The (not really) Official Endgame Summon Thread!

[JimMorrison]

Wrana said:
Well, as I've said, 'summon allies' doesn't allow for choices, and domsummon have only probabilities... Making 'factory units' normal summons - even with some of them from school(s) other than conjuration does, of course, allow for more choices... By the way, choice through shapechanging, while not entirely thematic, is a good possibility.

Well my theory was that the nation could be balanced with the need for those factories to play a vital role in combat. Perhaps they are your only reliable leaders, or some such. The point being that in general terms, for every 3 of these that spawned, you would want 2 of them in combat. So by putting in varied types, you supply a player with choices as to which he keeps behind to bring in more troops, and which he sends forward to engage in the active fighting (if there is any).

To be more specific, the nation would ultimately rely in large part on Dom Summons. The bulk of those freespawns would of course be small chaff. However, at castles with temples, in high Dominion territories, there would be a chance for powerful caster/leader units to spawn. These units would all have a Call Allies command, and there would be perhaps 10 different ones, each who had a corresponding elite unit tied to them. Not long into the game, you would find combat would be unmanageable without the use of these leaders (at lower level, you would still get freespawn leaders, with 40 Leader, and no special abilities) to bring larger forces to bear, and to support with their magic. So you would have to make a choice, between more elite unit creation, or a more robust army on the front lines. Once you had made the choice of how many of your casters to commit to leading armies, then you would choose between the different units that those leaders could create, were they standing still. I'm not talking about just 1 that does infantry, and 1 that does missile troops, but imagine for example that there is a more typical type of missile troop available, using bows or xbows, but they might also have some little amphibian guys that throw Slime. The balance of those capabilities, or your choice of which to use - is yours.

[HoneyBadger]

Another nice idea to be stolen from Insectoids is the unit that shapechanges permanently from a mobile unit to an immobile unit. This reminds me a bit of slime molds and the way they ambulate. It would be interesting for a fungus nation to have relatively weak but fast units (Zerg, anyone?) that could attack a province en masse, take it over-suffering heavy losses-but then compensate for those great losses by the few survivors permanently transforming into heavy immobile PD supporters (growing into the ground like creep colonies-Zerg again).

[MaxWilson]

How are you going to prevent them from attacking with hordes of cheap indies plus hordes of weak-but-fast units that turn into hordes of heavy PD support afterwards? I'm skeptical that this can be made to work within the context of Dominions.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Well you'd make it impossible to have other troops (other than some summons, mostly later game) with the gluttony/NNE combo. Seems like an effective way to make indies rather useless.

[TheMenacer]

MaxWilson said:
How are you going to prevent them from attacking with hordes of cheap indies plus hordes of weak-but-fast units that turn into hordes of heavy PD support afterwards? I'm skeptical that this can be made to work within the context of Dominions.

-Max

I think the trick here is that since our hypothetical hordes of freespawn are going to be late game units, getting a giant horde of indies to back them up would be a huge waste of time considering the high level battle magic that's going to be whipping around. The freespawn would remain effective in the late game because even though they would certainly die in droves, they're so replaceable that their controller isn't even really supposed to care. A horde of indies that you've spent turns and most importantly, gold on is much more of a big deal when some tartarian rolls into town and kills 80% of them with a single spell.

[HoneyBadger]

I would assume that a nation of fungi would have way too much trouble communicating with independent nations to want to bother with them-gluttony/NNE works here as MaxWilson states. But even if they did, those hordes of cheap, mobile units could still be balanced out the same way any other nation's units is balanced. They'd perhaps have no PD to speak of-which is, for some nations, quite important. They'd also turn into immobile units (as in no teleport), which is going to drain your army, and then those units-while they might be relatively good-are going to only be good for defending that specific province.

If that doesn't work for you, then just force them to change in combat to their immobile form, when the first form is killed, which then causes you to more or less randomly lose mobile units to PD while attacking.

[Lingchih]

Did you know that, genetically, fungi are closer to animals than plants? In fact, some fungi are closer genetically to humans than some animals.

[Wrana]

And what did you mean by "genetically closer"?

Considering limitations - I wouldn't say that fungi should have no PD - logically they should have relatively strong PD, possibly with Dominion bonus: they are grown in their populational centers, after all...