Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Animal horde can be made more effective by breaking up the results into squads that make the best use of their abilities. Sticking everything you get into one mass of animals doesnt do very well in battle. If you look at the speeds, morale, the hit points, the special abilities.. and then divide them up to use them as flyers, stealth, boosting infantry, flankers, emergency fills of front-line armies, etc... then I think people would be abit happier with them.

I try to never use vinemen/vineogres alone. They are free, dont eat food, and have high morale. But I find their best use is that if I mix them in with my 30 spearmen then my spearmen take less hits, stay in the fight longer, and can get more stabs in on the battle because they arent the only target on the field. If I did an AAR Id say something like "OK men, be sure to use those moving bushes I mixed in with you. Hide behind them and stab around them."

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Mass regeneration is good on high hitpoint creatures like the ogres. Not that good on low HP units

Mass protection is good especially on the ogres too because it mainly brings up protection from 5 to 10, which is an increase of 5. In case of a high former protection it only add 1.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Yeah, the trick to using vine ogres is to understand what not to use them for. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif They're very cost effective against armor piercing/negating attacks, but you have to think more along the lines of longdead chaff. They're great for fatiguing people out, they're not undead so those counters are out, they're cheap to mass, and they buff a lot better than longdead because of the HP. Still, they don't have good long term survivability no matter what you do, so I tend to just mass them as reserve troops which slowly accumulate until there is a decisive battle I can throw them in. They don't have an upkeep and don't eat, so just leave them steadily ammassing rather than using them for general expansion where they'll quickly dwindle.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

One of my biggest complaints with Vine Ogres is how slow they are to summon. I think best case (Vine King + Crown of Vine King) is 3 ogres a turn? (I'm open to correction on this.) Early in the game, 2 ogres a turn is more like it. 2 or 3 vine ogres couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag.

So you can have your mage sit there for 15 turns and have 30 or maybe 45 Vine Ogres for 30 gems. 45 Vine Ogres is a chunky force, sure, but it's a painfully slow way of building an army. With Animal Horde, you can use lions as archer attackers, spiders can work with your poison cloud emitting troops, hawks can attack the enemy rear, and wolves can, erm, tire the enemy out a bit. And I'm not sure the army of vine ogres which took 15 turns to summon (without buffing magic) would survive much longer than the animal horde (without buffing magic).

I'm sure there are usable strategies with Vine Ogres. And yes, if you've got nature mages with nothing better to do, there are worse things to do than summoning a couple of them a turn. As Gandalf said, I guess they bulk out an army a bit, and it's nice that they don't eat. But by the time you had a decent number of Vine Ogres, I think Animal Horde would be a much better use of the gems.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

I see Vine Ogres more as a mid to late game thing, despite the lowish research level. With lots of mages and lots of gems you can make armies of them.

They are not supposed to really kill much, but provide a wall of flesh for enemy units to run into.

Animal horde is much less efficient for that purpose.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Vine Kings don't have a head slot. In theory you could give them treelord's staff but practically this staffs are very expensive for a +1 bonus.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

No, merlinme, you arent thinking on a big enough scale. First of all, an army of vine ogres is like a million times better than what you get for your nature gems when casting Summon Animals. Not only can they take far more damage but they can dish it out, too. As for the scale tho: your problem here is your are thinking in terms of one or two mages summoning for 15 turns. What you really need is 12 mages summoning for 3 turns.

And now you are probably thinking to yourself "well, thats really excessive". But the truth is that its not. This is what is called a Summoning Factory and is a very common late game tactic. You set up a Factory like this that churns out 20+ vine ogres every turn (usually in combination with a spell like Mother Oak) and just watch as your enemies are crushed before you. The VOs eventually become your army core and your national troops fill out the rest of the space in specialized roles.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Well, maybe. It's true that Nature doesn't seem to have any really game winning summoning spells at the high levels, so maybe 2 Vine Ogres a turn for two gems is a good use of your average mage's time. A very large army of troops which don't rout and don't eat is obviously a good thing. I'd still prefer the Summon Horde as more bang for your buck in the short term, though.

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

Problem with early summons is that you can't get most of them in numbers that actually matter. In addition to paying the gems, you have to keep one mage away from research for one turn... and all that for only one fire drake or one wyvern?

It's sad not every single summon spell has it's higher level equivalent like summon wraith and summon legion of wraith. The later is much more useful than the first

Re: Pls explain how early summoning spells are use
 

I play SP. It's a caveat worth mentioning.

Three pages in and no one has mentioned my favorite early summon spell in the game - crossbreeding. Granted, usable only by a small number of nations, and requiring particular scales to be really effective, but it's pure joy when it works (IMO, a basilisk alone is more than worth the cost of casting).

Sans Blood, often I find my early-mid summons are more driven by what I have that's disposable than what I really want. For example, in any game where I have death magics, I find that a serious chunk of my early game death gems are going to Skull Mentors. So I rarely think all that much about any death summons early on. Corpse Man Construction, on the other hand, is a great spell for those capable of using it, even early on. You pick it up on the way to Skull Mentors, you also grab the Lightning Rod on the way there as well (which doesn't use Air gems to create, so you're saving that resource for the corpsemen), and it uses air gems which aren't known for their great summons. LA Caelum loooooves corpsemen.

PrinzMegaherz - I watched your little animation all the way through, twice. Pretty funny.