resoln is a great example of faction balancing - they have a lot of dependable summons but their base units have less hp and armour. A faction than can summon a lot of creatures should have a definite weakness in either the civ or military tech tree.

I of course ignore their spellcasting for the purposes of this conversation.

Buffing Summoner is very good idea, as gives other use to magic and a different gameplay. How to do without being another gamebreaker is the question. Summons requiere mana and upkeep, so that makes some balance. If your empire is based in mana, I find fair you benefit from that source of power. But keeping legions of summoning should be avoided too.

Easy way might be with cooldowns to the summon spell. or casting time -or both, for the biggest summonings-. That might work with a fine tuning to the mana costs and upkeeps...If a player prefers using the mana in summons instead of other spells for champs or tacticals, the game should allow.

To get into tougher questions, like path of the summoner, and some specific traits (number of summonings allowed, level of creatures, mana reduction costs, even traits for summoning specific creatures...), would require consider first wich mechanics should be followed...

Anyway, it is very interesting. I tried beastlord because of a post, and loved it, so I'd like to see some of all proposed features to play a summoner.

@ Lord Xia - 

Come on summoning is not that great but comes as the icing on the cake for high level mage! A level 10 Fire elemental will chew through companies of archers with embers, it will tank heavy Cavalry or Dragon like a bauS, and will make use of Cloak of fire and his High attack to destroy any infantry/cavalry in a 1 on 1. In an organized groups of casters and heavy cavalry they have a niche role when you are far away from any Fortresses to fill up the place when one of your heavy calavry dies. They are really great supports for troops and heroes and have really decent initiative.

@ GFireflye -

I don't think queuing up summons is a good idea, because you usually want to use it instantly when you need backup for an incoming fight. Similarly, I'd rather have darklings, ogres and such spawns after a certain given time in their lairs, than having to build a bunch of expensive scouts, ogres in the city nearest to their lairs (probably not a Fortress) while I really need to build city improvements there.

Although I do think that a subpath for summons would be great for the mage path (like more attacks & spells for summons, increase the number of active summons, being able to sacrifice summons for mana/health for their master, scaling hp/resist/spell mastery/spell damage for the summoner or his summons). But then it would require to have at least 2-3 available summons per mage path and it would require to rebalance their availability with an increase in their upkeep cost.

I suggest:

a.1) remove the summoning restriction, but

a.2) make total upkeep be "number_of_same_summon ^ 2" 

That would make total upkeep cost of your say earth elementals grow as follows:

n^2 = 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49

Alternatively:

b.1) remove the summoning restriction, but

b.2) adjust the base upkeep cost to be relative to the strength of the summon. I.e. Ice Elemental might be "1/turn", a Death Demon might be "8/turn".

In both cases it would be feasible to have a usable army - but expensive to have a really strong one. It would also have the nice side effect of making the game more "magical"

I think completely remove the restriction would not work even with increased mana upkeep, since one procipinees crown and you have free maintenance on summons as it is a buff on the caster. Instead how about summoner 1,2,3 add an extra summon each, maybe path of mage too.

Or instead of extra summons summoner allows you to summon in squads.

Or just create a larger variety of summons so you can bring in 1 of each. (summon great wolf as a tactical spell may make the summoner perks pointful by itself.)

Or make summons all scale damage by level.

If Princess Porcupine summoned 100 Ice elementals, I still wouldn't be scarred.  Doesn't matter how many of these they could summon, cause they are all shit!  No amount of these shit summons would be enough to hurt me.  

Careful xia, those 100 Ice elementals might freeze your pony out of the game.

Thanks for the replies. I will definitely post a minimod on the mod section and put link here. Just need to fix some more numbers here and there.

There are some very interesting and right suggestions, but probably due to the fact that there are either bugs and/or limitation, they are not possible to implement as far as I know.

For instance, ^2 for each summon and limiting the same summon to certain number other than 1..... as far as I know, they are not possible to implement (unless Heavenfall says otherwise.)

To fix the beastlord's issue I tried to implement variable mana cost system, but then both Heavenfall and I found out it is bugged that taming (or whatever any other using that specific call) does not work with variable mana coding.

That said, in my mini-mod, the mana unkeep is varied based on summoned's monster's strength. For instance, Death Demon / Shrill Lord  will cost 250 / 400 mana to summon and needs 14 / 20 mana unkeep (no worries they are buffed enough to match such high requirement) and they will need research (Third Book of Magi) to unlock.

That said, my mod indeed undermines early-game troops to a bit.... but then, nothing is more game breaking than late game troops, and from my game, I haven't seen my cities ever stop building things until the game ends because everything takes too much time to build in the first place.

It was terrible idea in the first place to merge build and train quene, and should had been separated like original Elemental anyway.

And it's up now. Obviously balance needs work (well, game balance ALWAYS needs work anyway.)

https://forums.elementalgame.com/436617

I think the a new special ability for the ice elementals are in order. Artic breath. shoots out a stream of icy breath freezing all in it's path, but those that resist are slowed instead. This freeze acts like a bash and has a cool down (or should I say a warm up) period.

I don't see why unlimited summons at 1 mana per turn upkeep each and the initial casting cost would be that bad, since most of the available summons are not much better than early to mid game trained troops, and it provides an alternative to the damage-oriented mage for a magic-oriented faction. I could get behind a caster level based restriction (i.e., you can have (level/5) fire elementals, (level/3) ice elementals, and (level) shadow wargs, or something along those lines) or not having any restriction beyond your mana income. If summoned creatures were to be buffed significantly, I might see a reason for them to be as limited as they currently are, but right now most of them don't seem to be worth the mana once I can produce a spearman in leather armor, or have a decent champion.

Removing the limitation on the number of summons or increasing the cap on the number of summons would also go a long ways to improving the Summoner sovereign class and making the Summon traits more appealing, even if levels for summons still only really increased their health, since you'd be getting more out of these traits. Also, the mana costs of summoning creatures as quickly as I can would probably prevent me from using much magic in tactical combat, and summons are generally fragile enough that I'd have to replace them fairly frequently.

As things stand, I feel like Summoner is the worst profession for my sovereign to take if they are to be built as a mage, since the direct combat professions will let me level faster, Bandit Lord and Beastlord will give me more disposable allies (and in the case of Beastlord, usually also better disposable allies), and the various troop supporting professions make my meatshields cheaper or tougher, while Noble at least doesn't hurt and is beneficial even if I chose magic types that don't have access to summons (death, air, and life).

I'd also like for the tactical summon spells to be castable even if the strategic version is already active on the caster (this is another annoyance that removing the summon limit would likely solve).