Well I understand your concern for normal/normal difficulty, but I would have to disagree on rid/rid difficulty. Reading your post I am going to assume you never have played rid/rid difficulty because using magic is like a bee stinging an elephant. With your proposed strategy your global mana pool would be empty real fast once you start a war. Trust me on this one because I have done it. Your startegy does work on lower difficulties of play, but the only thing that needs to be removed is blink or change blink so it can be only cast once during combat.
Now as another poster stated why would you waste your time with this strategy when you can melee attack 3 to 5 times around for as much as 60+ damage an attack. That is 180+ to 300+ damage a round you can do with a sword and wearing the best armor you hardly get hit. This is much faster and overpowered than casting arcane arrow for 20 damage (40 int) three rounds in a row than cast blink rinse wash and repeat until everyone is dead. On rid/rid you are going to be spending a lot of time in combat with that combo and once you start a decent war you will be out of mana because magic is very weak or basically useless at higher difficulties.
You should also try playing different size maps and difficulties before commenting that something is overpowered because really the only statement I can agree here is making a nerf on blink only. Magic damage needs to be increased especially for people that play on higher difficulties because as it is right now you can only truly play a warrior.
Now that I have time for a proper reply... Before you posted that, did you read the message before, where I stated I tried this on Rid/Rid and had success? If you missed it, it's ok. I added it as an edit because I didn't want to double-post
Anyway... From your experience, my game must have been a fluke, then. I should not have been able to crush the AI on Rid/Rid, even when it had a chance to build up. The problem was that the AI was unable to react properly to my magic nuke strategy. There is really nothing a sov can do to react to a blink rush other than casting Spell Immunity (an equally unbalanced spell) or produce Scions once they are in the game. I only had one sov cast SI... and he did so on himself... a level 1 sov with 14 HP. The AI isn't equipped to deal with magic, and even if they could react, they have no way of adding spell resistance to their units other than casting a spell.
The only challenge I had in my game was the annoying roving monster attacks. This wasn't because my strategy was faulty. It was because I was lazy. I would just conquer a city, throw up a few improvements, and move on. I really didn't do any colonization to bring the entire landmass under my control. Once I got the mana flowing, I started teleporting my sov around the map to mop up any bandits or beasts.
When I was fighting enemy sovs, most battles took 100-300 mana, and I used a mixture of AA, SB, fireball, and that multi-hit fire spell. Mana costs were low in the beginning and ramped up to greater heights when I started using fire. In order to pull this strategy off, I needed only to research the shard harvesting and mastery. I then started targeting enemy cities that had an abundance of Arcane Knowledge production or had shards in their ZoC. I was pulling in 20 mana per turn in no time, which was enough to limit downtime to about 8 turns between city attacks. That was fine pacing, because I did need some time to make sure that my captured cities weren't entirely neglected. Again, since I targeted cities with mana, I was able to keep my reserves in check.
If I ever was caught with my pants down (no mana), I just retreated. There is no penalty to retreating. (In fact, I found that if you have a champion parked on an improved resource, retreating keeps him parked on the resource and the improvement remains intact!) The enemy sov would retake the city, and I would then wipe them out again in a few turns. Since I was at zero risk (and always had enough mana for an emergency blink), I wasn't in any hurry to retake the city.
When I was fighting some Kingdom cities, I found that I could speed things along by blinking into a corner behind the row of 3 buildings. I was unreachable. I couldn't use this exploit for Empire Cities because there were no safe zones. It was a time-saver, but my strategy would have worked if I wasn't able to use this exploit.
In regards to the 5 Int vs 45 Int... Yes, you can do this with 5 Int and enough Fire shards. The thing I noticed, though, was that even with 4 fire shards and the ability to do 30 damage to a 3x3 square, I was still using the lower damaging Spell Blast (30% of Int as damage) simply because it was more mana efficient and could hit more enemies at once.
In summary, I don't share your view that magic is worthless. If, however, you think that magic needs to be more powerful, I would counter that the exploits that I posted here need to be cleared up before magic gets its second overhaul. Otherwise, they will just make the problem worse.
Here are my recommendations that I'd suggest to the dev team to deal with this strategy:
1. Make Spell Immunity have a maintenance cost, a limited duration, or both.
2. Make Spell Immunity only work against magic, not non-magical special abilities like poison or web.
3. Prevent players from Blinking behind buildings.
4. Create a system (other than a single spell) where units can be improved to resist spells.
5. Get the enemy AI to use said system.
6. Change Blink so that it uses only 2 AP, and allow movement/combat after casting. (Enemy sovs or blinkable units could blink in and attack.)
7. Or instead of #6, allow enemy sovs to blink other units around the tactical map (and teach them to use it).
8. Or if the dev team is uncreative, just totally hoze Blink by putting a cooldown or per-battle limitation.
(They also need to fix retreating/protecting resources.)
