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  • Path of Achra! There is a ton of build variety, and you can summon a screen full of minions. I also love the generated poems at the start, it's good flavor text.

    There is also Rift Wizard 1 and 2, but I had less fun with it.

  • Me furiously taking notes.

    But yeah, sadly some of my best minion moments have been online-centric games. Some tabletops give that feel, like MtG and some DnD classes if you really tweak your character. My summoner bard was fun, even if it added to already slow games. And remember, summons don't just have to be for combat. I once used Earth Elementals for evidence collection.

  • Streets of rogue lets you control minions through mob boss, zombie, gorilla, cop, crips, bloods, slavemaster, comedian classes or you can hire npcs for money or use a necromancy book or hypnosis gadget or some other item. 2D pixel art so wouldn't worry about that.

  • Pathfinder WOTR

    Lots of different builds for different degrees of minions.

    Lich mythic path has raising a tonne of undead built in, but classes like druids are also borderline RTS gameplay with the hordes you can pop out with spontaneous summons.

  • grim dawn has pseudo-pets plus real pets

    it is not very demanding however it does have some slight optimization issues. it also has mod support with more pet classes too

  • Pillars of Eternity's Chanter is all about summoning, with the sequel adding more options there as well. You have many different types of Summons, and on the side you also juggle some active spells and buffs as 'Chanter' in this universe is kinda like a 'Bard': their songs and poems is how they summon things.

  • Though it's online, Path of Exile 1 has a fun necromancer path if you start as a Witch. I never finished the campaign but even then my max horde was like ~50-60 minions running around murdering everything for me.

    Not exact sure if this fits your hardware requirements but there's a lot of fun summoning abilities (especially with workshop mods) in Divinity: Original Sin 2.

    • I'm waiting for 3.26. I should try Divinity Original Sin though.

    • I wish the PoE campaign was like 1/5th as long as it is lmao, I'd actually consider replaying it every season if that was the case

      • How long does it take you? I've been playing for a pretty long time and done the campaign a lot so usually it takes me 7-8 hours, usually I can complete up to act 10 on the first day of the league then get into maps in the weekend. Sadly that kind of pace might not be possible if you don't look up build guides for the campaign and you're new to the game, but I think it's worth using a build guide at least for that part of the game so you can start experimenting with your build in maps.

  • This is a pretty common feature of traditional roguelikes. Try Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

    • Can you believe that the whole reason I'm asking is because I keep trying to run Ghoul Necromancer and dying to stupid stuff before even getting to the first branch? I keep running into dragons on level 3, centaur warriors on level 4, and the most decroded antediluvean monsters as early as level 5 like sun gods, gargoyles, weird purple and cyan things, etc. When I first played it more last year I got decently far on melee fighter runs, no such luck this time around.

  • loop hero is kind of like that if you squint, especially the necromancer character. might check it out.

    • I love auto battlers yet I find Loop Hero really, really boring. The first 4 or 5 loops of a run bore the crap out of me because nothing happens and I'm just placing meadows and rocks, then it gets very FOMO when I have to decide to leave the run because I can't handle the next loop. I kinda hate that the main lever the player has to beat the game is to... stop playing?

  • i think the pillars of eternity games have some summons in a few of the classes. they dont require an internet connection or particularly good hardware.

62 comments