Supercharge just doubles their damage for 1 turn then kills them early, right? It doesn't add lasers?
Playing on Tactician, equipment item level is super important. Unless you have all level appropriate gear it's just way too hard to win battles.
Summoner is probably the best at dealing with this issue since its just based off summoning skill and player level - not an ability score or weapon damage. The summon has the best HP, armour and magic armour of anyone in the party while the summoner has the worst gear of anyone in the party. The summon gets AOO attacks, u can place it anywhere, change whether it does magic or physical damage, etc.
I've found that summoning isn't "losing steam" but in fact is always the best equipped member of the party and pretty much carries us through every battle. If everyone was a summoner we'd have a party of 8 with more than double the armour and hitpoints we have now.
It's just the game itself is losing steam. Once you get good at a game you get fast at making your moves and then start hitting these little delays from animation speed being slower than your thoughts and the game doesn't keep up with you. Then add in the irritation of having to do the same buffs on him every time when there are no macros or some way to summon him WITH buffs for a 4AP total mana cost.'
But you cant really complain about the animation speed because its all tied in with the excellent quality graphics. I just wish "turn based" didn't have to mean slow paced.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is turn based but you should see how fast I play it using the built in funtions for macros, auto explore, auto attack, etc.
For eg. To cast a magic dart you'd have to press [z] for spells, [a] for magic dart, aim at the target and fire. Instead you can make a macro [za.] and . just means nearest enemy target. Then you can add [o za.] if you want which will try to auto explore then cast at the nearest enemy, but auto explore will fail if there's any enemy in view. So, 1 button playstyle for your level 1 wizard! You could even throw in a "rest until healed" to the macro before you start the exploration.
Anyway, just voicing thoughts. Carry on!