Summoned Unit Redesign

I've long been upset that for magic your choices are either Sorcery (War + Utility) or Summoning (War only, and many argue not good at that).

In my mind, a summoner should be incredible to have around, especially outside of war. Hence I would like to have some help in designing new summoned units. I will most likely design it all into a mod-mod once I am happy with all of the results, and will most probably stick to the current models since I am not graphically inclined

Amusing aspects of current status:
Some current Sorcery spells probably ought to actually be Summoning if you envision summoning as simply bringing something into existence longterm, and Sorcery as altering reality in some manner. Thus Fireballs, Meteor Swarm, Conjure Eyeball, Flaming Arrows & Enchant Spellstaff (arguable) all ought to be Summoning. Since those are Sorcery, I will assume that Summoning spells refer just to those spells wich call a new unit into existence which can presumably act independantly (thus Fireball & Meteor Swarm wouldn't count as summoning spells).

Alteration leads to Sorcery, so it is fitting that it has so few summoning spells. Yet it has 2 of 3 permanent summons, oh yeah, and Divination (also leads to Sorcery) has the other 1.


For now I am still just doing Ideas. I'll check that things balance with each other and their Tier later on.


General Thoughts:

1. Each of the 4 Technology groups should have at least 1 good fighting/defense summon
2. Each Summon will ideally be the BEST at something. But that could be hard to accomplish
3. Every Mana Type should have a Summon Unit (which causes a problem for finding graphics to fit the 10 units which will be new)
4. I am attempting to stick with just mechanics that are already possible by the XML for now
5. Rank 3 should be impressive. So either Permanent, Affinity, or incredible utility/power
6. Need to balance ideas to be useful for a non-Summoning Trait, but not become broken for that trait.
7. Must remember that anything with Elemental becomes stronger by 1 if the Tower of Elements is built.
8. Anything for Utility needs to be permanent, but limited in number like skeletons/treants/Guardian Vines or it becomes a micro-managing hassle
9. Can't shake the feeling that Summoned units should have no maintenance costs, cause no War Weariness, and grant no XP (except in a few cases where deemed fitting)

Wild Ideas:

1. Timebomb: Not sure this one can be pulled off, would need a negative healing promotion at the least: Goal would be to create a negative healing rate and make it use the Explode on Death tag (which I do not think is working as intended now). Probably combine with HN or Invisible status.
2. Rampager: High Movement, Can Pillage, Cannot Attack
3. Bulwark: Ultra High defense, but inability to deal damage in combat (iCombatLimit set to 0, but since I have never seen that I don't know what effect it might have. End result might make it impossible for any combat to occur with the unit. Will test sometime later)
4. Terrain Super-specialists: Obvious one, can give a massive boost to some units in their native terrains
5. Anti-Stack: Can allow a unit to damage (flank) all of a certain type of unit in a stack.
6. Anti-Unit: Can specify which combat type a unit will target first in a stack.
7. Builder: Allow some summoned units to construct buildings. Problem is that once a building is placed in each city they are useless if that is the only function.... If I go beyond XML I could create a new building that has limited duration though.
8. Paratroopers: Summoned units are the perfect opportunity to bring the Paratrooper function to FfH.
9. Dreams/Muscle Aguments: Rank 3 only so you cannot spam Conjurers to exploit: Could allow one summon to give small beaker bonuses (ie - Savant), and another small hammer bonuses (ie - Soldier of Kilmorph), a third to do minor Great Merchant type trade missions for Gold, and a final one for small culture bonuses. These are all micro-management nightmares though.
10. Outfitter: Rank 3 only again: Attachable summons (equipment), Since turning it into a promotion means you cannot limit the supply of them to the number of casters this has to be rank 3 so that micro-managing becomes the main limit I guess. Needs to be fairly minor though, or limited by unitclass/unitcombat type.
11. Adaptability: Starts with a fair spread of basic promotions and 1 free promotion selectable (so can select City Raider/Defender, Blitz or other useful ones. Will be hard to select all the pre-reqs to make the choices interesting, but still worthwhile. Wish I could just assign 5 free promotions)
12. Situational: Could set some of them to have a pre-requirement for Alignment/Civics/Religion. Can't think of where that is fitting right now though.
13. Seperable Parts: (Requires Promotion) Unit can split into a swarm of weak units, or stay as 1 strong unit (Also requires that I create a new "spell" ability to accomplish the split)

