Pls explain how early summoning spells are useful

[merlinme]

One of my biggest complaints with Vine Ogres is how slow they are to summon. I think best case (Vine King + Crown of Vine King) is 3 ogres a turn? (I'm open to correction on this.) Early in the game, 2 ogres a turn is more like it. 2 or 3 vine ogres couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag.

So you can have your mage sit there for 15 turns and have 30 or maybe 45 Vine Ogres for 30 gems. 45 Vine Ogres is a chunky force, sure, but it's a painfully slow way of building an army. With Animal Horde, you can use lions as archer attackers, spiders can work with your poison cloud emitting troops, hawks can attack the enemy rear, and wolves can, erm, tire the enemy out a bit. And I'm not sure the army of vine ogres which took 15 turns to summon (without buffing magic) would survive much longer than the animal horde (without buffing magic).

I'm sure there are usable strategies with Vine Ogres. And yes, if you've got nature mages with nothing better to do, there are worse things to do than summoning a couple of them a turn. As Gandalf said, I guess they bulk out an army a bit, and it's nice that they don't eat. But by the time you had a decent number of Vine Ogres, I think Animal Horde would be a much better use of the gems.

[Teraswaerto]

I see Vine Ogres more as a mid to late game thing, despite the lowish research level. With lots of mages and lots of gems you can make armies of them.

They are not supposed to really kill much, but provide a wall of flesh for enemy units to run into.

Animal horde is much less efficient for that purpose.

[calmon]

merlinme said:
One of my biggest complaints with Vine Ogres is how slow they are to summon. I think best case (Vine King + Crown of Vine King) is 3 ogres a turn? (I'm open to correction on this.)

Vine Kings don't have a head slot. In theory you could give them treelord's staff but practically this staffs are very expensive for a +1 bonus.

[PDF]

calmon said:

Vine Kings don't have a head slot. In theory you could give them treelord's staff but practically this staffs are very expensive for a +1 bonus.

In Dom2 Vine Kings had a "built in" Crown of Ivy King (artefact) for +2 bonus so summoned 3 Ogres/turns. It could go up to 4 with a Treelord Staff.
I didn't use them in Dom3 yet so am not sure it's the same, but chances are.

[Ironhawk]

merlinme said:
So you can have your mage sit there for 15 turns and have 30 or maybe 45 Vine Ogres for 30 gems.
...
But by the time you had a decent number of Vine Ogres, I think Animal Horde would be a much better use of the gems.

No, merlinme, you arent thinking on a big enough scale. First of all, an army of vine ogres is like a million times better than what you get for your nature gems when casting Summon Animals. Not only can they take far more damage but they can dish it out, too. As for the scale tho: your problem here is your are thinking in terms of one or two mages summoning for 15 turns. What you really need is 12 mages summoning for 3 turns.

And now you are probably thinking to yourself "well, thats really excessive". But the truth is that its not. This is what is called a Summoning Factory and is a very common late game tactic. You set up a Factory like this that churns out 20+ vine ogres every turn (usually in combination with a spell like Mother Oak) and just watch as your enemies are crushed before you. The VOs eventually become your army core and your national troops fill out the rest of the space in specialized roles.

[merlinme]

Well, maybe. It's true that Nature doesn't seem to have any really game winning summoning spells at the high levels, so maybe 2 Vine Ogres a turn for two gems is a good use of your average mage's time. A very large army of troops which don't rout and don't eat is obviously a good thing. I'd still prefer the Summon Horde as more bang for your buck in the short term, though.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Problem with early summons is that you can't get most of them in numbers that actually matter. In addition to paying the gems, you have to keep one mage away from research for one turn... and all that for only one fire drake or one wyvern?

It's sad not every single summon spell has it's higher level equivalent like summon wraith and summon legion of wraith. The later is much more useful than the first

[Aleph]

I play SP. It's a caveat worth mentioning.

Three pages in and no one has mentioned my favorite early summon spell in the game - crossbreeding. Granted, usable only by a small number of nations, and requiring particular scales to be really effective, but it's pure joy when it works (IMO, a basilisk alone is more than worth the cost of casting).

Sans Blood, often I find my early-mid summons are more driven by what I have that's disposable than what I really want. For example, in any game where I have death magics, I find that a serious chunk of my early game death gems are going to Skull Mentors. So I rarely think all that much about any death summons early on. Corpse Man Construction, on the other hand, is a great spell for those capable of using it, even early on. You pick it up on the way to Skull Mentors, you also grab the Lightning Rod on the way there as well (which doesn't use Air gems to create, so you're saving that resource for the corpsemen), and it uses air gems which aren't known for their great summons. LA Caelum loooooves corpsemen.

PrinzMegaherz - I watched your little animation all the way through, twice. Pretty funny.

[Belcarl]

I find myself using quite a lot of the summons that are noted as bad here, in some situations. Depending on my main stream mages and gem income and what kind of national troops I have. What summons are regarded the best, are usually those who fit in the best for some common cookie-cutter strategies. Agreed, some of them are a better option in almost any scenario.

Cave drakes and Scorpion beasts I tend to use to strenghten a line of "slightly" inferior infantry, so my mages and artillery gets enough rounds to kill the enemy.

All in all, I rate banes, naiad warriors and Sea kings court among the best. Mainly since I almost always use them if I have them available.

The eater of the dead though, is for SP only. And then only for the kicks of summoning something odd.

[merlinme]

I've never actually summoned the eater of the dead, so can't really comment. He sounds kind of interesting, maybe I should give it a go some time. What's the problem with him? He attacks provinces at random? Do you ever have control of him, or is he random from the start?

I vaguely remember someone on the forum described quite an interesting strategy they stumbled across, where they followed the eater of the dead around with a bunch of stealth troops. I believe the way it worked was that because they were on hide, he never attacked them, and they could go in and take provinces which had just had their province defence and defending troops annihilated.

It would require a certain amount of luck, but it might be a viable strategy for someone who likes experimenting.