Right now magic victory is pretty much expansion victory with more bonuses and no real impact.
How about changing them to be more in line with something like AoW2 or the Ice spell in AoW4? Your race gains bonuses and ignores penalties to a specific type of land (astral soil, rainforest, wasteland, volcanic soil, etc.) And while the spell is channeled it terraforms the map to those specific types?
#Change Magic Victory to be more impactful
vast kayak
rocky patrol
Is it still a "direct" victory path in your example? Like when the entire map is terraformef you win? Or a percentage of it?
vast kayak
I would say all of it should be terraformed and it blocks other terraforming spells (so you cant stretch it out and enemies cant make it pointless)
rocky patrol
Still making use of the province improvements so that it can be countered by pillaging?
vast kayak
That is something I haven't decided on, either keep them. Or make it bound to your wizard tower (throne city)
frozen oar
I'd be for it... very appropriate to see the entire world transformed leading up to your 'victory' (like AOW2 as you said) and mechnically would benefit racial benfits like snow or water adaptation to help your armies in the process [even if you dont go for magic victory, the process can be worth while for conquest etc]
I think the seeds in provinces is still needed or it'd be too easy to defend [just turtle]... basically to unlease & maintain "the ultimate spell" you're required to have like 9 stacks (split up 3 on each node) of higher tier units to keep it defended while in effect --- remaining forced get to benefit
Ps: it'd be hilarious (and probably dumb) if looking at an ultimate themed for "underground adaptation", maybe ultimate earth-based magic... slowly puts the world into the underground 🤣 ... replace underworld with overworld slowly until entirely subterranean (overworld replaced with void tiles to force underground)
wild tusk
Honestly I'd like to see expansion victory fleshed out a bit more first... it's basically magic but worse (the province improvement offers no bonuses, and you get no passive bonus spell to start the countdown).
But there's still room for improvement for magic too, of course
frozen oar
Yeah, expansion vc, i did it once in a game [for the achievemnt] I already won by reloading both methods... pretty horrible and I'd never do it again 🤣 (already owned/vassal half the map, but still needed to buy as many heros as i could and spam outposts for another 30 sectors on the map by turn 100)🤣