The Tool of Cowards

You'd want to cast the blight spell yourself and make sure the city you cast it from is close enough, has a high level mage tower and that you use a lot of mana. If someone casts a blight on you and has more spellpower, it will overpower your blight and still affect you. And if you have someone else cast it, you dont know exactly what they are using, or maybe you do, I've just found it easier to do it myself.

I'm still rather green in this game but shouldn't their be a "protection" school of magic that allows protection against other spells just as there is one that  gives protection against diplo?

personally i would like to see the range of spells be increased, doubled if possible. Since the big move most cities are out of range of a decent blight spell. I take dakota's point that having no idea who sent an instant blight is pain so having an ability to identify or even block all spells would be really helpful.

SC, of all the possible choices I suggested, I thought option 4a and 4b to be the least likely to be incorporated.  I am happy to be wrong in that regard, as I believe that is the one which would most benefit the game-play.

Do I read the corporate forums?  If I had that type of access, would i be posting here?  But, if you liked my ideas, and are looking to hire a consultant, I am willing to listen to any offers. 

The Tool of Cowards

I am talking about the Blight spells.  Specifically the Instant Blights that allow a player to anonymously attack another player's cities without a chance of detection.  During a time of declared war, I would agree these are legitimate weapons to be used on your enemies.   But during times of peace, they allow anyone to cause damage to their neighbors, without a game mechanism to know who the attacker is.

Is this an oversight of the game developers? Or was this intentional?  For any other method that a player can attack or interact with another player, there are game mechanisms that allow the one attacked to know who the attacker is.  Armies attacking each other are the most obvious.  Diplomatic attacks you can see incoming threats, and defense spells and a high level consulate can give you a great deal of information about the source of hostile diplomats.  Why you are unable to watch a band of fleeing thieves as they depart your city, when you were able to see them approach, is beyond my understanding, but at least your allies are able to keep track of their movements.  Even the "bumping" caravans leave notification of who the city is that sent them.  

And there is a magic technology that is supposed to allow you to Identify a caster of a hostile spell on your city.  But apparently it only works for persistent blights, not the instant blights.  This is probably the main reason, persistent blights are never used, except for a time of declared war.  

I do not claim to be able to write code complex enough to create a game of this standard.  My experience is based on several decades of game playing, game-mastering, some small scale game design,  and immersing myself into swords and sorcery literature since I was a teen.  Perhaps not the type of thing you normally put on a resume, but I think enough to make me qualified to talk about game and magic "logic".  I will try to explain why I believe the why part of the magic system here is flawed, but more importantly, give my ideas that I believe would not only make it more "realistic", but more enjoyable to play with.

Magic is potentially the most powerful force in any game world that allows it.  And I have yet to see a game world, where the source of the most powerful magic spells are undetectable by those that study the arcane arts.  An attack spell that has a range of 200 squares across our game map, would leave a signature that any trained mage would be able to detect.  Depending on the training (or in the case of Illyriad, the size of the Mage Tower), different aspects of the spell could be learned.  Direction of the source, a "guesstimate" of the distance to the source, the race of the caster perhaps.

However, the only means we have to determine who is casting these magic attacks here, is through metagame methods.  Meaning that, I as a player can figure out things through statistics, what my magic users in my cities are unable to.   I will give an example for those that have not had the pleasure of having your city spell bombed anonymously.  I will not use names, to protect the guilty, since it is not my intention to use this post to attack individuals, but hopefully help change the way the game is played for the better.  Recently one of my towns was spell attacked by two spells in the space of two minutes.  So, as a player I was able to figure out that whoever attacked me owned at least two cities.  Next I had to find out the range of the two spells that hit me, something a little research and asking some other players were able to provide.  Third step, decide what the minimum size a town had to be, to cast spells of that power.    Putting that all together, it had to be a player that had at least two towns of over 1000 population, within 200 squares of my town.

So for the next several hours, I painstakingly searched the map looking at every settlement of over 1000 population, checking to see if the player owning it had multiple cities, and how close they were.  Eventually, I came up with a list of less than 30 players that would fit that description.  And then I used another metagame tool, and looked at the player rankings, to see what the magic rankings and scores were, for each of these players.  Some of the players' scores were so low, that it eliminated them immediately, however I kept them on the list to be sure.  I recorded the rankings, but had too many suspects to narrow it down.  So I waited.  Less than one day later, my same town was attacked with the same two spells.  I immediately checked my list, and looked at the magic score/rankings again.  I was lucky, because in my entire list, only one player's score had gone up in a day.   So, I was about 99% sure who the spell attacker was, sent him a pleasant note, asking him to desist, and by some strange coincidence, have not been spell attacked since.

And now, I have included a very boring, and painstaking ritual in my game play.  At least once a day, I check and record the new magic scores for everyone on my list.  And my prime suspect gets checked several times a day.  That way, if I ever get attacked, I have as much evidence as I can acquire to prove who the attacker is.

And all of that is done in a metagame manner.  It should be part of the game mechanics, that building a mage tower, and upgrading it, should not only provide detection and identification of the caster of hostile magics; but should also provide some type of spell defense, to reflect or dispel these attacks.

There are several fixes for this that I can think of, and the rationale for each.  I am sure there are more.  Some I am sure require more work for the developers than others, and for that I apologize.

1.  Remove all instant blight spells from the game.  They are abused, and used by people to attack foes anonymously and without consequence.  (I am not in favor of this, except as a last resort.)

2.  Change the Instant Blight spells so that they can only target a city you have already declared war on.  This would prevent their abuse, and they would be used in the manner I hope they were designed.  I think this would satisfy most people, and hopefully could be done with a minimal of work by the dev's.

3.  Allow the Identify Caster ability that is researched, to be used for all hostile spells.  I think it needs some adjusting, as I believe the more powerful spell that is cast at a city, the better the chance of detecting where it came from.  

4.  Add new schools of magic to the magic research tree.  Divination and Abjuration.  
  a)  Divination would include the Identify Caster ability already in the game.  It would include spells of various power, some that would give various amounts of information on a town that has a Divination spell cast upon it.  It could also possibly be used to detect spells that are cast within opponents' cities.   
  b)  Abjuration would include Dispel Magic, and be a school of spells that would protect your cities from hostile attacks.  Lower level spells may reduce some of the incoming spell damage.  The stronger the Abjuration spell, the more they can defend your town from.  The strongest Abjuration spells could possibly reflect some of the hostile spell back upon the caster.  The most powerful should require a very high amount of mana, so as to make it difficult to maintain constantly.  Instead they would most likely be used only during times of war, when attack is imminent.

In summary, I believe that more magic, not less, enhances this game.  However, some adjustments need to be made, to stop anonymous attacks made, that have no in game method of detection.  Rather than remove these abused spells, we should use more magic to use as protection from, and to identify the casters of these magics.    But if there is no way to implement these magic enhancements to the game, these spells should be removed as a final option to stop the blatant abuse.