Elemental King/Queen summoning limits?

[Arryn]

Thanks for the prompt answer, 'lept. Mucho glad I asked before trying it.

The game should gray-out the spells in such cases. I know making such a fix would entail a significant amount of coding by JK, but 50 gems are a lot to just waste (or for players unfamiliar with the rules and who don't hang out on this forum to be penalized by).

[Arryn]

So, to drag my own thread a wee bit OT, what would you folks do with 28+ air gems per turn income, excluding alchemy, Wind Ride, and Seeking Arrow?

[Stossel]

You could possibly constantly hurricane a few key enemy provinces, get the unrest over a 100 and stop mage/unit income.

cheap commanders + thunder bow + eye of aiming. I like this one, especially when facing squads with not a lot of troops.

[archaeolept]

flying boots staffs of storms copper plate

air domes

spring hawks for staff of storm wrathing squads

[Arryn]

archaeolept said:
flying boots

I make one of these for each BL I summon. As Caelum, most everything else I have (or summon) flies.

archaeolept said:
air domes

Already done. Good suggestion though.

archaeolept said:
spring hawks for staff of storm wrathing squads

I must be having another brain cramp. Can the hawks (as well as my Caelum units) fly in the staff's storm?

[archaeolept]

oh, I wasn't aware you were caelum. you have less need of spring hawks then.

there's that high level air global that gives some income bonus and deals w/ unrest, forget it's name off hand.

[Arryn]

archaeolept said:
there's that high level air global that gives some income bonus and deals w/ unrest, forget it's name off hand.

Alteration-8 Fata Morgana (A7). A good choice, but I'm saving the "Last" global slot for Arcane Nexus.

[Cainehill]

On the other paw, regarding putting the gems at risk - I fail to see why artifacts (unique items) are greyed out from the forging list, while summoned uniques are not.

After all - shouldn't people want to gamble on whether or not a particular artifact is available?

Answer - I think that losing the gems for a summoning is very disheartening for the newer players who may not have realized that, say, Ice Devils were a limitted commodity and that they could be throwing their gems away. It's irritating even for the players who know the risk.

Making unique items work the same way would add even more irritation factor to the game....

Personally, I think it might be nice if the summoning mechanism were tweaked a little bit. After all - you get shafted when you create a unique item at the same time as another person, or cast the same global in the same turn as another. If two people both summoned the Last ice devil the same turn, one loses out, so graying out the summons wouldn't eliminate risk.

That's probably going quite a bit too far towards player friendliness though. But - if the summons doesn't work, the player could lose a random 25-75% of the gems normally used, not all the gems.

Or at a minimum, for the new players especially, the interface could do something to stress that the gems might be wasted if the summons has already been cast / all the critters summoned.

[Arryn]

I'm making it a point to include verbiage about this issue in Liga's next Manual Addenda revision. New players need to be warned that their caster's time (and more importantly, gems) might be wasted.

[Chazar]

Cainehill said:
I fail to see why artifacts (unique items) are greyed out from the forging list, while summoned uniques are not.

Hmm, why is a unique item unique after all? I guess the unique items are so hard to forge, that the mage really needs a lucky day to forge it at all. It similar to drawing Pictures: You can never redraw a picture as good as before (at least for an unskilled painter like me this is true).

So I am okay that uniques are greyed out. One has heard a rumour that this thing was created by a genious and is so struck with awe that one cannot recreate it...

But that explanation aside: I would propose a general percentage chance for the success of Unique Items Creation as well as Unique Summons, so that a unique item cannot be created instantly. But in that case, a good percentage of the gems cost should be returned and not wasted...