Starting setup for LA Ulm

[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.

[PvK]

True, but against light independents and weak PD, they can still sneak in and pick and choose their fights, taking provinces for cheap.

[Shovah32]

True but the same could be said for rangers.

Feel free meglo. Other options are summon lammashtas, retreat(since the lammashtas keep fighting) which is useful in enemy dominion and summon lammashtas(this would probably need 2 gems to keep fatigue down/only some counts summoning lammashtas) followed by skele spam.

If your short on gems a regular flying, stealthy, immortal skelespam defensive raiding tactic is nice and flying in to cast things such as mass dust to dust vrs undead armies or decay+desintigrate vrs SCs can be helpful.