Illians World Spell

PPQ_Purple said:

I don't see why all this stupid crying is about.
If you don't like Stasis don't play vs the Illians.

All the anti stasis posts here are written as if there was some special condition that forced you to play Illians in every game. The game has many other lorefull and fun civs to fight and you are free to pick and chose the ones you want. I for example newer play with the Shelam because of world break. But do you see me crying how it should be removed from the game?

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I can't wait till Illian player casts Statis in PBEM game, a month of doing nothing ;>

Sorry, I couldn't resist

I understand there are some issues with doing it, such as producing multiple things in the same turn, but would it be possible to just have the spell give them twenty turns of research and production for each city rather than having it take ten turns? I know its not identical but it would be a lot less frustrating for everyone who isn't them.

When I get hit with Stasis, I sure do more than just push "enter" to end every turn. I explore, rearrange and otherwise stage troops for invasion of places which won't be able to rebuild defenders at all (and the army isn't draining your treasury for being way off your own turf), make a civic change and not care about anarchy, even "long" bouts of anarchy for severe civics adjustments... I would much rather be building during that time obviously, but if the Illians give you lemons, make lemonade.

That said, I did see V. mention a tech prereq as a potential idea. Personally I think that's pretty agreeable... you do not "tap" the powers of the god of Winter without maybe a little magicky/religious tech research. Not saying to stick it at the end of the tree like Divine Essence or something, but even if it was available after say, Priesthood, or better yet, was tied to completion of a Ritual first (like the Deepening or if really wanting a low threshold, Samhain). The idea behind that is that before the Illians release this very annoying power, they'd have to be a force to contend with, whole lot of beakers (or beakers and hammers) to have under their belts before they throw a wrench into the works of everyone else. Not like a turn 2 slap in the face preventing everyone from defending their first cities, ha ha.

Anyhow, yeah, it's a nasty power, but take advantage of the holiday from army costs or anarchy and go do something useful, exploring or conquering are fine ideas. You could even declare war at the start of stasis and be out of the "refuses to talk" territory before stasis is over, possibly able to drag concessions out of someone you significantly weaken (your power ratio over theirs changes in a big way if you hammer them, and they don't get many of your troops in return)... again, be prepared, and take advantage! Even pillaging would do if you had no chance of cracking cities on no advance notice of Stasis coming. All that said, sticking some kind of prerequisite on exercise of the power might make sense. A tech, a ritual, having Dunmanios, Aganatios and Riuros all sitting in the same city (kind of like Scion Dark Council?), or some other "hoop" to jump through to get this powerful effect might all be interesting things to think about. Oh you need Priesthood or oh you need to have finished Samhain, vanilla FFH Illians are ritual junkies with all kinds of "conditionality" of prior rituals on future powers, maybe this is something to follow suit, as RiFE Illians have a few more goodies to enjoy, maybe dialing this one back or pushing it to midgame and later would be interesting.

If you are lucky, you can do all the things Brokenbone mentioned. But since you don't know when Statis is going to be casted, you can't (and shouldn't) hold off civic changes. For warfare, you need a suitable victim and already have the troops build.

If there were some sort of advance notice, it would be possible to make preparations so that you will be able to make lemonade when statis sets in. Either a countdown timer, or maybe a slowdown period before statis, where every 10th, 9th, ... turn is "frozen".

Till said:

If you are lucky, you can do all the things Brokenbone mentioned. But since you don't know when Statis is going to be casted, you can't (and shouldn't) hold off civic changes. For warfare, you need a suitable victim and already have the troops build.

If there were some sort of advance notice, it would be possible to make preparations so that you will be able to make lemonade when statis sets in. Either a countdown timer, or maybe a slowdown period before statis, where every 10th, 9th, ... turn is "frozen".

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That kind of defeats the purpose of the spell though. While I'm not a big fan of the spell, it's supposed to be a shock to everyone.

To illustrate what he said in a way that most of the male population will understand.

What a world spell is supposed to do is either give you a strong bonus or cripple your enemies in such a way that your enemies feel as if they just got a kick in the private parts. A really strong kick by a giant superhuman foot wearing a cast iron boot.


