National Summons and Gem Costs

[Felius]

While most generic unit summons got a pretty large cost reduction or efficiency improvement (with some exceptions), most National Unit Summoning spells still have the same Dominions 5 efficiency, making them quite a bit more comparatively costly.

This is particularly affects nations such as Jomon, Shinuyama, or MA Ermor, which have a great deal of nation-specific summons that they somewhat rely for higher-end stuff (or for nearly everything that's not freespawn in the case of MA Ermor)

With this is mind, is a balancing review for national summoning spells in the roadmap for the near-ish future after the initial major bugs and similar issues get handled?

[Trapmaker]

I think MA ermor will do just fine.

[Felius]

Originally posted by Trapmaker:

I think MA ermor will do just fine.

I mean, it has always been a very strong faction, so it's not like it became weak because of this, but it certainly made the unit summon side of its national spells (as opposed to commander/mage summoning) comparatively weaker.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

I suspect this is working as intended, because in dom 5 most national summons were much stronger than generic options. A lot of the generic options just did not see play because they weren't worth using outside of some very niche situations. They needed the buff.

Also no, MA Ermor is not a very strong faction. It's actually generally considered quite weak, but being a popkill nation makes it more annoying than is worthwhile to deal with - you can generally thrash Ermor if you want to, it's just that the combination of whatever attrition you suffer in the process and getting so little benefit from the war means choosing to do so will lose you the game to somebody else down the line.

[Trapmaker]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

I suspect this is working as intended, because in dom 5 most national summons were much stronger than generic options. A lot of the generic options just did not see play because they weren't worth using outside of some very niche situations. They needed the buff.

Also no, MA Ermor is not a very strong faction. It's actually generally considered quite weak, but being a popkill nation makes it more annoying than is worthwhile to deal with - you can generally thrash Ermor if you want to, it's just that the combination of whatever attrition you suffer in the process and getting so little benefit from the war means choosing to do so will lose you the game to somebody else down the line.

> MA ermor isn't strong its just that fighting them is such a pain in the ass you'll lose the game if you do it.

So they're strong.

Originally posted by Felius:

Originally posted by Trapmaker:

I think MA ermor will do just fine.

I mean, it has always been a very strong faction, so it's not like it became weak because of this, but it certainly made the unit summon side of its national spells (as opposed to commander/mage summoning) comparatively weaker.

I'm willing to bet that black laurel lictors are still crazy efficient.

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Originally posted by Trapmaker:

> MA ermor isn't strong its just that fighting them is such a pain in the ass you'll lose the game if you do it.

So they're strong.

No, because you won't lose the game to Ermor. You can thrash Ermor easily enough, but all you'll get out of it is some barren wastelands that provide next to 0 income, maybe a bit of gem income. Meanwhile everybody else is fighting wars against non-popkill factions, so the winners will have grabbed significant chunks of extra income for themselves, and one of them will use that lead to kill you.

It's popkill nations' strongest card to play, honestly. If they were just straight up strong, people would take their lumps and coalition nations like Ermor to knock them out because you'd have to. As it is they've got that diplomatic gambit of, "any of you could kill me - who wants to give up their best chance of winning in order to actually do so?"

[Tuck Davis]

I summarize the current replies into: "HeHe Ermor" and "they wanted to buff generics".

Looks like I was getting the wrong conclusion that they made summoning more efficient to reflect the fact that battlefields are almost double as big now.
EA TienChi is also one of those nations with inefficient national summons for such a wide battlefield.

I guess we will see more AI styled armies then with a bunch of generic summons in late game just because we don't get the battlefield filled up with meaningful stuff. Having a new magic path to share the percentage of gem sites with wont help either.
But I have to get there still so I can not be sure :)

[LDiCesare]

I think Illwinter mentioned they would have a pass on national summons. Quite obviously EA T'ien Ch'i for instance has national summons that tend to be now overpriced. One more demon of heavenly waters wouldn't hurt for the same price for instance.