Law

Rank 2: Add a Massive Culture Garrison value (city will not culture flip while unit stationed there) + Prevents city from going into Revolt (not sure if that will work for non-Summoner Trait Civs. Might need unit in the city at start of the turn it would normally revolt).
Rank 3: Going to leave this one alone for now. It is interesting and quite well filled out.

Life

Rank 2: Planning to replace this one with something "Swarm Effect" in nature. But need to figure out a good XML manner in which to accomplish it.
Rank 3: Lifespark is definitely a keeper. Quite a nice non-combat summon already.

Mind

Rank 2: Summon Dominator
4
1
50% chance to create a slave from combat

Rank 3: Summon Empathic Entity
0
3
Starts with: Invisible
Treats all tiles like roads
Can Travel over all Terrain
Allows controller to see production/details of other player's cities
Cannot Explore new Territory

Spirit

Rank 2: Summon Insidious Thoughts
2
1
100% chance to capture any unit in combat

Rank 3: Summon Tormenting Visions
3
1
Starts with: Fearsome Visage (Combines Fear & an enhanced Guardsman Promotion)

Sun

Rank 2: Always been a fan of the Sand Lion, don't see any reason to change it.
Rank 3: Aurealis seems like quite a strong summon, but I haven't played with it yet.

Body

Rank 2: Summon Second Skin
4
1
Selected as First Defender against all Recon Units

Rank 3: Summon Restrainer
8 +1 Body Affinity
1
Cannot injure Units past 99% health (ie - can't kill them)

Dimensional

Rank 2: Summon Dimensional Rift
0
7
Starts with: Elemental, Flying
Cargo Size: 3
Can carry any Land Units
Cannot explore new Map areas

Rank 3: Space Fold
Permanent
7 +2 Dimensional Affinity
1
Starts with: Elemental, Flying, Hidden Nationality
Unit destroys itself after combat

Enchantment

Rank 2: Summon Midas Flies
4 +1 Enchantment Affinity
2
Starts with: Flying
Generates 5 gold from Combat

Rank 3: Summon Fairy Swarm
4
2
Starts with: Angel, Flying
15 First Strikes

Nature

Not sure these warrant changing. They are pretty decent, and Druids are probably balanced with them in mind.

Air

Rank 2: Seriously needs reworked so that it can actually make Blitz worthwhile. So either Heals from combat, or change it to be minor collateral damage with no limit on how many targets it can hit.
Rank 3: Fairly decent, but would like to add Blitz to it.

Earth

Rank 2: Can build everything that a worker can, but workrate is 10,000% (ie - 1 turn for anything you want to build)
Rank 3: Works fine for me so far.


Fire

Rank 2: Add Can Bombard City Defenses 10%
Rank 3: Decent as is I think.


Water

Rank 2: Not bad as it is
Rank 3: Add +3 Cold damage OR +1 Water Affinity. Add the promotion: Amphibious. Add Collateral damage at 100% Strength, max damage of 100% (can kill), limit 1 Collateral Target.

Actually all of Necromancy are pretty decent as they are. I'll not do much with them until I am ready to try balancing things out to see where tweaks are needed. If much does change then the Chaos Marauder, Imp & Pit Beast all have to be completely replaced since they are units in other areas. And balance must remember that AV priests can summon Death & Entropy as well.


Chaos

Death

Entropy

Shadow

fyi, the current host of Einherjar also has duration increased with combat.

Thanks much Only caught that from the pedia entry in the Pit Beast. Based this info off the online civlopedia instead of my own PDF since there it is linked to the spell charts

I'm all done with my ideas for the moment, so if you read it while I was still editing everything massively, please give it another read through and post some ideas if you have any

Once I think that things are fairly well balanced and fleshed out I'll make the appropriate changes in the XML and set it out as a mod-mod. If possible I will make it as a Modular Load so that it automatically works with any other mod-mod and doesn't need fixed every patch.

