bolotnik
Auto-translated
Yes, I've had a couple of situations where summoned elementals were very helpful in battles:
1) a simple example: the main hero with the main army is busy with more important tasks; ;) and a powerful mage without an army is, at this time, fighting off strong neutral creatures guarding some valuable artifact;
2) a hero with an army, but without resurrection, needs to break through a powerful guard protecting an artifact or a path forward; here it is important to minimize or eliminate losses of your own troops: let the summoned elementals die!
3) in a battle with a strong enemy, you can greatly simplify the task by blinding, "saving for last" :) a strong stack of "infantry"/archers, surrounding them with elementals, and then attacking them: they have nowhere to go, they can't shoot, and we shoot them, hit them with magic, etc.
Elementals are also useful for taking revenge.
There may be other cases. But this ability is valuable closer to the end of the game on large custom maps, when the hero's magic power and knowledge are highly developed - otherwise, the benefits of summoning elementals will not be felt.
That makes sense...
The problem is that my main heroes are always mages, and I don't have situations where the main hero is somewhere with troops, and the mage is bored on the sidelines without troops (I have 1-2 main heroes with troops, all the others are runners with only 1 fast unit to collect everything on the map and deliver troops), so the question arises about the expediency of summoning elementals, since there are many other spells in the arsenal...
and regarding the 3rd situation, if the battle is against an AI hero, he usually just runs away...