Another thing that I've been thinking about is that the early summons aren't worth anything later in the game, so those ability points are essentially wasted. So after reading the posts in this thread, I'm thinking something like this might work:

- The further right you go in the Summon tree, the stronger the summoned creatures are.

- Early summoned creatures (left side) are small and get physically larger as you move towards the right side.

- Each additional ability point added to the Summon tree allows one additional summoned creature to be added to the group. So, if I only have the 1st summon, then I can have just one of that creature. When I unlock the 2nd summon, I can have one of the 2nd creature and one group of two of the first creature. When I unlock the 3rd summon, then I can have 1 of the 3rd, two of the 2nd, and three of the 1st. Etc. The largest group size would be seven, to match the largest group size you can have with the regular troops. Naturally, additional summoned creatures require more upkeep. I imagine you would cast the summon spell again and target your existing group in order to add one additional creature to that group. Some mechanism would be needed to remove one creature without disbanding the entire group (if you lost a magic shard, or whatever).

AOW had a nice summon system- with multiple levels of summons.

You just need more powerful summons as you tech up. 

Elementals should be roughly Equal in power- right now the Water Elemental is underpowered (slowing on hit good, but too squishy)

Summoning in MOM was one of the things that was "overpowering" and overpowered vs the AI. I can't count the number of games I EASILY won using SUMMONS. Armies of Lycanthropes, Ghouls, Hell Hounds just overran and pulverized the AI who never used it to that effect like I did. I remember in the early game how even the lowly Phantom Warriors saved my butt in many battles because I could summon as many as I could afford.

So, NO! summoning in this game doesn't need to be changed. It works well with the system at hand. 1 summoner per spell works GREAT and should remain as it is. If you want more cheap crap in your armies play a BEASTLORD now there's an overpowered army builder who doesn't even have to summon. He/She just walks up to an animal and TAMES it....wallah instant army in a few turns.

Willie - did you have fun in MoM winning with your summons? The sort of fun that no one should ever be allowed to have again?

Describing what FUN is is always subjective. My fun may not be your fun. For instance I prefer things that are hard and complicated and overly challenging for my fun. But, from what I see on many forums is candyland romper room chutes and ladders is other players fun. Things that go POP instead of BOOM are fun for them. The NINTENDO age ruined many a gamer into thinking EASY is the ONLY way to play. GODMODE is a MUST and CHEAT CODES demanded. lol Most of those players are now in their 30's and I still see it in their posts and demands. So in a world FULL of easy romper room candyland games I will certainly root for improvements that INCREASE the level of CHALLENGE and complications, not for more Nintendo worldly games.

Willie, MoM was made long before the casual age, and I don't think anybody playing 4x want casual/easy games. But actually, playing summoner is just boring as hell : You must spend all your points into differents creatures, knowing earlier creatures will become useless later and don't even worth to give to your secondaries heroes. Really I don't see how you could win with an army of wargs.

Never tested beastmaster, but there is way to balance it i'm sure (upkeep for each beast, higter chance to resist the taming when the beast is full HP, hard/soft cap to the number of beasts...)

For summoner/beastmasters, you could have a soft cap as : more creature of the same type, higter is the upkeep each time you tame/summon one (easier to get more little creatures, but for large/best beast/summons, you can only afford 1-3 max) or even a hard cap, like nber of creature of each type = level + a modifier increased in the skill tree.

But from what i've read on the forum, how beastmaster modify the gameplay compared to the other background perk, I think it should be a whole class with it's own skill tree.

All Mom players know the game was never balanced. But hell it was still fun with summons, crafting, global enchantments, load of spells... It was made in a time before casualisation, and even before the "balance" era brought by multiplayer games. But we are in 2013, so we can hope AI could now handle a system like that?

A few more things about summoning in MoM that have not been mentioned:

1. Summons were thematic. Each type of magic had MULTIPLE summons that fit the theme of the books they came from. Death magic summons were undead and demons, Nature were big monsters that were uh.. natural (think warbears and the like), Chaos magic were things like Chimeras, Life magic was angels, you get the idea.

2. Every tree had multiple summons. Death magic by far had the most but every tree had a variety of creatures it could summon and at every power level. There were minion summons, mid range and powerful end creatures in each tree.