In short, I would set the Illians world spell as the benchmark and balance all world spells to be in line with it.

As someone who plays with 25 Civs per game, I'd absolutely hate that.

I'd really hate that!

I completely hate the Illians worldspell, and I believe it is bad gameplay design.

You have to realize that 25 civs is way too much for a game... Not everyone has 100 Terabytes of ram memory...


A world spell is the a unique thing you have. Most world spells are lame and pointless as they are now.
Start a golden age? Lame.

The only ones worth using now are Stasis, Tsunami and World break.

PPQ_Purple said:

A world spell is the a unique thing you have. Most world spells are lame and pointless as they are now.
Start a golden age? Lame.

The only ones worth using now are Stasis, Tsunami and World break.

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It's not that bad, there are a lot of fun worldspells (apart from the Mercurian worldspell which you probably just forgot, March of Forest and Rally come to mind), others, while less fun (especially in multiplayer), can give you the edge by allowing you to use your civ's abilities to their full extent (e.g. Khazak and Grigori worldspells), nonetheless it's true that some are both weak AND boring, most have been mentioned before, Matzatl and Cualli, Legends, Revelry even seems a bit off lore-wise - I can imagine the Balseraph running wild and being "merry" (in their warped ways), but why should that suddenly make them work harder? - and I never found the right time to cast the Legion worldspell, it seems like a waste in the early game when you need slaves but have few military units and later in the game you have enough units but you don't need any more slaves (you never really need more than ~60/city since you won't be able to produce more than one unit per turn anyway).

And while we're at it, it would be really cool to get a pop up (with a picture if that's possible) whenever a worldspell is casted by any civilization, would make it appear more like an epic one time event rather than like something at best deserving a side note in Erebus' history books (" *³ Around this time the Dural increased their production by 100. ").


Edit: On Topic: Love the Illian worldspell, it's your lifeline after completing the Draw (doing that without Stasis in multiplayer is suicidal), but it's even more fun when it's used against you, annoying as hell sure, but that's what makes it fun.

I'm kind of divided on the Illian Worldspell.
Pro:
* It is extremly flavorful. Freezing the world for 20 turns is exactly what i imagine a Ice themed Civ doing.
* It is probably the strongest Worldspell.
* It feels like a worldspell, more than most others. It's a big event with lasting consequences.
Contra:
* Everything that makes other players sit on their asses and do nothing is bad design. It's similar to Magic: the Gathering and Counterspells. Getting no chance to do anything sucks, but at least there's a number of things you can do to work around counterspells. Stasis not so much. The only way of working around that is not playing with Illians and that is stupid.

Torugu said:

It's not that bad, there are a lot of fun worldspells (apart from the Mercurian worldspell which you probably just forgot, March of Forest and Rally come to mind), others, while less fun (especially in multiplayer), can give you the edge by allowing you to use your civ's abilities to their full extent (e.g. Khazak and Grigori worldspells), nonetheless it's true that some are both weak AND boring, most have been mentioned before, Matzatl and Cualli, Legends, Revelry even seems a bit off lore-wise - I can imagine the Balseraph running wild and being "merry" (in their warped ways), but why should that suddenly make them work harder? - and I never found the right time to cast the Legion worldspell, it seems like a waste in the early game when you need slaves but have few military units and later in the game you have enough units but you don't need any more slaves (you never really need more than ~60/city since you won't be able to produce more than one unit per turn anyway).

And while we're at it, it would be really cool to get a pop up (with a picture if that's possible) whenever a worldspell is casted by any civilization, would make it appear more like an epic one time event rather than like something at best deserving a side note in Erebus' history books (" *³ Around this time the Dural increased their production by 100. ").


Edit: On Topic: Love the Illian worldspell, it's your lifeline after completing the Draw (doing that without Stasis in multiplayer is suicidal), but it's even more fun when it's used against you, annoying as hell sure, but that's what makes it fun.

