The MA Ulm issue.

[Micah]

Excellent summary Burnsaber. I think the idea of adding a low-resource troop to their lineup so they have a gold sink may have been overlooked in your post though. (Crossbows were my suggestion, but something else could work too)

[Xietor]

Blade Wind< arrow fend

One way to help Ulm would be to make blade wind unaffected by arrow fend. Typically by the time Ulm gets summon earthpower and Blade Wind other races have arrow fend.

Because the way the game mechanics work, blade wind, because it is not aoe1, is affected by arrow fend.

Maybe a national spell for ulm similar in effect to blade wind-but aoe1.

As I said in another thread, less magical diversity and more earth. Remove extra pick and old age from smiths and give them 3e 1f and a 10 percent chance for 4e. Adding petrify/earth attack would help them.

[Baalz]

One thing that would go a long way towards helping Ulm would be to change the smiths from being 1f 2e +10%fesa to 1f 1e +100%fea +10%bsnd.

[Sandman]

A long lasting debate indeed. I've suggested many different things over the years, including magic weapons, an assassin, high MR on the elites, a 'worker' mage and a standard bearer.

These are all pretty small tweaks. We could always go for broke and give Ulm a Grand Master Smith. 3 earth, 2 fire and one random. The potential of such a mage is enormous, single-handedly turning Ulm into a top-tier nation.

[Burnsaber]

I don't think that adding any new superunit(s) will be good fixes.

Adding some superunit to magically fix Ulm's problems would just warp all of their available stragedies to that certain unit. I can see a future Ulm stragedy thread;

"How do I play the new Ulm?"
"Dude, just make Unit X accompanied by leader Y. Save the rest of the gold to make new forts for more X's and Y's"

IMHO, currently Ulmish troops have too many weaknessess compared to their strenghts. I think that some of these have to be removed or made less drastic.

[dmentd]

I think two changes could change MA Ulm sufficiently to be worth playing. Add one additional, high probability random elemental (75%) to the smiths and up their cost by 25 or 30 gold. This helps forging potential and direct combat potential. The second is to give the black lord significantly more hit points (25 hp total) using the "great endurance" rationale. This makes these guys potential thugs.

These two changes make MA Ulm a middle of the road nation and possible to play in MP. It also follows thematically with the nation. Of course, I have only played two MP games, neither of which are finished yet, so please take my suggestions with the proverbial grain of salt.

[Nikolai]

> [1) Ulm's troops combination of high protection and high-damage weapons allows them blow through other nation's normal infantry and indepentends in (relatively) small numbers.

So so. Fresh recruit infantrymen, maybe. Good national troops, no way. Almost any human nation has defense 13-16 troops, and those often have armour 15-17. And THEY have encumberance 5-7, not 7-10. Good luck killing these with Ulm... you will be crawling exhausted before that.

And anyone good kills indies without dead. Give me principles, longbowmen, defenders... not even talking about vans and centaurs.

> 2) Ulm's troops are nearly immune to normal short-bows archers and have high resitance to longbows and crossbows.

Yes. But so do anyone those with shields. The tower shield helps tons more against a crossbow that armour 20 (Ulm's best) and everyone almost gets tower shields.

> 3) Their forging powers allow them polital maneuvorability and survivalability.

Yup, it's called being client nation (smith *****). Until they decide you've done with utility, being so damn limited.

> 4) Ulm's troops have wide selection of weapon choices, allowing them to choose right weapons for the right job.

As long the job's killing small number, low defense humans - maybe. No high attack weapons, no high defense weapons. Ulm needs rediscover swords and light shields/armour.

> 5) Since Ulmish troops have Gold cost:Resource cost ratio of 1:2 / 1:3 they have lots of extra cash to crank out forts, which has numereous advantages.

Yeah. Ulm gets castles, to make more crap :-)

I am not arguing with Burnsaber, but with the positions listed. Ulm needs help.

And Burnsaber's right, giving superunits is a bad fix. Just tune the existing up, and make smiths smarter.

[Edratman]

As a minor aside, why is there such a fervent love/hate relationship with MA Ulm? It reminds me of my trips to Japan, where everyone believes that they are superior to any and all other non-Japanese, but almost eveybody has a t-shirt on with the logo of an American sports team or some other American product.

No other nation gets anywhere the number of posts that MA Ulm does. I concur that it is one of the weaker nations, but the other contenders for weakest nation honors seldom get mentioned. Was Ulm a favored nation in Dom2 and players still remember that?

[MarcusSmythe]

Ulm is a good 'jump into' nation. As far back as Dominions PPP, its focus on troops over magic and formations over SCs made it very accessible to the new player, and gives it a very different feel than other nations.

Thus, alot of us have happy early memories of Ulm.

As another thing, Ulm is the closest thing to a nation able to just 'make war'. No mutliple blesses, no SCs and hordes of mages, no 'tricks'. Ulm has its core troops as its backbone, rather than a bless rush or a giant pile of mages+clams casting various flavours of 'I win and you all die, and I get gems for it'. Thus, its very different, flavour-wise, from alot of nations, and is appealing to people who like that flavour.

Unfortunately, its a flavour that just doesnt perform well in the current environment, so alot of virtual ink is spilled discussing the problems.

[Burnsaber]

Besides, MA Ulm is totally badass.

They fight terrible magical enemies with only steel and will. Like Conan the Barbarian, for example. It's just that their troops blow, unlike Conan.

From Dr.Praetorious
"Ulm is a nation of men, with human failings (and then some, but that's a distinct question), fighting against hordes of magic wielding demons, evil animated statues and malevolent warlocks, with only steel and sinew, and some magic available in a limited, supporting role."


EDIT; , stole Xietor's Conan analogy. Oops.