How do I counter Summoners

[Green Raven]

I love using them, but I hate fighting them.

[~ Fabulous ~]

I usually just out enchantment and out spell them, summon eat lots of mana to maintain

[GrandMajora]

The Tome of Severance (T4 Materium) is specifically focused around countering summoners.

[Balekai]

Off the top of my head some spell spamming WK or ES, with lot's of mana reserve and Mystic Attunement sub culture. And/or Shadow Affinity's Death Magic so you get 10 Casting Points back every time something dies in combat, sustaining unlimited high damaging spells.

For unit enchantments summoners tend to exploit lots of them and sustain in general.

Lock down their unit Enchantments with stuff like Tome of Severance, which destroys heavy enchantment, summoning and Undead summoning builds (Severances' Final Banishment spell destroys all corpses and heals 5 health/+1 Resist for each one destroyed as a side note vs. undead builds or Nature or Order builds resurrecting on mass).

Mostly because of Disruption (temporarily disables enchantments for 2 turns or so).
Severing Golem is really good for afflicting mass amounts of this in combat, while also doing 30 Frost damage base all to a random 5 units. Severing Blades makes melee attacks of frontliners cause disruption which is great. Find a way to lower enemy status resist and maybe exploit retaliation attacks with Tome of Tentacles or Golden Golem and the likes. Tentacles would also be good for getting immobilize into your faction build and keeping summons away form you that aren't Ethereal.

Make your armies highly sustainable as well. Try to apply Poison/Decaying if possible somehow to counter regeneration on all those extra summons if going up against a Nature summoning build. Vs. a Mystic Summoner you want Decaying as well and maybe a lot of weakness application to counter strengthen spam.

Keep a Mystic Summoner from casting any spells big or small all that much. Again Tome of Severance has a portable World castable Spell Jammer with Conjure Spellward. that you can cast before battle like a Fey Mist build does with Lingering Mists. Or if playing ES Mageblood summon can do this for you as well, Then at least the Mystic Summoner has to spend a lot more mana than they want to to activate their special attunement.

[Cindeerella]

That deleted what do you mean by “Summoners”. Mystic t3 unit? He’s pretty fragile so just kill him. Units that summon other units? You can’t really counter them, can try to ignore summons and just kill enemy army. Spamming summons in battle with spells? Kill enemy ruler and they won’t be casting spells. Enemy summons units on global map? Prepare a lot of lightning damage, most of summons are Astral and they hate Lightning damage (Or Frost if you see a lot of storm elementals). Summoning Umbral Mistresses in MP? You can’t counter that.

[Balekai]

Here's my stab at an anti Summoner build. It is very difficult and time consuming to set up because it requires at least Ascending an Eldritch Sovereign once with at least level 12, and as an Ascended Sorcerer (T5 Tome of Archmage), before getting to the actual build itself. Anyways AoW4 database link:

https://minionsart.github.io/aow4db/HTML/FactionCreator.html?u=20:34:19:43,22,25,61,57,e9,f3,bc:f0:aa:a3:ef:a2:83:8f:8e:90:91:84,000000,105:f8:fe:f9,13e,h,n:r

*Click the link twice as per usual, if it just pops up with steam page the first time like it does for me :p :P*

Idea: This build tries to pick up as much Army spell damage, Combat spell damage, anti enchantment ability, anti enemy cast ability, anti swarm effectiveness, and anti enemy positive effect effectiveness while destroying enemy sustain with lot's of Hazard DoT in addition tons of spike and spell damage.


Societal Traits:
Powerful Evokers +10% more damage with spells + 10, +5 Casting Points per Support/Mage in battle.
Runesmiths - 40% knowledge to unlock enchantment spells (we have a lot of them), -30% upkeep for enchantments. Alternative (one of the few since everything else is tight on affinity) is to go Gifted Casters (+10 world/combat casting points, -20% spell cost) or Mana Addicts for life leech attunement.

Racial Traits:
Were going all in on Pyre Templars AoE melee attack combined with severing enchantment + lot's of retaliation when getting swarmed by summons. Also elusive + Hardy help backline reduce opportunity attacks and take more hits respectfully.

(Ferocious + Hardy + Elusive + Cold Blooded. Cold Blooded especially if you take Mana Addicts and fail to cast, but great vs. stuff like Umbral Mistress).


Leader:
Ascended Eldritch Sovereign leader with the above signature skills for the much needed Affinity Points to qualify for a whole bunch of different high tier Tomes of different affinities. In addition we might as well take advantage of the -6 Status Resistance this build will have enemy army wide basically (Condemn + Cryomancy enemy army damage spell and -3 status resistance). An enthraller ES which we need to go into for affinity already bypasses 3 Status Resist and we will be able to mind control and mess around with units very easily.

We also want the extra +30 Casting Points and +10 Imperium income from Eldritch Influence I and II, the 200 Knowledge Ritual, Arcfire for a lot more massive AoE and DoT damage (OP overall and can wipe out trash encounters early game without the enemy reaching your units with Typhoon or Blazing Chain Lightning). Tome of Blessings adds strong support to ES in addition helping us qualify for later Order tomes.

Signature Skills: Mindbreaker (1 Shadow, 1 Order Affinities) --> Forgotten Tome of Blessings (1 Order Affinity) --> Enthraller (1 Order Affinity) --> Forgotten Tome of Arcfire (1 Chaos Affinity).


Culture:
Mystic Attunement for sure. We get to use echos as reserve combat casting points for early mid game, then can synergize with Ascended Sorcerer + Death Magic Affinity Tree trait for TONS of combat casting if not unlimited with the only issue being mana... maybe (40% reduction just form a Soother + Gifted Casters if you go that way, but with all the enchantments we're using you might get more out of Runesmiths).

