Is Conjuration too powerful?
I’m really enjoying the new magic update. Magic can be very powerful, and it should be. But after trying all of them, Conjuration summons stand out as incredibly powerful, and not in an interesting way, in my opinion.
First, conjuration summons don’t take forcelimit. This is fine by itself, but it can become a problem with the other two issues. It also allows small nations to double or triple their army size.
Second, conjuration summons are incredibly cheap. They don’t incur force limit costs and also don’t cost much money to hire, maintain or reinforce. The animals and elementals do have a mana upkeep, but even base regen can outpace it.
Third, they have massive reserve manpower pools. This allows you to ignore attrition and take very lopsided casualties without issue. As a Dwarf, I was able to colonize the serpentspine extremely aggressively with conjuration summons. The uprisings normally destroy your manpower at low techs, but the summons have a nearly infinite stockpile.
I think conjuration summons should allow smaller countries to punch above their weight class, but currently it feels trivial. Other spells are powerful, but they feel powerful in line with the game mechanics. The next game I start, I’m going to avoid conjuration, at least for the beginning of the game, so I can have a challenge.
There are several changes you could make to resolve this, but here are my ideas:
Feral Animals don’t reinforce. I imagine this as the regiment having 0 reserve manpower. They would still be cheap and not cost forcelimit. This would give the caster a quick shot of manpower and allow them to match a larger opponent in a few key battles, but would not be a long term solution anymore. I think it is also thematically fitting for feral animals to be a short term deal
Elementals would be expensive to summon and reinforce. They would still not cost forcelimit and have a large manpower reserve. This would allow the caster to convert money and mana into military strength, much like regular mercenaries. This thematically fits because mass summoning should require expensive material components, and reinforcing is basically summoning more.
Extraplanars should require forcelimit and cost as much as regular soldiers. TBH extraplanars feel a bit out of place to me. But since the regiment is a fixed size and gets powerful buffs, I think it should need to be supported in a standard way. Extraplanars are a long term unit, so they would behave like one.
Another idea I had was to have all the summoned units have low manpower pools, and change one of the other conjuration spells to replenish their manpower, but I don’t know if thats possible programmatically or if it would be annoying to play.