3. There were Overworld spells that affected summons. One of my favorite combinations was Darkness and Zombie Mastery. Darkness gave creatures of darkness (like zombies) a set of minor bonuses worldwide (+2 attack +1 defense etc you get the idea). Zombie Mastery made it so every unit you killed came back as a unit of zombies. Now zombies were pretty low-grade units but were hard to kill and the overland spell meant they could cause people to lose a unit or 2 getting rid of a stack of them. And I always had more of them.

4. The summoned creatures all had very unique abilities as you got to the high end summons. The demon lord was a big favorite of mine since he could summon up to 4 minor demons during combat.

Summoning in MoM was a really big part of the game. The creatures could be very powerful but they were limited by: LONG casting time especially for the high end creatures. This is a problem LH has because there is no mechanic limiting the use of mana per turn like MoM had. In MoM the mana you could use was limited to a certain amount of points per turn. By spending mana every turn you could gradually raise your ability but those mana points were lost and the ability raised somewhat slowly. You could not instantly raise an army unless you had invested a LOT of mana into raising your ability. The second limiting mechanic was that the high end creatures cost a LOT of mana. IIRC the demon lord was 14+ mana per turn. The  low end guys cost little to nothing at all.

I really liked playing a summoner in MoM and its one of the mechanics that I had hoped to see explored in Elemental. Sadly while there is a Necromancy ability its rather limited and summons in general are few and far between. I miss the days when I overran the land with zombies and my armies of the shambling dead.........

I agree that summons need to be made more viable.  They're just crap.  To think they take up good choices on the level ups is bad.  If they were improved that would be ok.  But they need help.  Also before people get riled up about boatloads of summons... there's ways to keep things in check.  (Like mana costs or no more than x per shard or summoner picks also ease the caps ).  

Being able to have more than 1 summons is not a bad thing. 

Well if you think it's bad in this game go play Guild Wars 2 after playing Guild Wars 1. THEY TOOK AWAY MY HEROES!!! lol I feel so alone in GW2 and I still go back and play GW1 because of all my heroes and hero builds I have made. But, one thing Heroes made me realize is they are much like a summoned creature and the more you have of them the less YOU actually play. I find myself just letting my heroes do all the battling work (I don't even have to cast a spell) and all I have to do is pick up the loot. Being able to summon an army of units is much the same. You have an army that can do YOUR work for you now so you can just sit back and put it on autoplay. So, everyone needs to get off their lazy butts and get out there and WORK for your victories. lol Just like in Seinfeld "No Summons for Gew!" lol

Cast times are totally an option in FE. People keep mentioning that like FE has no concept of it, but there are one or more mods that add strategic spells with cast times already.

I agree with the majority that strategic summons are severely lacking compared to MoM, but tactically I disagree with the majority.  I have run two empire summoners with summon skeletal horde backed up by mages/archers and decimated everything.  The AI will always target those skeletons while my two heroes and mages/.archers blow everything away.  If I need more then I just keep cycling through all my summons to use as distractions.  It works too good with the AI up through the one above normal (dont remember the specific name).  If anything the AI also needs to be tweaked to ignore low level summons when taking high damage from other units.  Not to beat the horse to death, but MoM did this pretty well.

Cheers!

Thats a very specific example of 1 offshoot skill that better AI would probably stop. Hardly reflective of the vast majority of worthless traits. Wisps and Lightbringers are also good start-mid game.

Summoner champions need to be viable. Which means they cant be stuck with a single quickly worthless summon every 4 levels. Summoning is so trait expensive that putting points into the necromancy/light tree makes it so you'l never get any of the end game summons and there's no good midway general traits like + total summons. This means that early game summons quickly become worthless.

Fix with:

1.Traits that give multiple summons according to champion elements.

2.Wider and shorter trait trees .Do not make us spend 3/4 of our traits on bland filler traits.

3.Champions starting with more traits. Why do no mages start with spell mastery I or summon I?

4.Traits that let you use weaker summons later game. +total or summon in groups.

My 2 cents (to recap) is this:

1. Getting the AI to summon things effectively is a lot of work.

2. The current balance doesn't make summoning that effective a strategy.

Therefore, I'd like to see summoning boosted substantially.

