[Wendigo]

To the original poster:

You will likely do not know this as a new player, but back in Dom I the battle summons were considered to be overpowered (it was pretty simple to destroy big armies with just a force of summoners, while suffering _no_ loses), thus most of those battle summons were downed to require gems, with 2 exceptions: phantasmal critters, and raise the dead/skeletons spells.

Rejoice that you can still use battle summons as a Death magic user!

If you really do not want to get those you should deploy your mages forward in the battlefield, so that they are in range for their evocations (*) or not deploy them at all and keep them at your labs. Obviously, you should also get some research in alternate battle magics (Evocation, Thaumaturgy, Alteration...) so that you know other spells.

Do not dismiss Decay as a useless spell. The AI switches to it when faced with a high HP critter, and it's a spell that can potentially kill a Pretender. Back in a DomI MP game, a single dusk elder of mine killed 3(!) Iron Dragons on his own using this spell. That's 75 gems worth of Const9 critters killed with a thau1 spell. This spell shines vs big boys with low MR (like Crushers, Spiders, Krakens...)

I generally concur with Graeme regarding the ret of the thread, 90% of the complaints about the spell AI from new players are due to bad battlefield placement or lack of research. There are indeed previous threads about this.

(*) range of spells/missiles is meassured in squares (you can turn on the grid with a key command to see it), the battlefield is around 54 squares long IIRC, so a mage in the back will barely be able to hit the middle with a 30some range spell.