[johan osterman]

Boron:

If summoned troops start to cost upkeep it will skew the game in favour of items and gem guzzling spells. This will, if items are not made upkeep dependent as well, amongst other things make SC's more prevalent, render far summons and army killing spells relatively more effective etc, in short result in a number of balance changes whose merit is debateable. Besides the balance changes upkeep would also introduce gameplay changes. For example it would render early summons with bad gem for punch ratio that much less interesting. It would also make you very reluctant to cast summoning spells with gems from which you do not have a reliable income, if as was suggested units without the gems to keep upkeep were to depart. There are more problems of this sort. Besides balance and gameplay changes there are implementation problems that are quite a bit more demanding than what you seem to imagine. First of all there is no hardcoded gem cost for a unit like there is for the gold. This means that each summonable unit would have to be assigned a gem cost induvidually. If this was derived from the summoning spells most commonly used to summon the unit it would mean that units that are summonable in different quantities dependent on outside factors would have to be subjected to some consideration, take a troll for example, part of the cost for the troll is that it requires a lvl 3 mage to spend a whole turn sommong it, should it still cost just 1/15 gem in upkeep? or should it be calculated based on the troll court? While these problems are not insurmountable the gains of the change is not readily apperent either, especially since part of what you appear to desire can be achieved by f�ddling with starting parameters. In other words, upkeep for summoned units is not going to happen in dom2.