Show when a summon is about to despawn

[Laraso]

It can often be annoying, especially with longer-lasting summons such as Makhleb demons that will often participate in multiple fights, to have your ally spontaneously disappear while blocking an enemy / chokepoint.

It would be a good idea to show when a summon is close to despawning. When there are only 40 auts left of a summon's lifespan, a message should be displayed such as "Your rat appears to start fading away". This could be represented in tiles by changing the purple dot icon that represents a summoned monster to be a white dot icon.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, x>v should also say if a summon is getting ready to despawn too, to help console players.

[MainiacJoe]

In trunk allies are shown as green circles, change that to a dashed circle?

[Laraso]

In trunk allies are shown as green circles, change that to a dashed circle?

We could also do both the white summon dot and a dashed circle.

[PleasingFungus]

This sounds like it would produce quite a lot of message spam, and give players something to keep track of that the game doesn't currently expect them to.

[ion_frigate]

It definitely shouldn't be a message, but I think a graphic (tiles) or a background halo (console) could be warranted. For longer-lasting summons like Makhleb demons, it's a real issue.

Of course another option is to just make summons rapidly time out whenever no monsters are around.

[dowan]

The game may or may not expect the player to keep track of summons, but a very careful player could keep track of how long his summons have been out, as well as looking up or keeping track of the average time they last.
This is probably in the "So tedious nobody ever actually would do it" category, but even still the information is there.

[Quazifuji]

The game may or may not expect the player to keep track of summons, but a very careful player could keep track of how long his summons have been out, as well as looking up or keeping track of the average time they last.
This is probably in the "So tedious nobody ever actually would do it" category, but even still the information is there.

This seems like an argument in favor of making the information readily available, since that's been pretty consistently done for other similar cases (e.g. item IDing).

[infinitevox]

This sounds like it would produce quite a lot of message spam, and give players something to keep track of that the game doesn't currently expect them to.

Add visual indicator + description in "x,v"
RC file option to display summoned units expiration messages
Done!

[duvessa]

If players aren't expected to keep track of summon durations then why does the game reward them for doing so?

[dowan]

In case it wasn't clear, I was trying to say this is a good idea, because the information is already somewhat available, albeit in a tedious fashion (write down the turn number when you cast each summon, code dive for average duration, etc). So make the information available in a less tedious fashion, but like PF said, make sure not to cause a bunch of message spam in the process.