The (not really) Official Endgame Summon Thread!

[TheMenacer]

That was pretty much my idea, in my hypothetical plant monster nation, the fungal chaff plus a strong PD were going to make the nation a defensive monster, but mobility issues and difficulty keeping immortal units alive outside of their dominion were going to make them significantly weaker on the offense unless there was heavy investment into pushing the dominion. I was going for the idea that these plants, being plants, grow slowly as a nation, but once they start moving it doesn't particularly matter how many times you chop away at them because they're going to grow back.

However, in the case of a hypothetical factory summon to buff up the nature path in the late game, they wouldn't necessarily be held back or helped out by weak or strong PD, particularly as I'm not seeing fungus as being anything other than a universal summon as opposed to a national summon.

Edit:
On that note, I wonder if factory summons would help out any other paths. Not that I want to see the endgame switched from "everyone has tartarians" to "everyone has freespawn", but I wonder if having an ever-growing horde of monsters would make sense for any path but nature.

Just a thought, although it doesn't specifically have to be fungus that're the end result of a factory summon, it'd be a neat way to shoehorn redcaps into the game. I had always sort of wondered why evil fairies that wander battlefields and dip their hats into the blood of the fallen weren't in Dominions 3, and having them show up as some kind of freaky mushroom monster that has a bright red "cap" would just be tops.

[JimMorrison]

Hmmmm, this gives me an idea, for a thematic way to slow their progression, and perhaps facilitate this whole immortal troops thing -

Make them totally unable to make temples (give them 1 in their home to start). So first, they are pretty much locked in to starting with 10 Dom, if they want to survive. But second, if some of their commanders had auto-temple-checks like the pretender and prophet, they would have the ability to push Dominion in the direction that they wanted it to go. Also, you could give them summons of course that were immobile, and provided temple checks. (I know, I said earlier make the best freespawns out of a fort with temple, but could they just be flagged to need a lab?)

[Wrana]

I am not sure they can be flagged in such ways at all (unless we replace some of existing freespawn nations with them). But the idea of no temple is cool.
Redcaps idea is also good (& faeries CAN be linked with fungi - what is faeries' circle, after all? ).

[HoneyBadger]

There seems to be a bit of confusion between "animals" and "mammals" or atleast lower (single celled, simple invertibrates, etc.) and higher (multi-celled: insects, lizards, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, etc) animals.

Every living thing started out as an animal. Plants evolved *after* animals did, and infact were the cause of one of the earliest mass extinctions on the planet when they did evolve, because at the time oxygen was a deadly poison to most forms of animal life. There are still animals on Earth which survive and flourish in anoxic conditions, such as the bacteria that cause gangrene or boccilism.

Note: A biologist I am not, nor am I a geneticist. So I'm not claiming to know for certain, but to my latest understanding, plants, mammals, and higher forms of animals that are related to mammals, are closer genetically than we are to some other forms of animals, including several different types of bacteria, and other very primitive orders of animal, which may have split off into separate families before plants even existed.

[Lingchih]

http://i27.tinypic.com/2h6yet5.jpg

Nuff said.

[llamabeast]

Bacteria are not animals.

Animals basically are only things we think of as animals - insects, birds etc.. There are a couple of freaky exceptions, but almost all animals are multicellular. And even the unicellular ones are eukaryotes, which means their cells are far larger and more complex than those of bacteria (which are prokaryotes, meaning they have simple cells with no nucleus).

[HoneyBadger]

Well, I hate to tell you, Llamabeast, but everything that exists, that we have knowledge of, is what we decide it is.

Plants and animals both have a list of characteristics that define them. If a given creature meets the definition of an "animal", then it's an animal. If it meets the definition of a "plant", then it's a plant. If it only subscribes to the definition of a "bacterium", then that's what it is, which still means that bacteria evolved and split into families over time, and some of those families came before plants, and some of them came after.

Fire, for that matter, meets most of the requirements to be defined as "living". It eats, reproduces, produces waste, requires oxygen. The only things that I can think of offhand that separate it dramatically from every living thing on the Earth is that it doesn't require water and has no cellular or DNA structure that we recognise. So perhaps it's an alien lifeform. Certainly other forms of alien life that have been espoused have been more far-fetched.

I suppose I should have said "heterotroph" instead of "animal", because it would fit what I mean a little more clearly, but it's a little tricky to nail down any specific trait, when we're trying to make classifications of various evolutionary quantities and qualities, over the billions of years this discussion requires. So I say "animal" in opposition to "plant".

Regardless, I'm still pretty sure that multicellular, eucaryotic animals evolved before plants did, and that plants aren't all that far removed from us, compared to several other branches of DNA coded life, on our particular branch of the Evolutionary tree.