If it were up to me, I'd dump the whole Summoning branch. I'd cherrypick the best creatures and add them to the Divine and Sorcery branches. Some could be moved to objects. However, I find a lot of your ideas to be quite attractive.

I was thinking the other day about how the magic system seemed... bulky, I guess, compared to the now, mostly lean-and-mean other branches. At the time, I was leaning more towards getting rid of (combining) some of spheres, but rolling sorcery & summoning together is a pretty nice idea as well.

Currently, the 17 spheres (plus the "planned" force, ice, creation and meta), times the three fields of sorcery, summoning and divine is just starting to feel a bit large and unwieldy.

So as not to completely hijack the thread from xienwolf's ideas... I really like a couple of these ideas for summons, especially, for whatever reason, the fairy swarm. I just envision a bunch of malicious tiny little buggers with lances fluttering around poking people to death, while the hapless victim tries to swat them away.

I definitely like the idea of filling in the summoning gaps for Mind, Spirit, Body, Dimensional and Enchantment. Its kind of annoying if you want a summoner and you have (say) Sidar with few mana nodes and you have to give them spells they won't be using, just to get the promotions. I don't think the magic system's unwieldly, I do think the civilopedia needs a major rework so its more obvious what spells do what and lead to what.

I think that we tend to think too much about units for fighting when thinking of summoning. For example, the dimensional III spell could be one that summons a temp building that acts like the obsidian gate for one turn or spirit/law III could be used to summon a unit that ends revolts in a city much like a priest. Enchant could bring about a item that causes happiness in a city for 10 turns when used (doesn't stack).

In fact, I wish that nature didn't have summon trent as a level 3 spell, but something like summon rainstorm that did something beneficial to the land. Something like having 3 movement, with twincast, and level I water or something.

I am aiming to do non-combat ideas as much as possible. But so far I do not know yet how to make a temporary building, so creation of buildings is a bit unlikely. I'd vastly prefer something like that though for most of the Summoning Line.

While I don't want to copy any non-combat effect from the Sorcery line, I want to place as many non-combat ideas into these as possible, but sadly most units are designed to fight, so the XML tags which exist are mostly oriented around combat. Once I am a bit more comfortable with the modding process I will probably quit aiming for Modular Load capability and make some SDK or Python changes for the "Wild Ideas" entries and more things along those lines.

xienwolf said:

... But so far I do not know yet how to make a temporary building, so creation of buildings is a bit unlikely. I'd vastly prefer something like that though for most of the Summoning Line....

Click to expand...

possible Workaround for units vs. temporary building:
What about a Zero movement summoned unit?
or a unit that has a one-turn promotion (like enraged) that provides +movement but then wears off (assuming you want to be able to be created in one place and 'deployed' somewhere else.
(you'd have to make it immune to haste)


Any chance you could summon ITEMS? that might be cool.
Again, perhaps the item can grant a 'buff/promotion' that deletes the item after a time.
(interesting idea.. makes it sort of a 'hot potato')
possibly could also make it so that it does not give the drop/trade icons, so it cannot be handed off once picked up.


ohh! the 'deployment' idea above made me think.. what about units that can summon-sacrifice to turn into each other.. like a mobile wagon train that turns into a massive seige weapon with 0 movement once deployed...

or a pre-stirrup cavalry that moves fast when mounted, but has 0 offense, has to dismount to fight.

or an amphibious critter that is fast in water, slow on land.

lots of ideas surrounding this one

Temporary buildings are easy, if by temporary you mean they stick around only while the the unit that cast it (which could be a summoned unit) is in the city. I believe that you could make a summoned unit with limited duration that could be set to cast a building creating spell as soon as it is summoned (it would require the actual unit creation be done through python, but then again you would have to do that anyway of you want it to have duration more than the standard 1 / 3 with summoning trait)


I also think it would be nice for some spells to create summons to be attached to units (a la great commanders), giving promotions that will wear off eventually. (This would probably be a lot like the way promotion granting promotions used to work, letting you pick which unit to apply it to. It could work for the body and spirit spheres pretty well I think, but it might be better as an alternate implementation of some sorcery spells (like stoneskin, burning blood, etc)

Honesty I'm not a huge fan of most of these new summons.

