As written. As-is, it seems that summoned creatures bloat the perceived party size, leading to more spawns. Now.
I see that making sense with permanent creatures, such as mercs, animated dread warriors, fiends, red wizard knights and apprentices and so on, but....
Summoned creatures can and do get routinely dismissed via dispel magic spam, which makes their impact highly variable as-is, but when they also lead to a higher number of creatures on a map they won't even fight (due to mentioned disappearing in a flash), their impact goes from zero to negative, never mind the principial oddity of punishing several classes for using their class-provided powers. This is especially a problem in maps where a certain critical number of enemies will cause a complete cluster*** of alerts... which is incidentally a situation where mages are hard to target and eliminate quickly, resulting in an even lower projected lifetime for summons.
So, yes. If it's temporary (or a wizard familiar for a matter, since that one's there specifically to make up for the one-hit death HP , especially early on), it shouldn't raise the party size. ESPECIALLY since all summoned creatures come in one slot, and thus one can't have an arbitrary number of them, unlike other minions ,so cheesing (which would easily happen with say, mercs without scaling) is not possible.
As written. As-is, it seems that summoned creatures bloat the perceived party size, leading to more spawns. Now. I see that making sense with permanent creatures, such as mercs, animated dread warriors, fiends, red wizard knights and apprentices and so on, but....
Summoned creatures can and do get routinely dismissed via dispel magic spam, which makes their impact highly variable as-is, but when they also lead to a higher number of creatures on a map they won't even fight (due to mentioned disappearing in a flash), their impact goes from zero to negative, never mind the principial oddity of punishing several classes for using their class-provided powers. This is especially a problem in maps where a certain critical number of enemies will cause a complete cluster*** of alerts... which is incidentally a situation where mages are hard to target and eliminate quickly, resulting in an even lower projected lifetime for summons.
So, yes. If it's temporary (or a wizard familiar for a matter, since that one's there specifically to make up for the one-hit death HP , especially early on), it shouldn't raise the party size. ESPECIALLY since all summoned creatures come in one slot, and thus one can't have an arbitrary number of them, unlike other minions ,so cheesing (which would easily happen with say, mercs without scaling) is not possible.