The Kingdom Summons

I was wondering similar things too.  There is also a few summons (familiar at least, possibly others) that have essence, but nothing to spend the essence on.  

The summons right now seem like they were cooked up by 10 different people.

Lord of the Sea is actually Minor Water Elemental, there is no actual minor water elemental spell as far as I know, it's just a naming discrepancy I believe.

Kalin---thanks that is what I thought as well.  Just seemed odd.

Wayninja---The mana with nothing to spend it on was pecular to me as well.  I thought there might be some kind of transfer mana ability.  Your familiar sending some mana to you ever now and then would be cool.

I did notice with the Rock Giant that using his special (stone rain or whatever it is called) it did consume his mana.

Yes it does, but the familiar has mana but nothing that uses it.

The Ice Lord is even more confusing, he not only has essence but he also regenerates essence during combat... but can't use it for anything so it's really wasted.

I agree its like they forgot to add a special attack to each of them.

Well in the gold release the familiars and stuff with mana but no spells could cast any spell you knew that they had enough mana for. I liked it that way. But it got changed in patches. Don't know if it was an Accidental change or what. But I miss having 4 casters and 4 imps unloading fireballs in the first round of combat.

It would be cool if they made it so that familiars could cast spells but be limited to to level 1 & 2 spells or something so that they don't get to strong. In fact, I think that in general heroes should have to put points into something to let them cast higher level spells...

I like that no one should have magic except the sovereigns.  If a couple things have a talent than I would be okay with that.

if mana becomes global (as planned) and mana maintenance is added for summons, then this won't really be an issue anymore.

What is this 'mana' people are talking about. I can't find it in the manual.

Keep listing the things you can't find on the manual, such an effort is to be admired

Just joking

Yes, casting was removed from all summons. I recall even the Bear from "nature's ally" could cast. That was dumb. But I loved spellcasting familiars, they had low mana so even midgame they could only use spells like "Deflect", they felt so much more useful. I even tried modding it back

Glad to see I'm not the only one that misses them!

Magic Point

Yes I noticed the Ice lord and familiar make no sense also the empires "demonic spy" kicks A and is way to powerful for the level you can summon him at 10 points of unblockable damage to every enemy on the battle field he can wipe out a dozen spiders in one turn.

Hopefully in 1.08 they have fixed some of these and rebalanced them.

I don't really care about balancing the units.  I think each faction, race, whatever is missing some faction, race, whatever specific units.  MOM was probably the most unbalanced game ever.

I think I know what's the issue with Ice Lord and it having mana regen, but no special ability.

Unit is bugged.

Look at the unit definition in CoreSummonedUnits.xml:

See the IceBlast ability near the end? Unit is supposed to have it, but for some reason it isn't added.

Weird, I haven't cared to look at the xml yet, but what's with the inconsistency between the model and skeleton paths?

Also, how does the hitpoints work?  0 hit points at level 1... that seems bad.

Nice find p22, do you know where "IceBlast" is defined, I haven't heard of that spell...

Success! I figured how to fix it.

Unit abilities are defined in CoreAbilities.xml.

There, every ability consists of one or several AbilityBonusOptions (for example, Clarity has several versions that regenerate 1, 2 or 3 mana).

Well, what was wrong was that internal name for AbilityBonusOption for IceBlast is IceBlastAbility, not IceBlast. So changing Ice Lord's SelectedAbilityBonusOption tag to use "IceBlastAbility", instead of "IceBlast" fixes Ice Lords.

By the way, Ice Blast does 5 points of non-defendable damage, has hurricane like effect (teleports unit randomly), and makes it lose it's next turn. Sometimes, NPC hero with similar ability can be found.

Does anyone know if this was addressed in any of the new patches or if Stardock was aware of the problem.

So far it's only been in Heavenfall's Bugfix mod.

There are quite a few of such spell bugs and typos, though...

I'm aware of it because of this thread, which I was actually linked to from the bugfix mod thread.  No matter how trivial the problem is, if there isn't a thread yet for it, please do make one.  Anyone that has been around during our previous games should know that we do read the forums and do fix things that we find on here.  Apologies for not getting to fix it sooner, but I did fix this problem today, so it should be in the 1.09 update.

For the curious, what I did to fix it was change the name of that AbilityBonusOption to simply be IceBlast.  I did this for a couple reasons:
---For one thing, that is how the majority of the rest of them are set up (ie. AbilityBonus with internal name RainOfStoneAbility, has an AbilityBonusOption with internal name RainOfStone.  Same with FlameStrikeAbility/FlameStrike, BlinkAbility/Blink, etc..)
---Secondly, not only does the summoned unit Ice Lord refer to the ability bonus option as "IceBlast", but so does the summoned Titan.  There was one NPC referring to it under its current name of "IceBlastAbility", so I just updated him to say "IceBlast".

I looked in our source control software, and as far back as our release date, the summoned unit called Familiar (located in CoreSummonedUnits.xml) has been pointing to an ability bonus option called "Vengeance2", and that ability bonus option has been defined in CoreAbilities.xml since at least the beginning of August.  I realize that the response pointing out this problem is 14 days old, but even back then, it should have worked.  Unless there was some problem in the xml file itself that caused the whole thing not to load at the time.  At any rate, I have verified today that the familiar does have a special ability to spend his essence on.  So if it's not working in the build you have, it will be working in 1.09.

what manual ? 

Vengeance II does work, but it is a passive ability, so there is no mana cost. It just doubles the damage when you counter attack. As a result, the familiar has mana that it doesn't use.