I think this is a hardcoded limit, because more than one could make the hotkey system difficult to manage and make the game too easy anyway. I don't know if there's something controlling summoned units in the data files, but they also lag a lot.

Yeah i guess so but its still cool to have multiple friendly wizards helping you.

I would like to manage the wizards as part of the army and then be able to summon the whole army (or up to 8) at once.

Summoning them all at once? Sounds like it could work just fine, if you allocate yet another hotkey to do that. Or, possibly, make that the default thing to do with rescued wizards?

Seems a bit powerful but it could work

or just use 'f'?

Disabling unsummoning them might work out kinda well. You'd have to shield them from harm with your own actions instead of just pressing F twice whenever they are flashing red.

All this automatisation kinda takes away from the whole "blokes with swords" idea, though. The whole army thing with the levels and stuff was supposed to make the game more into something between wizardly action and army management, with the best of both worlds. That's what I can remember, at least. At one point, it kinda felt like the whole management aspect wasn't emphasized enough to justify making it a major feature, and I always preferred the wizardly action anyway.

Right now it's somewhere inbetween - dealing with moving the army is easy and doesn't take a lot of attention. In the meanwhile, Merlin's actions, while important, don't completely dominate the gameplay in the same way. Having to put more effort into actually protecting the army members or fellow wizards could work out well though, in my opinion. In that way, the player could still go ahead with the wizardly mayhem aspect (hoarding all XP for Merlin), or raise up the army itself.

Perhaps the solution could lie in making level ups a more dominant aspect instead? The level curve is still pretty tough after 20 (which kinda removes the incentive of soloing maps), whereas the enemy counts don't really get that much higher.

the hard limit atm is 1+the number that start out in the map

I knew that Note!
Also Hi note!

I find that unless the map is carefully designed to be used with the army, it's pretty difficult to really use. By simplifying things and just summoning a bunch of army people in one group (the bigger the charge, the more people) it would make the army as accessible as the other spells.

and Hi Note!