No, up the priority for the spell/skill they use.

Here's what I used for a spell and they are almost guaranteed to start the spell immediately in tactical battle

       <AIData AIPersonality="AI_General">
            <AIPriority>850000000000</AIPriority>
        </AIData>

That's good to know... any of these summoners are fools if they don't cast it right at the beginning... unless they are fighting ranged units, but that seems a little more in-depth than I'm capable of doing in the code.

@heavenfall how do you test such a feature out? I'd hate to release unto the public saying I've got the AI using these summons in battles, when alas I do not.

Watch the AI play. Start the game with cheats, then press ctrl-U to see whole map, then ctrl-z to watch the AI play. When you see an AI army with a bunch of summoner units, engage them in battle.

Or you can create a monsterlair and have it spawn them, then create a custom map with that monster lair.

Or any way you'd normally test stuff like this, by watching how the AI uses it.

Thanks... spent too long watching the AI doing its thing... didn't think about the monster lair though, I'll do that one Bandit Summoners .... here we come.

Hi, I just completed the quest with inn pieces (pretty funny actually). the problem is I didn't receive the summoners.

playing with stormoworld, loaded with mod manager

Found the error... forgot to make a special Air summoner... DOH!

Glad you like the quest... seems it didn't make it out of testing phase. At least you got XP for the moment.

I'll make the unit and post up a correct file tonight sorry about that, thanks for the error catch.

Fixed... forgot to set an internal name correctly. It should work now and I found another error with the quest... you shouldn't face 1 level 1 air elemental but 3 air elementals in the first round of battle.

parrot, idea, could you create a summoners tower or chamber or dungeon or laboratory or whatever.

buildable in cities that have shards connected to them directly (to avoid problems with shards switching allegiance as the cities crawl)

that would be buildable in conclaves only and would provide a defending summoner unit of given type?

I think I don't have this mod installed correctly or something.

For some reason it seems random if it shows up in the tech tree and if it shows up.

When it shows up, there is usually one of the 4. Once I had two, fire and frost.

When it shows up, there are no pre-created units once you reach that tech, but if you make your own, you can choose the correct summon ability and it works great.

I'm playing with Mods: Stormworld (u), Armored Milita (1.4), HugeMaps (1.1) and this one Summoner Units (1.4c)

Using the Mod Manager, do I only install "StormworldSummonerUnits" or both "StormworldSummonerUnits" and "SummonerUnits"?

Thanks.

I have these summoner units tied to tech that have a 1 in 4 chance of showing up. Basically the book of the winds, book of the flame, book of frost and book of stones. So, it is working as intended. There are also quests that give you summoner units.

There should be pre-designed units for each of the races when you research that tech and all the pre-requisite equipment. You should be able to build these units when you can build mages. Namely the staves they have pre-designed with them need the enchanters tech (which is not a formal-pre-requisite for these traits).

If you have suggestion of a tech pre-requisite for these character besides these books that show up randomly, then let me know I might make an alternate version.

What about installing, do I check both boxes with Mod Manager, or only the Stormworld one?

It's hard to use this mod as a viable strategy if there is only a 25% chance of it showing up in the tech tree. I'd like to see one of them be there randomly each game, with the rest available via quest.

If you are using the stormworld, only select the stormworld version. Heavenfall has special summons.

I'll add more summons in a future version that are not dependent on the books. Maybe do a weaker versions of these summons. As it stands if you get these summoner units, they will dominate the battlefield with no cost to mana on your part. The only viable defense is to kill your summoners, which the AI is not that skilled at averting a blocking unit (your summons).

After the new-year I'll have a upgraded version of the summoner units with more summon traits.

Thanks for the feedback.

FYI, I'm in the process of finishing up my third game with the summoner mod installed.

In the first one, I got two of the "Book" techs and saw that they unlocked the corresponding summoner units, so all was happy there, although I never did get around to building any of them.

In the second, I didn't get any "Book" techs, which annoyed me, so I installed the "No more raodom book of power in magic tech"[sic] mod from Nexus, which replaces the master tech file with one that sets all for "Book" techs to 100%.

