Um, you're basically making the summon weaker and giving the arcane a boost, or saying don't change arcane and reduce a summoning's existence by one turn. Summons already last a turn, and the AI will attack your summoned beastie before their turn ends, even though the summon will be dead.
Another feature of merging arcane and summoning is that it will create a more diverse assortment of arcane leaders - cre/arc for Keelyn, or someone suggested agg/arc for Tebryn, or a monstrous ind/arc for Os Gabella. I used to love playing Garrim Gyr when he was fin/arc, but now he's just the least of all dwarves - not that I've ever seen the AI do right by GG, much less want to choose him for myself.
I also really think that if it isn't too much trouble, the arcane path would benefit from some kind of xml tag that boosted research for arcane leaders - maybe ten to fifteen percent at most. I usually play games on emperor with raging barbs, huge maps, and aggressive AI, and it takes a while before I feel like I can turtle up and go the thirty-two turn wait for sorcery.
The final thought I had on the topic involves creating a scenario that would allow a player to experiment with all these traits - kind of an amurite-hosted mage school tournament, where you can't build anything except adepts, everyone starts with three to four raw mana nodes, and all four mana-building techs plus sorcery. Representative civs could have their native mana. Far corners of the map would have critter-guarded artifacts that boost strength or spell ability relative to mana possessed. Anybody interested in helping to develop this?
