Vanilla Summon Costs

[Jazzepi]

Does anyone actually use vanilla summons, providing no magic diversity or thug/SC in addition, except as an absolute last resort? I can't think of a worse waste of gems then summoning a handful of units at a relatively decent price, as with vine ogres + summoning head piece, or summoning large quantities of really terrible fodder for far too many gems?

Personally I think the cost ratio on most summons should be lowered. Either make the cost less, which still incurrs many turns of mages sitting around summoning wasting their research and forging time to make doodz, or make the number of effects greater which would both lower the number of mages needed to cast, *and* provide cheaper troops.

Either way I think, currently, the basic "here are some doodz" summons aren't terribly useful at the moment.

Jazzepi

[vfb]

I like Call of Winds, and national sacred summons are good.

I've got an MA Mictlan game where I've summoned really quite a lot of Jaguars (Conj 3 spell), along with quite a few Jade Serpents. It's going pretty well.

[Jazzepi]

vfb said:
I like Call of Winds, and national sacred summons are good.

I've got an MA Mictlan game where I've summoned really quite a lot of Jaguars (Conj 3 spell), along with quite a few Jade Serpents. It's going pretty well.

I should have specified that the summon at a distance spells were out, as they're not vanilla. Those clearly have their uses fighting PD, etc.

Jazzepi

[Omnirizon]

I can't entirely agree with the OP.

certainly, there are some damned useless summons.
but as vtb notes: national summonable sacreds can be OK sometimes.

and spells that summon lots of pretty good troops at reasonable prices are good, like the higher level, often national, summons. spells where you get 20ish units around 30ish gems; units with over 20 HP, and str and prot over 15. But I don't know, I'm only in my 2nd MP game, so maybe these are actually useless. They look pretty tasty to me though.

[Edi]

The most problematic summons are the various low to mid-level summons that cost 15 to 30 gems for 5 to 20 units that are essentially worthless. Many of those are nature summons, but others as well. The cost efficiency is so bad that you are always better off using those gems to forge items or distributing them among battle mages. You get more use out of them that way.

[Cerlin]

I play Agartha a lot, and because of that I like to use low level national summons they have in all ages.

But vanella summons? I am sure that I have used some but generally they seem somewhat wasteful. I do not build a lot of thugs generally, but I like to save my gems for mage item, mid game summons, and the big late game ones.

[Jazzepi]

Edi said:
The most problematic summons are the various low to mid-level summons that cost 15 to 30 gems for 5 to 20 units that are essentially worthless. Many of those are nature summons, but others as well. The cost efficiency is so bad that you are always better off using those gems to forge items or distributing them among battle mages. You get more use out of them that way.

This is exactly what I'm talking about D: They spells end up being so junky they're useless. I'd really like to see the spells retooled to be more useful. I think it'd be a lot more interesting to see T'ien Ch'i's soldiers supplemented with a contingent of ancestral ghosts, instead of just more of the same national troops as cannon fodder because the gems are just too valuable to waste on low ratio, low power, summons.

Jazzepi

[silhouette]

Ok, maybe not the place to suggest it, but here's one thing I think would be great, and could make life easier for both the developers and the folks to who do the work to figure out the 'delta' in all the new patches. It's kind of a self-documenting patch feature also.

The developers could write some build targets to automatically generate "null" mods for all the defined game spells, items, creatures, nations, spells, etc, from the original source code base at the time they build the patches. Then deliver these full-content and authoritative null mod files as part of the patch. Once setup, it's easy for the developers since they never have to do more extra work per release to detail what has changed and what is current. And it's super easy for us users, since we always have the ability to check these 'database' parts of the content directly, and nobody needs to do has extra work to create big (and error prone) null mods every time a patch is out (no string searching executables, finding new unit numbers, weapon slots, and trying to decompose *trs files, etc.) As a bonus, it becomes a great modding tutorial in itself, so you can see exactly how the modding commands correspond to the creatures, items, etc, that already exist and use them.

It would also make it easier for us to do larger scale or longer-term projects like a total conversion mod. If I start a lot of work to mod changes into 3.14, and it takes a year to finish, I want it to be easy to propagate those changes into the current 3.xx without having to research the changes in each version between .14 and .xx and manually update things.

Sill

[Saulot]

While your idea has merit, most things cannot be changed through modding, and so this couldn't happen without significant alterations to Dominions. Most likely, the effort required would be too great, and better spent actually creating content, and not just showing us what is already there.