In the third game, I have all four "Book" techs, but they're not unlocking the summoner units.  I have received a summoner unit as a quest reward, however, so I know your mod is still there and active.

Anyhow, that's a potential incompatibility that you may want to look into.  Also, would you consider an option in the mod to make the "Book" techs 100%?  (I fully understand if you don't want to deal with any more variations of the mod than necessary, but it would be nice.)

As to feedback on the summoner units themselves, they seem to work properly.  The one thing I'd like to see added is some indication of the summoned elemental's level (and how it's determined, if not a fixed level) in the tooltip for the summon powers.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't quite understand why my mod is not compatible with the other mod, unless the other mod changes the internal name of the techs. There is a invisible pre-requisite for these summoner units. They need "enchanters" for the staves they use. But the traits themselves are unlocked with each of the books. Next time check to see if that is happening. (I've checked the other mod and it doesn't change the name of the tech so it should work).

The tool-tip when in tatical combat does tell you what level elemental you can summon. I'll see about adding it to the other locations. Right now it goes by the following:

ice elemental level 1 (+1 level per water shard)

fire elemental level 3 (+1 level per fire shard)

earth elemental level 3 (+1 level per earth shard)

air elemental level 3 (+1 level per air shard)

I might up the Ice elemental level to 3... just to keep consistent.

It could well be because of "Enchanters", yeah.  That game was with Stormworld's Elves faction, so I didn't really feel a strong need to research staves.  (This also kept me from seeing much of how effective the earth summoners were...  I'm an Initiative junkie in general, and the Elves have a base +2 init, plus the better/faster bows trait, so the summoners only got to act once in all the battles I had them along for.  The rest of the time, everything was dead before Initiative 14 came along...)

When installing the other mod, I did a diff of its file and the vanilla version and the only differences found were changing the chance of the books appearing from 25 to 100, so I concur that it did not change the internal names.

A suggestion, now that I've seen how the elemental level is determined:  Can it be made dependent on the unit size?  Say, (number of figures) + (number of shards) - 2?  That would make it the same for 5-man units, but lower (shards+1) at the start of the game and higher (shards+5) at endgame, to go along with the power progression of other units.  Even better would be if it could be dynamic, based on the unit's size when summoning (rather than their full complement), so that summoned elementals are weaker if the unit is damaged when calling them, but I have a feeling that probably isn't possible.

I suspect that my problem with the missing units may be due to playing non-vanilla races.  In my current game, I'm using Stormworld's Angels faction and, with Enchanters, Book of Air, and Book of Earth researched, I don't have any pre-designed summoner units available and none of the "Book of (Element)" techs show on the research tree as unlocking any units, but I am able to design custom units with Earth Summoner and Air Summoner abilities.  I've just produced my first squad of lightning hammer troops with Air Summoner.  I expect them to be devastating once they pick up a few levels.  (Or sooner, given that I have 10 air shards...)

Another minor bug I noticed: I tried giving a unit both Earth Summoner and Air Summoner and, as I expected, they were only allowed to have one or the other, not both.  However, in the trait selection panel, the green "active" highlight box stayed on for the traits even when they were removed from the unit.  (i.e., Select one, then select the other.  The unit will only have the one that was selected second, but both have the green box marking them as "active" on the right.)  I suspect that this may be an engine bug rather than something you can do anything about, but I figure I should report it just in case.

These summoner units are rather devistating on their own since they cost no mana to summon these troops. The idea is to keep them in the background and let the summons kill all the other troops. My balance is that the summons has a range of 3 from the caster and a lower level compared to the sovereigns summons. I think the range implementation may be a problem with the AI using this unit, still more tests needed to determine this or not.

I didn't make anything special for each of the non-vanilla races. I only made the mod compatible with stormworld not fully integrated with stormworld. It would take a long time to do that, and I would have to keep up with stormworld changes.

This was an experiment of mine to see if it was indeed possible to have only one trait from a collection of traits. It was possible as I succeeded, but I did end up with this side effect you mentioned above. There is nothing that I can do to fix the problem.