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I use the D'tesh worldspell for my first war... During which, I tend to have 10-12 scouts. Now that would be 5 or so Binders, 3 Watchers, rest Scouts.

The first assault is the place where it will have the most effect on the rest of the game... Getting 10-12 population right then is amazing.

shoggi said:

I'm kind of divided on the Illian Worldspell.
Pro:
* It is extremly flavorful. Freezing the world for 20 turns is exactly what i imagine a Ice themed Civ doing.
* It is probably the strongest Worldspell.
* It feels like a worldspell, more than most others. It's a big event with lasting consequences.
Contra:
* Everything that makes other players sit on their asses and do nothing is bad design. It's similar to Magic: the Gathering and Counterspells. Getting no chance to do anything sucks, but at least there's a number of things you can do to work around counterspells. Stasis not so much. The only way of working around that is not playing with Illians and that is stupid.

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Yes, the lack of a counter is something I dislike as well... Other worldspells either affect just the one turn, or are beneficial to the caster rather than negative to everyone else.

Prehaps golden ages could negate the effects of statis. So, you are unaffected by statis, but you don't get the economy boost of a normal golden age. May cause some interesting choices with the Balseraph world spell (which is rather weak for a wordspell). All word spells need to be brought to the power level of statis.

Randomness said:

All word spells need to be brought to the power level of statis.

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No. All civs should be balanced, that's it. I can see why, for example, calabim and khazad WS should be a little weaker than others, those are very strong civs.

That said, the idea of golden ages countering stasis is appealing!
I also tought, instead of stopping production outright, could it be possible to add an hammer intensive, fake building to all cities?
This way a super productive city could get free of stasis sooner than a little town.
All cities should get a bonus production toward completion of such a building, to avoid said little town being locked in stasis for ages...
I don't know if that would be even possible, or fun ! Feel free to ignore! it's 5:34 am here, and I'm quite sure I should have stopped drinking at least one beer earlier...

(please, forgive any grammar/spelling/semantics/mechanics error I made...)

I'm another 'not a fan of stasis' player, but i want to play with the Illians in game. This is the only thread on the internet i have found discussing the issue (which is quite a surprise!).

Anyway what i would like to do is not get rid of Stasis completely (which is what i had currently been doing) like this:

line 3042 in \XML\Units\CIV4Spellinfos.xml

change <bAllowAI>1</bAllowAI> to <bAllowAI>0</bAllowAI>

But instead reduce the length of Stasis by half (so on normal game speed the 20 turn freeze becomes 10 etc). The ONLY place i have seen this mentioned is on this webpage:

https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/wiki/Features

"Stasis base length reduced to 10 from 20. It now gives a Golden Age (for the same length) in addition to the freezing."

Which sounds a pretty good compromise. So where in the files is this possible to change? I've looked all through the files and not been able to see where Stasis is defined in terms of it's effect and duration etc?

Edit: I have since found the thread for the mod that the above link is for, so if anyone is interested in seeing how to make that change the thread link is here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=12944745#post12944745

Incidentally, if Illians cast stasis during Blight (which I have seen the AI do - in MNAI admittedly), then Blight only affects them. Everyone else doesn't have growth, so the Blight health whack decreases as normal without any negative effect. Since the Illians do get growth then, they get whacked by Blight.

I'd like to say that in a Marathon game, I was able to get 2 Stasis in a row due to Birthright Regained. That was the easiest conquest I've ever done.

I kinda like the illian world spell. It's the nemesis of all players that attempt to completely ignore military in order to ramp up their economy. Even if I'm not playing the illians I tend to enjoy their use of this spell. It gives me a reason to destroy my neighbors and with no unhappiness or economy burdens while doing so! That said I still hate the illians.. if you don't have sun mana and they cast their ritual, your chances of winning the game just went down the toilet.

Also I agree with Valk - the lanun spell is far more devastating. I'd ban them before the illians for sure. Ignoring coastal cities is a massive economy loss, and even if you do, you can't prevent your improvements from being destroyed. Just finished that Town? Go back 70 turns. Don't pass go. And don't get me started on enclave removal x.x