I'm playing LA Ulm and I may be screwed to death by my bad opening position anyway, but lemme give out some pointers beside army scripting.Mister_Sinister wrote:Does anyone have any advice for playing LA Ulm? More specifically, some advice on early expansion and early research would be very much appreciated.
The first and most important thing to realize about LA Ulm is that it has two mages that can be built even without a fort. One is a cheap S1 caster that only costs 70 gold.
This means that while everyone else is taking 5-6 turns to build their second mage recruitment center, you can have two, three, or even four mage recruitment centers up already pumping out a relatively cheap researcher every turn. It is not uncommon for LA Ulm to be hitting 300 research/turn by the end of year 1 so long as you have the gold and Magic scales.
Also, you will significantly outnumber everyone else in the mage department. And while S1 mages are not awesome on their own, what this means is that LA Ulm will actually have enough mages to do proper communions. This is why I'd say going for Thau1 first may be better so you can pump up some communions - no one else can do it earlier and faster than LA Ulm, which is crucial given how communions eventually get screwed by mass-kill spells like Rain of Stones. Besides which, Thau has some decent Astral fighting spells too - Mind Burn and Paralyze being fairly easy to reach with Ulm's research potential.
For your cap mages you can go as K said and get Earth casters, which are okay (consider Iron Darts too). But do note you can also get Fortune Tellers, who can be added to communions and spam bigger Nature and Death spells; and in numbers they've proven fairly good at bouncing bad events on your cap if you take Misfortune.
Finally, do note that your Vamp Counts are probably your best bloodhunters, to the point I'm actually not entirely sure if you should even rush for SDRs and make your bad Blood 1 mages bloodhunt. Instead have your Pretender hunt and get you an initial outlay, which summons a Vamp Count. That vamp count then goes to a province and blood hunts (plus creates chaff to patrol away the unrest), which eventually gets you enough slaves for a second count. Rinse and repeat until the empire is covered by vampire counts. This gives you a huge blood income, and if coupled with Growth (plus the thrall patrollers) you may not even see any real drop in income at all.
Also, don't completely ignore the tower shield dudes. Yes, pikes are generally better but if you encounter a real opponent with massed X-bows you will really need a shielded dude.
