[Cainehill]

On the other paw, regarding putting the gems at risk - I fail to see why artifacts (unique items) are greyed out from the forging list, while summoned uniques are not.

After all - shouldn't people want to gamble on whether or not a particular artifact is available?

Answer - I think that losing the gems for a summoning is very disheartening for the newer players who may not have realized that, say, Ice Devils were a limitted commodity and that they could be throwing their gems away. It's irritating even for the players who know the risk.

Making unique items work the same way would add even more irritation factor to the game....

Personally, I think it might be nice if the summoning mechanism were tweaked a little bit. After all - you get shafted when you create a unique item at the same time as another person, or cast the same global in the same turn as another. If two people both summoned the Last ice devil the same turn, one loses out, so graying out the summons wouldn't eliminate risk.

That's probably going quite a bit too far towards player friendliness though. But - if the summons doesn't work, the player could lose a random 25-75% of the gems normally used, not all the gems.

Or at a minimum, for the new players especially, the interface could do something to stress that the gems might be wasted if the summons has already been cast / all the critters summoned.