AI casting high level spells very early

[rgp151]

I'm playing the 1.6 patch and it seems like its too easy to get really high level spells from encounters. Every now and then I'll get something high level pretty early, but from time to time the Ai will also cast absurdly high level spells very early in the game.

Just now I was off to an excellent start playing a Node Mastery setup, then before I had even built my first Shrine Tauron cast Great Wasting. I'm like WTF? Of course now unrest is through the roof and this will just grind the economy to a halt. I've also seen wizards cast (even worse) Meteor Storm early like this, I myself popped Sky Drake like in the fist few encounters I took in a game once, and it seems like most of the wizards are casting Awareness way sooner than I ever remember them doing in earlier patches. It seems like most wizards cast Awareness within the first 100 turns now.

So what the heck is going on and is there any way to change some settings so this doesn't happen? It seems to me that when it comes to spell rewards you shouldn't get next tier rewards until you have gotten all spells from the current tier.

The AI getting ultra rare spells super early and having absurd mana pools that allow them to cast them is just ridiculous.

[mshih01]

This isn't a bug in the original master of magic code -- so it's not changed in community patch. Caster of magic addresses this with a time threshold for rare/vey rare spells. If you find such spelll prior to the time threshold -- they are swapped to some other treasure with same budget. There's complaint about this behavior too -- but the threshold is adjustable.