Range penalties

[Seravy]

The mod has increased the distance where each level of range penalty gets applied quite significantly.

I'm wondering if maybe this was a mistake. Ranged penalties should help slow down early expansion/conquest, without having a significant effect on the late game - in the early game you only control cities that are in the "medium distance" zone where the reduction was the highest, but in the late game, most of your battles are in maximal penalty anyway, those few that happen closer barely matter. 
This would also make Chaneller a more powerful retort, I think it's somewhat underused.

These were the originals (we don't need to restore these exact numbers, we can pick anything we want) :
1-5 : 1x
6-10 : 1.5x
11-15 : 2x
16-20 : 2.5x
21- : 3x

And these are the current ones :
1-8 : 1x
9-13 : 1.2x
14-18 : 1.5x
19-24 : 2x
25- : 3x

Do note the map is only 60 wide, so there are only 10 tiles in the furthest region that are 3x range while the other 50 are lower. Unless the starting city is very close to the poles, it is also unlikely to exceed the 25 in the north/south direction.

The change would affect the AI, as they cast a lot in combat, more than the human. However, when the AI is attacking the human in the late game where they have the high skill that makes it relevant, they usually do so in the high range penalty distance anyway - in the player's territory, who already knocked out the closer wizards. Fights closer to the AI are less frequent, as those are only limited to those few, short battles where the human attacks and AI city. The last war even happens between planes, being always max penalty. So the overall impact on the AI seems to be not as great as it first appears - most critical being likely when the AI was at the "2x range" distance from the human, if the change pushes that into the "3x" one.

Overall, this change would steer the game towards defending a larger empire on combat spells becoming more expensive, while cost of conquest would be mostly unchanged for "doomstack" strategies, but much more expensive for strategies that use many small stacks to attack in multiple places at once (to wipe out all the wandering AI armies), sadly that includes the AI as well, but mostly only the first two (last two is already paying near max range).

Unfortunately, "raze all" strategies, falling under the doomstack category, would be unaffected, but razing all is rarely viable.

Edit : It's worth mentioning territory affected by range is not linear - doubling the range quadruples the area included. So I'd say the mod's changes made a much larger impact than the numbers seem to imply at first sight and what I expected. For example the 1x range area went from 81 to 225 tiles. (omg that's a 177% increase!)

[Bahgtru]

Something that has always left me perplexed is the fact that skill is not affected by the same drawback: if a spell costs more to cast it costs more to cast, why should its mana cost be different from its casting cost?

I'd change that mechanic rather than range. Now THAT would make channeler desirable!

[Nelphine]

I regularly fight my first war at x3 range, despite the mods change. I actually fight at x3 so often that I assumed the mod did the other way around and made the ranges shorter.

I wouldn't change it. But I also wouldn't worry too much. Maybe try halfway between the numbers?

[Seravy]

I think a picture says more than words here :
   
We have this right now.
The following is the original game :
   

Also I made a mistake and counted the city tile as "1" when it's in reality the "0" so all the areas are 1 tile wider than the pictures.

One interesting idea that might help is to use diagonal distances, turning the square into a circle. Basically, use sqrt(x*x+y+y) instead of max(x,y) for the distance. It doesn't fit the world though, as diagonal movement costs are same as horizontal and vertical, implying the world does not use that type of geometry.

A downside to the range penalty is starting location becoming more relevant - further from the center of the map, especially to north and south is worse, but even east and west are not ideal - there is a 6-10 tile wide ocean area at the edges, which pushes anything on the other side quite far. This is especially a problem because we no longer have Move Fortress. However those locations also make it more expensive for the enemy to attack you - so if you did pick Channeler, it turns into a big advantage.