Vanilla Summon Costs

[Omnirizon]

I can't entirely agree with the OP.

certainly, there are some damned useless summons.
but as vtb notes: national summonable sacreds can be OK sometimes.

and spells that summon lots of pretty good troops at reasonable prices are good, like the higher level, often national, summons. spells where you get 20ish units around 30ish gems; units with over 20 HP, and str and prot over 15. But I don't know, I'm only in my 2nd MP game, so maybe these are actually useless. They look pretty tasty to me though.

[Edi]

The most problematic summons are the various low to mid-level summons that cost 15 to 30 gems for 5 to 20 units that are essentially worthless. Many of those are nature summons, but others as well. The cost efficiency is so bad that you are always better off using those gems to forge items or distributing them among battle mages. You get more use out of them that way.

[Cerlin]

I play Agartha a lot, and because of that I like to use low level national summons they have in all ages.

But vanella summons? I am sure that I have used some but generally they seem somewhat wasteful. I do not build a lot of thugs generally, but I like to save my gems for mage item, mid game summons, and the big late game ones.

[Jazzepi]

Edi said:
The most problematic summons are the various low to mid-level summons that cost 15 to 30 gems for 5 to 20 units that are essentially worthless. Many of those are nature summons, but others as well. The cost efficiency is so bad that you are always better off using those gems to forge items or distributing them among battle mages. You get more use out of them that way.

This is exactly what I'm talking about D: They spells end up being so junky they're useless. I'd really like to see the spells retooled to be more useful. I think it'd be a lot more interesting to see T'ien Ch'i's soldiers supplemented with a contingent of ancestral ghosts, instead of just more of the same national troops as cannon fodder because the gems are just too valuable to waste on low ratio, low power, summons.

Jazzepi

[Dedas]

Yes, that is what I've always thought. All the serpent/drake spells for example - pure crap. Do anyone ever use them (besides from SP). Even the spell that is intended to strengthen them is bad (dragon master). I mean lv8 and 30 gems to get "not one but three" of them. What is up with that?

[Sombre]

Well this is kinda my speciality area. If you go back to the old CBM thread you can see my analysis of various vanilla summons and suggestions to improve them in CBM.

Many, many summons are improved in CBM, though sometimes I think qm doesn't go far enough. Or at least as far as I would.

Summon animals in CBM is a hot spell though. It scales (quite a lot) and is cheap and in the right terrain you get some nice stuff. Just as an example.

[Dedas]

The CBM is a way to solve the issues of course, but I rather have an explanation by Kristoffer how he justifies the high costs. I mean doesn't he like animals?

[sector24]

I love animals. They're delicious!

[Twan]

Dedas said:
The CBM is a way to solve the issues of course, but I rather have an explanation by Kristoffer how he justifies the high costs. I mean doesn't he like animals?

It's a good question.

Compared to dom2, national army sizes you encounter in midgame have been multiplied by 3 or 4, and so battlefield wide dammage spells kill 3 or 4 times more troops when their cost is unchanged, lone SCs are perhaps a little less efficient but teams with thugs and mages are far better with the new morale system...

Only troops summons in most cases got no love at all (vine ogres had even their cost increased iirc) when gold allows to recruit far more regulars. It looks like a strange design decision in a game where half the rituals are troop summons.

(another one is not upgrading alchemy results, a gem should worth 30 or more gp with the devaluation of gold imo, I wonder if anyone uses gold alchemy out of extreme emergency, or the old trade price of 10 gold for a gem).

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:
The CBM is a way to solve the issues of course, but I rather have an explanation by Kristoffer how he justifies the high costs. I mean doesn't he like animals?

I'm not KO, but I believe most spells in the games remain pretty much exactly at the rough estimate cost levels of when they were first added, before anyone had used them much beyond testing them for bugs. Which is of course the only way to start, but the reason they were not changed I believe has more to do with the fact KO would much rather add new content than balance what is already there, especially since mods can address many of those issues.

Also, I'd note that Dom2 to Dom3 changed remarkably little in terms of troop summons being worthwhile, almost all of the useless ones in Dom3 were already that way.

Oh, and on alchemy, I still use it a fair amount, but it's obviously rarely a good choice when you in a strong position and have lots of other options.