Vanilla Summon Costs

[Endoperez]

There are lots of people who only play singleplayer, or just the demo, and still think the AI is hard and impossible to beat, and would be quite confused indeed if they bought the game and found out they don't know research levels up to 4 any more.

As an example, is LA Vanheim good or crap? There was that thread about some other forum thinking it was so bad it was almost useless, and discussion about their mages' randoms and the skinshifters and stuff like that.

Similarly, here we've had huge discussions about monkey nations' PD, and about Ulm. Some people think Ulm in all ages suck, some think MA Ulm sucks, some think EA Ulm is too good already - unless someone frequents these forums, major changes will come out of nowhere. Even if someone frequents here, some changes seem to come out of nowhere.

Some changes are good and universal. Price changes are relatively easy to adjust to, and changing Summon Animals to 20 to 30 beasts isn't that big of a change. Something like changing Dragon Mastery to Conjuration 1, 10 gems and Cave Drakes to 20 gems for 4 drakes, +2 from mastery, +1 for every level above needed? Suddenly some nations can pump out lots of Cave Drakes in the early game with one turn's expense from a Great Mother pretender. The spell might get used now, but all changes are scary.

There's also the fact that Shrapnel is still selling Dominions, and shipping the game with a manual that is very clearly outdated is bad. If people can at least trust that the manual gives the right idea about where you find what spells and what they do, they can plan without having the game always open.

EDIT:

Sombre said:
The manual is already pretty hopeless. It's been wrong on almost everything I've actually needed/wanted to look up.

The manual could use an update, but I use it to check spells' details. Where can I find this spell, what level caster does it take, how much fatigue does it cost? It gives me that. I also use it to check probabilities from the table at page 5, and no one has proven that wrong yet. I also learned out the effects of fatigue and morale from tha manual, and no one has proven that wrong either. My manual is right in almost everything, and wrong in few things. It's also missing some stuff that should have made it in for the release (number of towers in castles, quickness stacking, things like that), and lots of stuff that was added in patches. As I said, it could use an update. But it never was, and isn't, hopeless.