Recruitable Mage Rebalance - seeking comments

[Saber Cherry]

Um, this discussion on lifedrain, while interesting, is getting a little off-topic... but if any of you have any more thoughts on specific overpriced, underpriced, and useless mages, please share them. Or thoughts on whether mages in general are overly powerful/cheap or overly weak/expensive, or just perfect.

[Scott Hebert]

As stated before, several national mages are undercosted (by formula), while at least as many are overcosted.

If we're going to get into summoned commanders, I feel like a blanket increase of 2x to 3x cost on all summoned commanders (except for perhaps the Revenant) would do well.

Specifically, Spectres and Lamia Queens are far too cheap for their abilities. The main issues with these (in particular) are that they have no upkeep; and once you are able to summon one, you will soon easily be able to summon the other.

The large-term ramification of the above issues is that research levels become largely meaningless. That is, your research pool snowballs. And, unlike Revenants, Lamia Queens and Spectres are also quite useful as combat mages.

Suggested solutions:

1) While not possible with Dom2 (I think), giving summoned mages a magic gem upkeep would be one way to limit them.

2) Reduce all summoned mages' research levels to 0.

Anyway, just my thoughts.