I may be on of the few non-academics who played the old board game Civilization back in the 1980s - which had Ilyrians as one of the starting groups - who had ever heard of them before playing the game!
On the one hand, an interesting Antiquity group, especially now that they have discovered that a major bronze age Civ existed in their area of the Balkans, with massive stone fortifications and apparently dense population - but so far, we can't match that Civ up to any later group - they haven't found any written material from them (so far!), and I haven't heard that they've managed to extract any DNA to trace - yet.
On the other hand, the Ilyrian Pirates were (in)famous throughout the Classical era, and may have invented the Liburnian-type bireme and sail galley that was the 'classic' Mediterranean pirate ship, so they would make a great Minor Power with naval attributes and potential to rent you some fine Very Early Privateers . . .
I also confess to having a soft spot for Thracians, because, like some others who herded sheep in hill country, they wore tartan-patterned cloaks, used bagpipes, and everybody around them were terrified that they might stop fighting each other and start conquering the rest of the world - rather like certain North British types a few thousand years later . . .
I will be very disappointed if Civ VII doesn't take and run with the chance to introduce more of the previously-unusable groups to the Civ franchise: folks that for want of Leaders or Language have been left out up to now, like the Minoans, Etruscans, Iron Age Scandinavians and early Germans, Xiong-Nu, etc.
