Whenever I play on Impossible, and my starting city is attacked, the game won't let my wizard throw any spells. Specifically, I get the message, "You cannot cast any spells at this time."

My priests and magicians, however, CAN still cast spells; its affects on heroes is undetermined, as I haven't had any spellcasting heroes at my fortress when these attacks have occurred.

It's neither a mana nor a magic skill issue, as I have tons of both by that point. It doesn't affect any other city, and doesn't seem to occur when playing on Hard. (Or maybe it's just that I've been lucky, and no one has attacked my starting city.)

1) Has anyone else even seen this problem?

2) I run Insecticide. Is this perhaps an introduced glitch? Or have any of you played on Impossible using Insecticide, but haven't had this problem occur?

3) Is it tied to my starting city, or to the location of my wizard's fortress? In other words, if I cast Move Fortress (or move to a different city upon casting the Spell of Return) would the problem move with it?

4) Does the bug only occur on Impossible? What about Extreme, which is a level only available via Insecticide?

5) Are spellcasting heroes stationed "at home" affected by this glitch as well?

This has happened to me now on several games, with different starting races (High Elves and High Men). So for me at least, it's not a one-time thing.

Basically, I'm trying to find out if the problem is just with me, or whether it's somehow tied to the patch. If it IS an Insecticide bug, I'd like to be able to report that fact to the developers — assuming I can figure out a way to contact them.

There's probably a reason you can't cast spells, but it's hard to know what it is without seeing your game.

Your heroes have their own magic ability and don't use yours, which is why they're unaffected.

As far as I know there's no bug at work. Maybe someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

Sorry that wasn't very helpful, as I just realized reading it back. I've encountered similar situations before, where I couldn't cast spells and didn't know why at first. There's always been a reason but the reason is not always clear.

True. And I'm not saying you're wrong about it being a bug. But I've had several instances of not being able to cast spells, and it sometimes takes some investigation to figure out what's causing it. It could be a rival wizard's overland spell, for example. Some of them block certain types of magic.

You could check this forum, too:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=15

There's a lot of good info there.

You know, I completely forgot I'd posted this thread; and a month ago, DeMignon resolved the same problem for someone else <span class="bold">in this thread here</span>.

I'm happy to finally mark this question as solved. Part of the problem was that I assumed the glitch was related to either Insecticide or playing on Impossible, or perhaps even a combination of both. It never occurred to me to test my mana levels to see if there was a cutoff, and if so where it was.

Wish I was here, at the time. I woulda told you that. Of course, I would have been a little off on the numbers. I thought the problem started at 15,000. Of course, there is a bonus to this problem. If you are going in to take out one of the other mages, having him have too much mana is a good thing because he can't cast. The added bonus, of course, is the fact that you get mega mana in reward for taking him out. The dragon that tends to play in the lower world has a history of having too much mana... and being a wonderful source for such.