u/CPOKashue

I've been playing with various secret spells as ascensions since finding Cinren's. Thoughts about the ones I've messed with:

• Arctica's ice age: an interesting idea, if you're a sociopath. Randomly curses a bunch of provinces, which then explode and become ice. What makes it unique is that these take away the province improvement, and it works on EVERYONE BUT YOU. Allies, vassals, enemies, doesn't matter. If you cast it 1-2 times every turn, you will effectively suppress the entire world. I guess it could be useful for a purely military playthrough, but as it is, you end up just bleeding mana to make everyone's life suck. It IS available at a T3 tower while the others in this list require a T4, so you can get started ruining the planet pretty fast.
• Zaethyl’s paradise: makes the entire map grass and forest, and doubles your income for grass and forest. If your civ was building toward the tome of paradise, it's sort of a no-brainer, especially since it stacks with other similar spells. Also plays strongly to the story fantasy aspect of gameplay, as you can be a magical nature kingdom that "fixes" hostile worlds.
• Cinren's Temptation: in a previous post I had posited you could build around this and just kind of hoover up guys - this seems to not actually be the case. The expense is prohibitive until pretty late game, to the point that it doesn't really ever beat using units with dominate like the Temptress or Nymph, or a vampire lord. It's neat to have during sieges, but not as strong as it initially appears if you grab it late game.
• The minion ones: gives you a T5 minion. These are good in that you can theoretically rush a T4 wizard tower pretty fast, then have T5 mythics way before you'd get them via tomes. All the minions are pretty good, although the Faelor is PROBABLY the strongest.

I've been messing with this spell since I found it, and it seems like it might be good enough to build around?

Broadly, it lets you target an enemy army and cause a random unit to leave. You can then pay mana to have that unit join you, or simply let them wander off.

Although this isn't written into the spell card, it only seems to work on non-hero units that do NOT have control loss immunity.

It has a pretty steep cost - 200 Mana and 150 world casting points - but I think Mystic could still manage 2-3 casts a turn - possibly 4. And the ability to just delete units whole cloth from an enemy army is extremely powerful, even if you don't keep them. It even works on units inside cities!

I feel like this may work as the basis of a build similar to rally builds, but dependent on hoovering up enemy troops instead. Anyone try it yet?

Tunneling Spider has been busy apparently

https://preview.redd.it/8fb35z36cr8h1.jpg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c1bd42ff472c0c4f58f9b0757ac57a7674808210

If you can stay alive until it unlocks, it owns incredibly hard. It was a rough couple of months after they nerfed Architect Monuments, but Empire of the Cosmos is good again!

Also, it looks like you can only have one Avatar of the Cosmos at a time? I can kind of see why, but it's weird no other unit has this limit. I guess the devs consider it kind of on par with a hero, which like

It absolutely is