In tactical battle, I think you should be able to summon multiples. You could have each additional summon cost more mana than the last.

I think that alone would make things funner.  But I also think that the LEVEL of what gets summoned should be the same as the caster.

Like the idea, unlocking group summon or be able to fusion lower summons of same type, so you could get a 2wargs unit mid game and a 3 wargs unit later (with increased upkeep).

You mean strategically, as in not spending mana on troops it wont use? A few summons are viable tactically now, especially those with effects like wisps heal area. You could expand this so AI Summoners could mainly cast tactically.

Its good to know Summoning is getting some thought and I appreciate the difficulties you face.

Thanks

That would help a bit, but not sure that would let wargs and early summons still viable late game.

One of the big complaint come from the skill tree too I think. When I look at the mage tree, warlock got a long chain of passive +stats where summoners got a long chain of 1 time summons, either aren't much exciting.

Another idea, why not getting some summoner improvements in the magic tech tree? like buildings that improve the number of strategic summons you can get? That could make the strategy of a summoner creating an army of summons if he's spec into magic, but he will need to build lot of improvements to support it and spec into conclave town letting down other aspects.

I found in early and mid game, the most effective summoning was the group of skellies.  Completely block their pathway.  Pretty awesome, really.  Never seen AI use it, let alone use it effectively.

I honestly don't think the tactical summons need any more work, it's just the strategic summons that are too limited/weak to compete as troops.

I agree strategic summons are the problem. 

Exactly. If you were to redesign the mechanic, for example a summoner instead of increasing the levels of the summons casted (leave it the same), but make the mana cost be less, I would say cast it at 25% cheaper (-25% of the mana cost). This would make summoners cast more in tatical battles (like they should) and have more of a summoner army.

I think it would help if a hero could have one strategic summon of the same type (for example one Air Elemental) AND one tactic summon of the same type.

The levels of the summons are very good, but the level difference of summons is too low, because they are only a single unit and the effect is not multiplied by the number of units. Summons should get the following effects per level:

HP: + 5

Attack: + 2

Defense: + 2 (Earth Elemental)

Accuracy: + 5

Dodge: + 5 (Air Elemental, Fire Elemental, Water Elemental)

Spell Mastery: + 5

Spell Resistance: + 5

With all this talk about Master of Magic, I was wondering if everyone knew you can now download a real, not bootleg, version playable on Windows 7.  Go to GOG.com to check it out.  The graphics are still crude, but can be smoothed out woth some tweaks.

I just mentioned MoM in a post I made about the city interface - LH could take a lesson from MoM in how to allow you to select units in a city so they can move out as a group.

I do like the direction you are going. However, just to add some points (from my opinion); if you are summoning within a tactical battle, the summon cost should be more than if that creature were cast outside of combat for the simple reason that it's getting you out of a pinch. In addition, summons within a tactical combat should unsummon after that combat and consequently summons outside of combat should have a magical upkeep.

I agree tactical summons are fine, they provide an excellent distraction and extra damage and can be summoned anywhere on the battlefield.  Allowing multiple ice elementals would be seriously overpowered and would need a 3 turn cooldown or something similar.

Strategic summons are useful in the early game when battles are easier and mana is short but they soon become too weak.  They are also too slow strategically once all champions and most trained troops are mounted on horses / wargs.  So at that stage and once I have enough mana I disband strategic summons and use them tactically in a tough battle to lessen casualities on my trained troops.

JJ

Just played a game as Resoln with with summons to test this, and I don't think I've ever ROFLstomped everything in the game so hard. Granted, I was blessed with a large number of shards, but it was not extreme. I actually think this tactic is slightly OP if played right, which makes me feel a little narcissistic when looking at everyone's complaints (again). 

Things to consider to make sure you don't make this tactic OP:

• Imp doubles the number of summons available.
• Getting quick access to summons (skip the worthless XP traits) will let you rush like no ones business. Ice elementals and then Air elementals provide a huge boost in power, especially in double.
• It is entirely possible to summon an army, send it at an opponent to weaken them, summon another army, do it again, and again, and again. Mana is the only limit.
• Summons are not susceptible to attrition the way normal troops are.