The Tavern

Hello,
currently it is impossible to know when there are several summoners around and several summoned monsters who summoned whom. That makes choosing the best tactic hard: killing a summoner also "kills" its summoned monsters, but since the link is not clear a player may end up killing the wrong summoner first, therefore subjecting themselves to futher attacks from the summoned monsters that didn't disappear.

There are several ways this could be solved. The simplest may be to use colour coding: even just 4-5 colours may be enough for all but the most extreem situations.

Otherwise perhaps a more complete solution would be, in the monster list, to list the summoned monsters below and indented respect the summoner. This could similarly work if one or more of the summoned monsters summons further monsters themselves: just indent further. The issue I could see with this solution is that currently if there are multiple identical monsters the list gathers them into a single list item: obviously the fact highlight the summoners would break this, and putting each bunch of summoned monster separately would break it as well. This could make the monster list considerably longer than it is now. Personally I think this is a trade worth making, but others may have a different view.

Thoughts?

Another possibility would be to highlight the summoner and its summons when positioning the cursor on them while in eXamine mode.

I would vote for both the indentation and examine highlighting.

Highlighting the relevant summons/summoner when a monster is x'ed over has been a (very) longstanding plan, it's certainly a good idea but the related display code is unsurprisingly fairly complicated. Patches welcome to speed up the process!

Alternatively, there's a solution that removes the need to complicate UI, makes the decision "fight the summons or go after the summoner" less of a no-brainer and makes multi-summoner fights more challenging (and easier to spiral out of control and make player use resources to reset the fight, which feels like the purpose of monster summoning to me): make summons stay as long as there's at least one monster in sight capable of summoning:
"You kill the orc sorcerer!
The orc sorcerer chants, maintaining the late orc sorcerer's summoning rites!"

I like this idea, but put a UI icon on all summoners when at least one summond creature is on the screen, so the player can tell what's up. It would be a pain to kill the one monster that's actually been summoning only to realize there's another summoner at the edge of LOS that can maintain them.
This also might get weird with multi-spellbook monsters who only sometimes get summons. For these purposes I'd support revealing the "they have a summon spell" information early, whenever there's another summoned creature on the screen.