopless Vampire Counts invariably run away after casting Lammashtas regardless of what orders I give if there are two or less of them (you'd think immortal troops would get an extra morale bonus in friendly dominion). I don't mind, though - there's still a lot of killing going on, and I'm not the one who is dying...

[Shovah32]

Sometimes my counts flee too, not always though. The vampire troops can get in the way of lammashtas but they will go in, do some damage and then either die or rout and either way, provided you stayed in friendly dominion, all you lose is the death gems for the lammashtas.