Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

Golems with Stymphalian Armour and Winged Shoes/Boots of Quickness make excellent tramplers. Add anti-magic and a charcoal shield for more fun, or give your Golem the full "anti-the-person-who-hits-me" outfit. Bane Lords look funnier when they are flat.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

Simply Magic Levels and Paths are counted much more than pure fighting skill.

So a Banelord, even if thougher than an Harbringer, or more skilled than a Golem, lacks of any magic skill.

Harbringer can trapeze, mistform and mirror image, and with a +1A item can wrath too.
A Golem with a Starshine Cap can teleport, and he's plenty of buffs like body ethereal, personal luck, astral weapon/shield, resist magic. And it's lifeless, this make enemy SC unable to lifedrain him, even if he doesn't regenerate unless in a lab, in the lab IIRC he heals afflictions too.

However it's true they cost a lot of pearls meanwhile you can easily build a Banelord or better a Tartarian factory.

IMO Astral really needs for some uniques.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

I really would like a summon that is cost effective before a unique. Either troops or commanders. Heck both would be nice http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

Why genericize things? If you give summons that are like summons from other magic schools, are you later going to want to give something like Communion, Teleport, Dispel, and Luck powers to all of the other flavors of magic?

Communion makes Astral scary, as well as the various astral items and spells that add magic levels, and not just astral levels either. As the magic that deals with magic, it has a lot of potential for players who use it from a more sophisticated perspective than just "it isn't in the top 2 cuz it doesn't have the best summons or battle spells".

PvK

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

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.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

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.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

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.

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.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

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.

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.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

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.

Re: Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?
 

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif 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...http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rant.gif...I really bit myself somewhere when I saw that batte replay...http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif