What's your opinion on #domsummon?

[Wauthan]

I noticed that a new patch popped into existence while I've been away. The new #domsummon command looks interesting enough so I wondered if anyone have had a chance to test it yet?

In the quick mod I made the ability seems a bit nonintuitive, with the free units appearing in a somewhat random fashion. I like the new command but I'm having trouble creating a balanced implementation. It does seems to help the AI expand a fair bit faster in singleplayer though. Anyone have an example that turned out to be fun ingame?

Also what summons do you feel are appropriate for the various pretenders assuming they all would have the #domsummon ability?

[Sombre]

Well I stuck domsummon1 on a wolf pretender I made for the vaetti and that produces quite a lot of wolves, especially if you go for a kickass dominion. They proved to be very useful too, nailing archers and casters before they could retreat etc.

I also used it for a unique hero fro my avernum nation who got domsummon in his weaker shapeshifted form and not in the stronger demon one (an incentive to keep him in the 'normal' form a lot of the time). That was domsummon8 I believe and it netted occasional nephil warriors, which was just the sort of minor bonus I was going for. Basically I think domsummon is best used to grab fairly weak monsters and not a ridiculous number of them either. It's an interesting command.

[Wauthan]

I agree with your observation. It's an amusing ability. After I went through the necessary silliness with domsummoned high tier units I found that the command is best used for summoning chaff and meatshields.

One variation that worked out fairly well was making an expensive custom LA C'Tis commander with #domsummon6 for a few different ME Ermor units. The basic idea was an effort from the C'Tis to help the few surviving refugees from Ermor. The mixed troops really worked well with the AI.

Putting #domsummon2 on the "Prophet Lizard King" unit, to summon Tomb Wyrms, also worked well enough. So far it's a good way to bring some of the rarely used units into play.

Your shapeshifted hero is a brilliant example though, and one that I will use on a few one of my own elites.

[Amos]

I tried domsummon in my Nephilim mod but it was too unbalancing and hard to control. I gave domsummon to Kurgi in Horror mod, who was pretty useless without it. I'm working on an Insect mod and am planning to give domsummon to Queens. But in vanilla game anything but the weakest beings being domsummoned will be unbalancing.