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[sprinkled chariot]

How you, guys, play MA Ermor / Lemuria?

[E. Albright]

If you're doing SP, turtle like mad and cast doom globals to cripple everyone else. If you're doing MP, diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy.

[BFEL]

How you, guys, play MA Ermor / Lemuria?

Kill everything ever.

[Cthulhu]

Ohhh boy I somehow convinced myself to start playing this again.  I feel like there's so much shit I don't understand though.

Playing a single player game as MA Ulm cause I trust nothing but the steel in my hand and the brothers at my side.  Eight players on the map that's a big disc with an underground and floating islands, got a pretty choice spot too, right on the only way to the northwest floating island, which happens to have a throne of ascension on it.  Haven't gotten around to conquering it yet since there's a big regiment of cataphracts there.

Just in time for my first real war I hit Evo 6, swiss-cheesed a giant army of Jotun with iron blizzard.  I got the lucky air smith + air site so almost all of my researchers have quills and I can't imagine we're not way ahead of the others on research.  Working on getting magma eruption online but I haven't been very fortunate with my smiths so I don't have many that can cast it.

Now I'm getting to that phase of the game I don't really know how to play.  Things start getting very micro-intensive and turns take a long time and my initial goals are done and I don't really know where to go next cause I almost never get this far.

I know low-stakes games like singleplayer should be experimental and I should see what works, but a little guidance would go a long way to helping me figure this silly game out.

So what would you guys suggest I do as MA Ulm, when I've got several big armies and a few good victories against Jotunheim under my belt, enough to probably shove straight into their territory.  I killed like half of their main army last turn.  I just hit evo 6 and I'm thinking construction would probably be best to start pumping out earth boots for magma eruption.  After that, I dunno.  I guess that starts the thug/SC stage of the game but that's something I have no idea about.  My Allfather is A4S6D3, so I can make bane lords with a skull staff, and equip them with whatever, fire brands and shit.

Past that I dunno man.  Is Iron Angel good?  Is it worth going that deep into conjuration? (I guess tartarians are inevitable so it's on the way?)  What else should I be looking at with Ulm?  I'm getting into terra incognita.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Not experienced with MA Ulm specifically. But as you say experimentation is the key here. Might as well go with conjuration/construction thugs. Your smiths get summon earthpower and earth elementals while you're at it, those are always good.

I always did prefer armies + army buffs over thugs, if you can grab some buffs from alteration tree. Just to give options.

Either way go and skewer some jotuns.

[EnigmaticHat]

To be blunt, thugs are weak.  They have situational value but because of the Dom4 nerfs the online advice currently overvalues them quite a bit.  Now, if you happen to have a really good national thug...

For noobs, I would say spammable combat magic + army is the way to go.

[Cthulhu]

I have heard people suggest that around, that SCs and Thugs aren't as big a deal in Dom4.  Spamming combat magic with an army is definitely something I can do.  I'm really reaming the Jotun.

[Frumple]

Random MA Ulm thoughts: Iron Angel's pretty a'ight, iirc. Can definitely use regen/more reinvig/better weapons/etc., but they're not the worst thug/low SC chassis by any measure. Obviously better if your opponent is actually using sacred troops.

You've already noticed you've got decent workhorse combat spell access, so... keep using those. You should be more or less oozing master smiths out of your pores.

If you've got the D income, consider using the allfather to pump out a few revenants, who can take up the staff and start making staves for themselves/forging cheap D items*, or spamming raise spells in combat to chaff down the giants. Good way to bootstrap some D forging industry when you don't have native/indie casters available.

Don't forget your remote attack spells, and don't fear to research them up and use them -- E actually has some fairly nasty ones, if you can scrounge up boosters for your fairly anemic casters.

You might consider playing around with communions a bit -- one of the few easy-ish ways to get stronger battlefield spell access with MA Ulm's kinda' shitty path access (I actually hadn't noticed it until I checked just now -- did you know MA Ulm is literally the only nation in the middle age that doesn't have at least a chance at native, non-boosted 4X casters?). Ulm's even got really cheap access to the slave crystals via hammer'd master smiths if you don't want to screw around too hard with the scripting.

I'd probably recommend a lot of trinket forging if you're not already doing it -- those master smiths with hammers you should have a bazillion of can be putting out one gem 5X cost items to make your commanders more troublesome. The priest smiths you've been producing at the capital (... right? You have been?) can do the same thing for only a gem more. Warbows+aiming eyes from your A randoms (and owl quills, when they're not forging more offensive stuff), reinvig/MR (strength belt, lodestone) from anything, AM/crowns for the S randoms, fire jars for your F randoms looking to put out elementals or somethin', there's just a bunch of stuff you can be doing there if you've got the income and the mostly-idle casters. Remember: O (monthly forging) is Ulm's friend.

