The thing about the Illians is that you can't really balance them for all possible maps. The ability to turn crappy land like tundra or even barren desert into grassland-equivalent ice is always going to be amazing sometimes and near worthless other times. I wouldn't reduce the yield of ice, personally, but I agree with reducing the bonuses from the temple. I'd actually suggest you reduce the carryover further, personally. 50%, with smokehouse and granary, would make 90% carryover total.
50% it is.
Yeah, the problem with Illians is the temples bonus per ice mana. It scales too much.
I've been able to get Auric Ascended before turn 300 twice in games on Emp. The White Hand ritual basically guarantees a kill on your neighbor, and if the map RNG was generous in the mana node placement you are going straight to crazy town.
The white hand results are too strong IF you are already playing as Auric. If he's being summoned as a new civilization, then it's closer to appropriate. Perhaps he shouldn't be playable and only summonable? I dunno. I think the Illians are the most broken civ in the mod ATM.
Yeah that usually happens when your power rating is lower than your opponents (was it?). While it is often a decieving statistic, unfortunately thats the best way to make the AI read militaries I guess, short of rewriting the whole code
Well I'm kind of on the fence regarding this issue. While reducing the food would be a hard nerf, plus it would take a lot of balancing to do as well, this argument still makes a lot of sense to me:
One thing I've noticed about power ratings is soldiers of kilmorph seem to give quite a big boost to it. I assume it's because of all the free promotions they get. This tends to make the ai really aggressive when following the religion.
Yes. Seeing a neighbor convert to Kilmorph is a good indication you are about to get stack rushed. By units that can walk over mountains and ruin your chokepoint defense.
Promotions may be relevant, but I think the unit's base power rating is a bigger issue. I just noticed that Soldiers of Kilmorph had a power rating of 8 (equal to that of a Champion) and so reduced it to 4 (the same as an Axeman or Warrior).
Edit: Actually an ordinary warrior has a power rating of 3. Only the Doviello UU has a power rating of 4, like that of an Axeman, probably meant to encourage the thematic early game hostility.
Yep.. this time got a stack of about 50 SoKs.. Its stupidity really.
The AI obsession with certain cities it sets its eyes on is dumbfounding. As Auric, I started out quite close to Kandros Fir and Mahala. I made my second city at a spot roughly equidistant from our capitals. It was a good location for me (riverside ice) but quite pointless for Kandros. However for some reason he was hell bent on taking the city. I killed a total of about a hundred SoKs by turn 200. Due to spamming huge amounts of units in trying to get a city which was absolutely useless for him, he didn't settle a region on his other side which was empty and just grassland and resources. Not to mention how much it would have drained his economy, by the end of the rushes he was last in tech despite having started next to Yggdrasil.
I could understand a human obsessing over a single city (hurts my ego when my invasion is repelled

) but why the AI would do this I do not understand.
I believe I was told that even the vanilla Civ IV AI is programmed to focus on attacking one player at a time and mostly one city per player. I don't have anything to do with the AI though. Take it up with Tholal if you want.
Oh and a few things:
--After adopting the white hand, do Blizzards randomly spawn in your territory?
They can.
Tholal implemented the Blizzards code so that they can randomly spawn on Snow tiles in Illian territory. I changed the civ prereq to a sate religion one instead.
(I'm thinking of making units of the White Hand religion and state religion immune to Blizzard's damage, to give some non-Winterborn civs an incentive to use them.)
--I noticed open border agreements seemed to cancel regularly due to no apparent reason.. why is that?
I noticed that too and found it annoying. It is an issue for Tholal, not me.
--I would strongly suggest modifying the mechanic by which Auric and the priests spawn. The mechanic of flipping the tile of Letum Frigus is kinda buggy (most of my units landed away from it on different tiles). Additionally if Letum Frigus is on an island or on the other end of the continent on a large map it is a pain. So I would propose two checks (I don't think this should be too hard to code, but I really dont know): Firstly Letum Frigus should be on the same landmass as the Illian capital, and secondly it should be within a certain (map-size dependant) distance of it (around 20 tiles should be fine on a Large map). If these two criteria are obeyed, the units spawn on Letum Frigus else they do so in the capital.
That is basically how I used to have it work. I don't recall at the moment why I changed it, but I think there was a good reason.
Also on a side note, have you considered reducing the number of axemen spawned? The unit and supply costs end up being huge.
By Axemen I presume you mean Conscript units? Axemen are not among the units that they are given, but are a common conscript.
The ritual grants 1 Auric, 1 Anagantios, 1 Dumannios, 1 Riuros, 1 settler, 1 worker, 2 supplies, 1 Adept, 3 Hollow Men, 2 Javalin Throwers, and 1 Frost Speaker. (Formerly it also granted 1 Great Commander, but I just removed that.) It also grants a variable number of conscripts. The unit type is based on whatever would be drafted in the city that completes the ritual. That could be Axemen, or Archers, Longbowmen, or Champions, or various unique units. The number is dependent on how many other hostile or friendly units are already present in that area of the map. (An area may be an island, body of water, whole continent, or part of a continent separated from the rest of the landmass by a mountain range.) It used to equal a quarter of the enemy units minus a quarter of the friendly ones, but for the next version I reduced the first number to an eighth.