Overview
This is a guide on how to play everyone’s favorite Middle Age nation, Ulm.It covers things like pretender design, basic strats, how to forge efficiently and how to dumpster your enemies.After reading the basics of the guide, I recommend you hop over to /v/anheim to ♥♥♥♥ on some noobs with your knowledge on the best nation in the game.
Making your God
When you make your God for MA Ulm, you want it to be either an expander, or a spellcaster.
The first thing to consider is what scales you want.
Order
So as you probably know each point of Order gives you 5% bonus income and reduces events by 2%. Three points of Order as Ulm is a high priority because you want to be making a lot of smiths, pikeneers and castles.
Productivity
All your useful units are resource intensive. The productivity scale is very important to Ulm so you should take at least three points of it.
Heat / Cold
You should take either one heat or one cold. The first thing to consider is whether you want your magma bolts and magma eruptions to be more effective. Fires caused by these spells will last longer in heat dominion and burn out quicker in a cold dominion. The second thing to consider when choosing between one heat and one cold is that cold dominion lets you cross rivers, and hot dominion lets you access mountain provinces. Cold dominion will also hinder cold blooded units like C’tis lizards or your Earth Snake, and reduce effectiveness of Abysians.
Growth
Growth is a good scale however not good enough to sacrifice a useful expander or extra magic paths. You should either leave this neutral or take a point of misfortune to pay for one point in Growth.
Fortune / Misfortune
Fortune as Ulm isn’t very good because you should be taking Order to pay for Smiths and soldiers.
Misfortune synergizes with Order because you will get less events. You should take one point in misfortune or two at most to pay for other scales like Growth or Order.
Drain
You should always be taking Drain with Ulm as your Smiths research capabilities aren’t hindered by it. Drain 3 should be used with all your pretenders.
Thrice Horned Bore
Earth Snake
This God is your most reliable expander. Use him if you are unsure about the Thrice Horned Bore. There isn’t much to be said about this one, throw him at indies and enjoy your extra cash.
Allfather
This God can give you some magic diversity. He gives you air access for things like fog warriors and mass flight. He has astral and death which can gear you up for fun things in the late game.
Your mage selection
So as MA Ulm you have three mages.
This is the Priest Smith.
This mage has one fire, two earth and is a level one priest. He can only be recruited from your capital.
This mage provides ten resources which is very useful for massing your resource intensive troops.
This mage will be the unit you will be recruiting from your capital almost 24/7, and this is because he can cast a spell called Iron Blizzard. This mage only has a forge bonus of one, so you should instead forge items with the next mage I’ll be discussing.
Research targets for making this mage useful are:
Evocation 3 for Iron Darts
Evocation 6 for Iron Blizzard
The Master Smith.
He will be the mage you will be mass producing in your other fortresses.
He will be the one melting enemies with magma eruptions, casting useful buffs like Legions of Steel and forging useful items for your thugs. Like the Priest Smith, this mage produces ten resources. He has a level two forge bonus which means he can forge items cheaper.
This mage has random magic access. You have a 20% chance per Master Smith produced to get one level in Fire, Earth, Air and Astral. Arguably the most useful of these is the Air random, since you can start site searching for air gems, forge Owl Quills and cast Rain of Stones. The extra earth magic can help you cast Earthquake without forging Earth Boots, an extra point in Fire magic helps you cast useful evocations and forge numerous items. The Astral point will help site searching and defend against mind hunts, but unless you have a pretender geared to make astral boosters it is hard to make these useful.
You can forge numerous useful items with this mage such as Earth Boots, Girdles of Might, and much more, all at a healthy discount.
Research targets for making this mage useful are:
Conjuration 3 for Summon Earthpower
Evocation 5 for Earthquake
Evocation 6 for Magma Eruption
Evocation 7 for Rain of Stones
Next up is the…
Black Priest
The Black Priests are basically cheaper, unarmoured Priest Smiths with leadership and somewhat useless random magic. Unless your are getting attacked and need gold or you need to domkill someone, you should not be making these mages.
They do not have immunity to Drain. They do however have Holy level two and the inquisitor skill, which makes them preach twice as effectively against foreign dominion. This means each Black Priest essentially preaches as though it’s a level four priest against foreign dominion.
This is very useful for domkilling and getting rid of unwanted scales in your lands.
This unit can cast Iron Darts and Iron Blizzard but you should be careful when positioning them as a stray arrow can kill them very easily.
Research targets for making this mage useful are:
Evocation 3 for Iron Darts
Evocation 6 for Iron Blizzard
Troop Selection and Commanders
As Ulm you have the most useful army in the game. You have lots of specialists and a very good main unit in the Pikeneer.
You have three main troops:
Pikeneers
Infantry with Tower Shield
Crossbowmen
Pikeneers
Pikes are very useful early on, and continue to be useful late on. They are very good at killing indies, they have the longest reaching weapon in the game. You should make these to expand and later on to block the enemies from reaching your mages.
Tower Shield Infantry
You should use these to draw arrow fire away from everything else. These units have morning stars which have 2+ attack against enemies with shields, very useful for killing heavy cavalry or men at arms.
Crossbowmen
These are unique from other crossbowmen. They have an arbalest which deals 15 armour piercing damage, which is extremely good. However they have a drawback: they take three battle turns to reload. So to use these effectively, make sure you have the first turn of combat, play defensively, make sure they are behind a wall of pikes and make sure the enemy is attacking you first, don’t use these offensively unless you absolutely know you can win.
Later on in the game you should be recruiting mostly black plate infantry however if you need a lot of infantry somewhere quickly don’t be afraid to make a swarm of regular infantry.
Specialist troops:
The Guardian
Guardians deal fatigue damage to sacreds, so if you are getting rushed, or are up against enemies using a lot of sacreds, make guardians!
Black Knights
These units are very resource intensive knights. You can use them to raid, or flank the enemies rear in a fight. This can be very useful if you catch their rear by surprise and kill their mages.
Sappers
These guys have five siege bonus and are equipped with crossbows which makes them quite useful, however they are resource intensive and cost 2x as much as regular infantry. Use them when you need to siege, 10 sappers are worth 50 regular infantry when in a siege!
You have a diverse variety of commanders however the best unmounted commander is definitely the commander with the morningstar. This commander has 80 leadership and the morningstar has a longer reach than the hammer.
The second more expensive and more mobile commander is the Black Lord, which is a thuggable and more survivable than regular Ulm commanders.
The siege engineer counts as 40 men whilst sieging but isn’t a very good commander.
Thank you for reading
I sincerely hope you enjoyed my rambling guide.
Good luck Ulm players across the world