I strongly dislike your spirit sphere, but those summons wouldn't be so bad for the mind sphere. Nightmares are really the providence of the Archangel of Mind, Hastur. I think that Spirit summons would be best for boosting you units (and maybe lowering rival units') Morale, but that would require waiting for the Morale Mechanic (In the mean time you could make the unit give the morale promotion for free like flagbearers if you wanted to, and maybe courage and valor for the level 3 one too). Healing would be fine as well, if they are permanent summons.

I think that your Mind3 summon would be better as Mind2 (probably nerfed a little), and your spirit3 would be better as mind3.

It seems like the enchantment sphere summons should be the ones that can work as workers, not earth. The enchantment2 summon is ok, but I really don't like the enchantment3 one. I'd rather it be some sort of super-mud-golem, with a huge work rate and possibly the ability to construct things that other units can't (maybe making castles instead of forts, towns instead of castles, and/or not having the tech requirements. You could make it so that this unit can construct improvements though unit-specific spells instead, which would mean it would always take 1 turn and you wouldn't need to add anymore build orders)

It might be nice for earth summons to be able to move through peaks, and get a combat bonus there and on hills. Colleteral damage seems good too.

I do like your change to Air and Water, and Law isn't bad.

I was just thinking that it would be better for Dimensional summons to use the Paratrooper airdrop mechanic (while carrying units and bringing them with them) instead of actually flying through the tiles. It doesn't seem like you should be able to block a rift by putting units in between, since e units in the rift are supposed to be moving through the same plane as the rival units are in. I don't really see the point of the dimensional3 summon (which is an ordinary fighting summon in your proposal, which there are enough of. It also is too close to the shadow summons), and would prefer is be basically the same as the dimensional2 summon but with larger carrying capacity and/or a larger airdrop range (maybe even the whole map?)

(Despite creating a unit though, a dimensional rift or space fold sounds more like sorcery. I'm actually thinking that the next version of my modmod will have a Dimensional 3 promotion as well, with summoning a 0 strength, a movement unit that can carry ~7 units and airdrop within a ~12 tile radius. I'll probably leave the summoning effect as a free promotion, probably a new promo that gives +1 dimensional mana affinity. I'm leaving the temporary planar gate building and the starting settler bonus promotion for summons at dimensional 2)

I still think that treants would be better if they were made unitcombat_siege (and possibly given collateral damage/bombard rate). (mostly for the sake of the elves, who have no siege units) I like my permanent summons to gain promotions.

By temporary buildings I mean that the Summon Unit would be sacraficed to create the building (like Priests making Temples), but the building would only last you for 10 turns or so (thus allowing you to keep the building active in 2 or 3 cities with 1 summoner, but not your entire civ).

Having a 0 Move summon is a decent idea, but then I run into the problem of having to go into Python to set them with a longer duration somehow, and I am aiming for XML changes only at this stage.

Summoning Items is an idea I was working with, but then you run into the same issue you get with buildings: Just 1 Conjurer can outfit the entire Civilization. But that one I can work around a bit easier since I can set the promotion to have a chance to wear off per turn.

The main reason I am not doing Promotions is in my "Amusing Aspects" section where I stated that some spells in Sorcery seem like they are actually Summoning, unless you define Summon as only those spells which call a UNIT into existence.


As for not liking some of the units: That is why I did this post instead of going straight to creating the Modular load. To get feedback on the raw ideas before the playtesting stage of it. So by all means: Propose some ideas

My thoughts: I never really bother with Summoning. Why would you, when Fireball/Meteor Swarm can accomplish anything most summons are capable of and still let you grab Spellstaff and other useful stuff? (BTW, the Enchant 3 Summon should just be Spellstaff again, Summoners could really benefit from being able to use Spellstaves)

Personally, the first thing I would do (and what I did in my personal modmod) is give Fireballs and Meteors a max damage limit so they can't kill things. Then they become true siege units, much like catapults, instead of the combat beasts they are right now (Think of it this way: is there ANY situation where an Azer is more useful than a Fireball without the Summoning trait, the way things are right now?).

