[TheMenacer]

I'm not even sure it'd be possible to make the late-game less dependant on SCs without changing the entire base system of the game. Look at it this way, on the one hand, yes, it'd be nice to be able to have your legions of national mages not be obsolete by then, but considering the gradual escalation of magic it's just impossible. The fireball that by pure chance smacks right down in the middle of your mages is annoying, possibly altering the outcome of a battle, but isn't necessarily devastating. The earthquake/rain of stones that completely obliterates the entire lot of them could very well be if it hits your main army, and it will eventually. Important units with low HP just don't scale up alongside everything else. Thus it falls to supercombantants or thugs to shrug off hits that'd otherwise lose you five or six turns worth of recruitment and a potentially a whole bunch of gems.

That's why I think every path/nation should have viable endgame summons, because the current blood/death/astral split is just unbalanced. It'd be nice if we could keep the point of each path without losing its effectiveness by late game, but some paths, like fire for example, just aren't going to be able to do that. Fire being all aboud evocations could feasibly have some ridiculously powerful "smack the entire battlefield for a billion unresistable damage" spell, but without something big and mean to cast it, the poor mages who try are going to get a faceful of tartarian.