Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?

[Yossar]

Huzurdaddi said:

Hmm awesome would I guess indicate that it is one of the best schools. Let's define awesome as top two.

So let's compare to air. Air has a number of area effect high damage, Armor Negating, no MR check spells that are feared by all. It is widely considered to be the best battle field magic. Orb lighting, false horrors, thunderstike, wrathful skies, storm these are all considered to be "awesome" spells. I don't know if it really is #1 but many people consider it thus.

Now #2 is much harder. It could be earth. They have a number of very powerful battle spells. Blade wind, Petrify, magma eruption there are a few and they are hard ( or impossible ) to resist.

Perhaps #2 is death. Life drain can not be resisted and it is 100 precision. Death has fine battlefield summons. Banefire is considered one of the better direct damage dealing spells. It has a vast array of battlefield spells and many do not have an MR check.

No, IMO ( and I could be wrong here ) Astral magic is at best the #4 battle magic in the game. Exactly in the middle of the pack. If this is what goes for "awesome" then so be it.

Astral's not a school for dealing damge on the battlefield. It's a more general school. It's definitely not useful in every battle, but in the right situations, it's very, very good. Antimagic is a huge help against things like Illithids. Doom is great for making large Groups of SCs much more vulnerable to afflictions. Battle Fortune/Will of the Fates are great defensive spells for any unit. Communion is always good and almost necessary for some high level spells. And a group of astrologers with as many spell focuses, starshine skullcaps, boots of quickness, crystal coins, and rune smashers as you can afford can be extremely scary.

Air is good, but a ring of tamed lightning or thunder ward takes away a lot of its punch if you know it's coming. And the best air spell, storm, can be duplicated by an item.

[Arryn]

Death has the best summons in the game IMO. I even prefer the Nature summons to the Air ones. And once IW fixes the anti-morale loss spells so they're effective vs. False Horror, Air should be readily negatable. But until then, Air is #1, with Death #2, Earth a distant #3, and Nature at #4. IMO, FWIW. YMMV.

[Huzurdaddi]

It's definitely not useful in every battle, but in the right situations

Hence middle of the pack. IMO. Although I have stood corrected that if you have the correct cross-paths ( in particular death ) then it becomes much better.

And a group of astrologers with as many spell focuses, starshine skullcaps, boots of quickness, crystal coins, and rune smashers

That's a lot of hardware to put on a 10 hit point body. You may cry if you get hit with a flames from the sky.

[Yossar]

Huzurdaddi said:

Hence middle of the pack. IMO. Although I have stood corrected that if you have the correct cross-paths ( in particular death ) then it becomes much better.

Well, I'm just saying that its hard to rank them since everything is situational and most things are counterable. Against an army of mechanical men or other lightning immune creature, air is not going to be worth a whole lot. Death, on the other hand, will probably obliterate that army with shadow bLasts and nether bolts.

That's a lot of hardware to put on a 10 hit point body. You may cry if you get hit with a flames from the sky.

Hence "as much as you can afford." Teleport them all into a seiged castle the turn when the opponent storms and that won't be a problem.

Astral doesn't blow stuff up. It's most "awesome" spells are cast in support of a conventional army, a force multiplier. And used like that it's incredibly powerful. A lot of its applications require you to mass spellcasters, but with them you can massively weaken the enemy army and strengthen your own.

One battlefield spell makes your entire army lucky and another curses the entire enemey army. This on its own turns an equal battle into a slaughter.

At a lower level spamming Paralyse breaks an enemy formation into bitesize pieces, reducing the impact of its attack and allowing yours to beat it piecemeal. Again, turning an equal battle into a winning one.

You can kill enemy SCs without having to build your own.

Enslaving a few key units can turn a battle. I once, as Arco, fought a battle with Caelum. Two enslaved Mammoths turned the tide by themselves.

Armies with many magical units become terribly vulnerable to being destroyed or taken over (again, with battlefield-wide spells).

And Communion gives you the flexibility to be able to cast the high-level high-fatigue spells without spending (and risking) a fortune in magic items.

Except in the very early game - when Raise Skeletos is King - Astral on the battlefield is much more powerful than Death (Drain Life is a fine spell, but only hurts one target, and needs a D4 caster). And this is OK, because Death has many excellent summons which Astral doesn't.

Agreed that Air is also very powerful, but in a different (rather more direct) way, and has different applications. I wouldn't want to cast Wrathful Skies in support of an army - my elephants wouldn't thank me for it.

I like that the magical schools are different, and have to be applied in quite different ways. It's what makes this game so interesting. Appealing for more summons for Astral just leads us down the path of homogenising the game in pursuit of fairness or balance, and losing both the flavour and the challenge of learning how to use all the different options currently available.

[Chazar]

Mark the Merciful said:
Agreed that Air is also very powerful, but in a different (rather more direct) way, and has different applications. I wouldn't want to cast Wrathful Skies in support of an army - my elephants wouldn't thank me for it.

Sure, especially since I just showed you a few turns ago how I successfully used WrathfulSkies to kill a third of my own main army (despite of an active ThunderWard spell) against your lousy 25-point PD......I really bit myself somewhere when I saw that batte replay...