Re: my mages cast crap spells?
 

Playing devil's advocate here, motivated by the phrase "biggest problem": All of those ideas sound nice. At the same time, to a certain extent the art of war is about learning what works and what doesn't within the constraints you have, and as long as I can figure out WHY things work the way they do (Storm of Thorns optimizes for damage) I can still optimize. Stupid mages are one thing. Stupid, random and uncontrollable mages would be something entirely different. (You could still optimize, but it would be along the lines of "don't research the conjuration tree if you want to be able to cast Fire Storm." No fun.) I don't think the UI is a problem as it stands.

But, yeah. #2 and #5 would be especially great, and I could see how #4 would help some people a lot. Maybe we could agree that the combat UI is the area most urgently needing attention? (Well, that and disbanding units.) Although I'm all pumped about automatic site searching working properly in the next patch. Yay for Johan!

-Max

Re: my mages cast crap spells?
 

Did you try to cast 5 buffs and then attack? Was there already too many summons in play then?

Something that looks fun in the theory at least is to cast Foul Vapors, Shark attack, invulnerability, soul vortex, summon earth power (or fire shield or personal luck or personal regeneration), then attack.

Re: my mages cast crap spells?
 

It's been long enough I don't remember what all I tried. What I do recall was that if I scripted any spells the AI did it's own thing and utterly ignored the script.

I had enough good items I didn't have that much use for buffing, anyway. The force I was facing couldn't get past my regeneration even unbuffed.