I like most of what you've done with the summoning tree, though...

I like some of the ideas in this thread. I almost wonder if some of the effects you are looking for might have been implemented better in the Total Realism mod via promotions to units stacked in the same time. Although I admit to not knowing how much overhead or programming problems that would pose.

For instance you could add a summon with a strength of 0 that gives a promotion with the ability of to waterwalk to all units stacked with it and give it a move of two. Make it a water summon and call it phantom raft or some such. If you need it to stay with the summoner, make it like a hawk that nests with the summoner to leave a city and limit it to one per.

If you go with such a buffing mechanism it opens up a world of possibilities. Like summoning a fire/holy/death/poison shield that buffs the stack for a turn with elemential protection for when you assault a city

my thoughts on a few ...

dimensional mana,
- level 2 (o/2 , move 3 , bombard 25%)
- level 3 (0/6 , move 0 , can cast a spell to summon a dimensional gate)

the level 2 unit is purely designed as a specialist to break holes in city walls. the level 3 is a single summon (like the vines) and permanent. gave it enough strength to act as a defender (approx same as a priest or divine war), and it being able to cast and maintain the dimensional gate as long as its in the city.

body 3,
summon war couldron...
a war cauldron is a 0/1 unit with 0 move. if anything dies within 1 square of the war cauldron then a flesh golem with str = (victims str/2) and a move of 1.

earth ....
i think allowing the kukjib to gain a workers ability is WAY to strong and easily abused. what i would like to see is the level 2 summon changed to a mud golem as a permanent summon.

mind 3 ..
honored teacher (pic of obi-1). 0/4 move 0 , can cast a spell to give a +25% research bonus to the city that its in , this is a 1 time summon

spirit 3...
i like your idea , but the brokenness of combining the ability to hang around after winning combat AND spawning more of its own is sick. just think of an eater of dreams summoning a hoard of these and watching it multiply.

Good luck in modding!

Wild Ideas:

1. Timebomb: Do not see when it is useful. Maybe not timebomb but just a mine: invisible, becomes visible on attack (seems XML is not enough for it), immobile, permanent, 0 str, rank 2, destroys attacking unit on death. Good for Enchantment.
2. Rampager:That is basically shadow 2 as it is HN. Maybe Shadow 3 HN + commando, more movement, can cast Defile.
3. Builder: No much sense: building-spells are mechanism of sourcery. Summoning can provide the same but with more micromanagement. Still there are possible variants when summoned unit creates unique permanent building but summoner after summon lose ability to cast this spell (like Domination fail). But again summoning is worse then sourcery for it.
4. Paratroopers: As magister said it is perfect for Dimensional. I imagine the following. Rank 2: can paradrop (once per turn, from any place, not only city) to everywhere, then move/attack in the same turn, still rather weak and can not pillage. Rank 3: "Dimensional gate" - non-permanent, summonable anywhere, acts as DimGate building in a city: can paradrop one unit per turn to any city or anoter DG or accept unlimited number of units per turn.
5. Dreams/Muscle Aguments: Yeah, micromanagement level is inacceptable. Sourcery mecanism with spell-buildings is much better with the same effects possible.
6. Outfitter: As I understand it is again nothing more then sourcery buffing spells with more micromanagement. Unless you don't like to summon fully functional equipment. Well, "summon" healing salve instead of griffon is acceptable but it have a sense only it is permanent and limited number. I don't know if the number of equipment items are easy to control.
7. Adaptability: May have a sense.
8. Situational: Hard to remember and plan. Don't think it worth coding.
9. Seperable Parts: I thought about such and invented the following. "Beehive": Rank 3, permanent, str 0/10, mov 1, can not use roads (like tar demons), on die (or disband/split spell) splits into 5 bees. "Bee": non-permanent, str 1+1 poison, mov 5, flying, 4 first strikes, withdrawal chance 50%. Have no Idea where to put it but Nature.