Ulm - what items do you build w/Smiths?

[KissBlade]

Oh right, I forget, I get lightless lanterns too =).

[thejeff]

Everything I can. I try to make sure my pretender can make boosters for all the smith's random paths, so they can forge more things.

The Air and Astral randoms on the smiths open up whole new areas of cheap items.

[Potatoman]

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but why are charcoal shields so good? I almost never see units suffer damage from the fire effect in my tests, and even then rarely more than 3 or 4.

[DrPraetorious]

Well, that depends on the unit.

A Prot 16 unit isn't going to suffer very much damage from a Dam 4 fire shield.

OTOH, A prot 0 unit is going to be fried eventually.

So if you are concerned that your SC is going to be swarmed by summoned undead or something and bottled up, you give him a charcoal shield.

[Baalz]

DrPraetorious said:
Well, that depends on the unit.

A Prot 16 unit isn't going to suffer very much damage from a Dam 4 fire shield.

OTOH, A prot 0 unit is going to be fried eventually.

So if you are concerned that your SC is going to be swarmed by summoned undead or something and bottled up, you give him a charcoal shield.

Also realize that the fire damage is reduced by the weapon length of the attacker, so it's not going to do much to armored pikeneers. If you're getting attacked by ghosts though, low protection, short ranged attack, fire ignores their etherealness....quite effective.

[Folket]

How do you build SCs with Ulm? I would just be happy with thugs.

[NTJedi]

Folket said:
How do you build SCs with Ulm? I would just be happy with thugs.

Depends on what turn of the game and your targeted enemy nations. A SC on turn_15 against Pangaea would be equipped differently than a SC on turn_75 against R'yleh.

[Baalz]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the difference is between SCs and thugs. I generally think of thugs as strong enough to take out most any PD singlehandedly, while SCs are in the ballpark of taking out moderately strong armies absent magical support. Ulm has some good thugs in the construction line which is a high priority anyway- golems & iron dragons (you can GOR the dragons, or just have a smith equipped with winged boots lead one dragon apiece for pretty lethal raiding options). For SCs, with boosters Ulm can reasonably easily summon all the elemental royalty other than water. You're also almost certainly going to want to empower a smith one level in death for forging reasons, this gives you an easy way to create death golems which can start encroaching into SC territory if properly equipped (no astral to mind duel, high HP & prot, built in crowd control with banefire shield). Outside of that, you've got the boosters to get that d1 smith high enough to cast liches, then the liches can take the boosters to make tartarians.

Also, keep in mind Ulm really needs a pretender to flesh out some of their magic diversity, and summoning SCs is a pretty reasonable use of pretender-turns so its not unreasonable to expect that to be something your pretender contributes to.