*Skelliespam amulets are pretty much always useful if you're using any non-caster commanders whatsoever. It takes all of 2D to set up a black servant/bane venom factory -- with a 2A forger somewhere, you can make them fly, too! _{And all of 1N gets nice stealth boosts on top of that, if you have N income you're not really using for anything} Jotuns are usually pretty gold intensive, so a nice flock of BVC carriers on their high income provinces can cripple them in cheerfully short order.

[Shadowlord]

The quills are a good idea. You'll want to make a few dwarven hammers for the smiths that you'll have making stuff. The 4 gem discount is huge when you're making 5 gem items.

Iron blizzard spam is pretty effective. Priest smiths are good for that. You can also give them earth boots or let them cast summon earthpower at the start of the battle, and then they can cast magma eruption. Any of your master smiths can do the same to cast magma eruption too, but you probably want to keep most of them researching or forging things instead.

Iron angels can be good SCs. The smithing discount is a huge advantage when kitting them out, since it means you can make equipment far more cheaply than your opponents. I'd also look at Earth Blood Deep Well (Ench 7, requires E6 skill) to increase your earth gem income, which can let you make more stuff or summon more iron angels or other units. One item I'd suggest would be the shield of gleaming gold. It gives awe, which makes it difficult for normal (non-mindless, iirc) units to attack. Awe's no protection against undead and the like, of course. (This tends to become a problem if you run into Asphodel, because their manikins' sleep vines can incapacitate your iron angels)

Frumple mentioned remote attack spells - The only earth one I know of is Earth Attack at conjuration 8. It's pretty good: It summons an earth elemental to wreck a commander in the target province. It doesn't hit anyone hiding (only mind hunt does that), and is less effective against giants (because they're too big to trample), but is super effective against normal sized units. You need someone with E5 skill to cast it. My go-to method was to cast Troll King's Court (Conj 6) to get an E3 troll king, then give him earth boots and a blood stone. You'd need to get someone up to B3E2 to make blood stones, but getting blood up to B3 isn't too difficult.

[Frumple]

Besides earth attack (which is pretty easily one of the most vicious assassination spells in the entire game), was primarily thinking of melancholia (which is, to be fair, thaum 6), which is a pretty alright province wrecking one, if a titch expensive. Crumble's there, and if you've got a silly amount of evo research there's always volcanoes, ahehehe. And blight, if you can get some 2E1D somewhere -- blight is a freaking nightmare of a spell, honestly. Cheap remote BVC hit with added gold loss and an unrest kick, guaranteed to make someone's life miserable if used vigorously.

[sprinkled chariot]

How does one protect himself from acid?
Are lizards immune to heat fatigue?
How probince temp affects fatigue?
What are the ways of increasing cold aura of unit?
Do astral fires set enemies on fire for prolonged time?
Being on fire is some real effect or just ,, fancy" graphics?
Did anybody manage to successfully deploy bless strategy for ermor/ lemuria?
Are angels supposed to be that creepy?
How devastating is illwinter spell?
How do I calculate fatigue/ damage effect for chill/ heat/ fire dhield effects?

[EnigmaticHat]

Oh geez... ok, for starters, Illwinter sucks.  All it does is cause unrest everywhere, but the faction(s?) that can cast it are super gold reliant and have a low number of troops, so they're hurt more by unrest than their opponents would be.

[Shadowlord]

It got cast recently in a game I'm playing now. It turned all my provinces cold, which would be bad for my cold blooded units, but then it disappeared the next turn.

I figured someone whacked the pretender who cast it.

[EnigmaticHat]

I guess it would have a niche use if, for example, you were getting dompushed by a heat 3 faction.

The good news about Illwinter is it takes blood slaves, so its vastly cheaper to cast then most of the other globals in the game.

[Il Palazzo]

Pushing cold everywhere in the world is rather useful for cold-reliant nations like Niefelheim. You want those giants to get all the stat boosts they can get, and it makes it easier to kill stuff with Murdering Winter (or so it says on the tin). Extra fatigue on non-resistant enemy mages and troops is also of use.
Then there's the random Niefel giant(s?) that attacks enemy provinces every now and then.

Granted, I've only cast it once, in Dom3, so it might have been changed.