Lastly we need the Spellbreakers for their Star Purge ability. One hex radius 2 turn cooldown, 6 Lightning, Fire and Cold damage. Enemies hit lose all positive status effects. Double damage to Magical Origin. PERFECT!


Army Makeup
To get it out of the way the early-mid/late game unit stack setup will be 1 Support/Battle Mage Hero, 1-2 Soothers (great healers and at least 1 in every 3 stacks gives 20% discount on combat spell costs), 1-2 Spellbreakers, 2 Pyre Templars. Until Spellbreakers and Pyre Templars just use White Witches/Evokers and Spellshields respectfully.


Tome Rundown and Reasons.
*I kind of have to explain this because it might not be so obvious from database build link above*

- Tome of Faith (Makes Support units Faithful with Staves of Mending + qualify for Order affinity requirements later + extra healing + Army Heal + Soothers can be in Cleansing Fire later automatically, Makes ES Faithful with Mending touch for cheaper upkeep overall).

- Tome of Tentacles (Mostly for constricting enchantment so out support and battle mages keep enemies in place. We can also buff our Pyre Templars to have unlimited retaliation later. The immobilize won't work on Ethereal summons though, but will help pin down everything else in our hazards and for nuking. Then clean up with Pyre Templars).

- Tome of Cryomancy (Blizzard 20 frost damage -3 status Resist to enemy army, stack with condemn -3 status resist so our severing and constricting enchantments are going to land A LOT more. More Pyre Templar damage with Frost weapons +extra damage channel to scale and we can disable an annoying enemy with Ice Coffin).

- Tome of Evocation (Lighting Army Spell, Chain Lightning spell, Lightning enchantments for melee and support/mages, lightning resit debuffing all over the place, extra damage vs. electrified which will be a lot of enemies already + Arcfire. Magical Origin already vulnerable to Lightning damage channel. Perfect).

- Tome of Cleansing Flames (Pyre Templar which is OP for what we want to do: Mass application of Disrupted all the time with Fire Cleave main attack that deals damage in a 1 hex cone with 40% less damage to adjacent targets, but who cares we're stripping them of enchantments and we have tons of extra damage to make up for it and more. They also come with zeal so they will do full zeal damage vs. condemned armies.

Tons of burning from enchantments. Province damage spell doing 20 damage to enemy armies + condemning everything and destroying an improvement. Cleansing Fires remove one ally neg effect and one enemy positive effect, deals burning I believe to non Faithful/Zeal units. All this combined with Arcfire from ES means a lot of Cleaning Fire, burn stacks, electrified, thus tons of AoE/Hazard damage and extra electrified bonus damage. Blobs will literally melt away. Make sure to build a Pyreshrine early to make drafted Spellbreakers and Pyre Templars faithful since that's what the improvement does now post patch, make units recruited in City Faithful including probably mythics).

- Tome of Amplification (increased spell damage, more damage potential with support/battle mages, more crit on racial units when a spell is cast. More Casting Points. The powerful and cheap Chain Lightning Spell. More knowledge income).

- Tome of Severing (We can actually qualify for this with all our Ascended Eldritch Sovereign gimmicks while going heavy into Order and Astral at the same time. Disrupting Blades for the Pyre Templars and Null Shields for +5 Status Resist. Conjure spellward to mess up Summoners summoning in units and combat spells in an area. Spelljammer world improvement-like summon on demand making enemy casting point costs insane. All the other goodies).

- Tome of Exaltation (Can be switched in for earlier Supremacy Tome, but getting mind control immunity, flying, and a resurrect spell is probably more important at this point while also making all racial units faithful automatically. We also take more spells in this tome than some others i have later on, meaning it's better to take early for cheaper knowledge costs).

- Tome of the God Emperor (Has a powerful enemy Army spell that does 50% more damage vs. enemies in enemy domain. Mass Resurrection combat spell. Divine Protection Army spell for army wide Resurgence for 1 world turn. Exalted Champion buff for 100% more damage, +5 Defence, Resist, and Status Resist for 3 turns on a Pyre Knight with possibly infinite AoE retaliation with Retaliating growths... yes please).

- Tome of Sanctuary (Keeper's Mark for Pyre Templars so they can have an extra insurance policy. Anointed People for more Status Resistance. I moved this up only because it has 2 research I want instead of one).

- Tome of Supremacy (Supreme Magic for Support/Mages. Spellbreakers should be mopping up tons of units. Having them do a further 20 spirit AoE damage when they kill a unit is even better. In addition, Supreme Magic makes all support/mages get zeal which they will get full damage from due to all the sources of condemn we have).

- Tome of Constructs (make units immune to flanking I believe with Linked Minds, plus some other goodies).

Start filling in unit weaknesses with minor transformations like Magical Wards, Steel Skin etc etc.

[Nocturio]

The best is to just avoid them.

[MrButtermancer]

Casting points are a much harder bottleneck to overcome than draft. If you are able to create drafted armies quickly and have anything like ballpark even casualties, they won't be able to replace their losses as fast as you can.

From another angle, Summoners are very good at being able to defend ANYWHERE at a moment's notice. They will, however, struggle if you attack them EVERYWHERE.

[Pantagruel]

What do you mean by summoners as a problem? Is this PvP or PvE? I think there's three types of thing this might be about, but it's not clear which.

• Use of overland summoned units. This lets you add reinforcements while away from you cities, but isn't otherwise super powerful, and it's very weak to the arcane bond spell.
  
• Use of combat summoning skills on units to create a disposable meatshield. This can be moderately annoying, though the AI is bad at doing it.
  
• Use of combat summoning spells to appear in the back line and assassinate key units. This can be hard to deal with, though the AI is bad at doing it.