Tower of Mastery Strategy

Lstewart4

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Apr 7, 2008
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What are some tips and strategy to win a game by the tower of mastery. what is needed, what techs should be priorities and other things to win a game by this victory?
 
a mage with metamagic 2 to dispell the nodes after you've build the tower. Enough mana nodes to get the mana type's needed for 1 tower (4, 5 for comfort). Shrines help as well. Build all towers in your high production city, save a few great engineers for the final tower.
 
have you played as Khazad? If you have, you know what you can do with massive amounts of money saved up. If not, start saving up money.
 
Undercouncil > slave trade saves a nice bunch of turns on the building of the final tower, if you managed to pile up a sufficient stash of coins while building the other towers.
Besides, the coin-to-hammer ratio is better through slave trade than cash-rush, unless I'm mistaken.

Another point : one of the towers grant a free tech, that can be used to pop the expensive tech that unlocks the ToM

I am unsure wether it's faster to go tower builder mode as soon as you control 4-5 mana nodes, or to wipe out a neighbor or two to get more nodes early on.
Anyways, an army is needed to avoid war declarations while you're buildiing towers, so putting the army to good use to gain a few high exp troops is a good idea in some cases
 
When I started building the ToM, every civ except for my vassals DOWed me - I think its scripted - so mind your defenses.
 
Played a game as the Lanun and won a Tower victory. They are good at it because they can expand fast and control nodes. All civs except my perm ally, who gave me about 4000 gold to rush the tower, and my vassal, and my friendly Luchuirp DOWed on me.

Luckily I had a massive army of arquebuses and cannons, four times the power of the second powerful civ, who was 2.5 times the power of the 3rd powerful civ. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th powerful civs happend to be the one who didnt DOW on me. It wouldnt really matter if my capital got captured because I was building them all in my 5th built city in Australia, which was way far from my capital that was around west europe, so the attackers wouldnt reach my tower city in time because they are stupid.
 
Another point : one of the towers grant a free tech, that can be used to pop the expensive tech that unlocks the ToM

The tower of divination (law, sun, mind, and spirit mana) gives you a tree technology. I usually use it for mithril working, but you can use to to get strength of will which enables construction of the ToM.
 
I've had success with the Chirp. Use their world spell later on than normal, and then found a bunch of Engineers in your capital. Get the National Epic, and pump out Great Engineers. When the time is right to build the Tower itself, rush it until completion. (Takes like 5 great engineers) a little gold to buy it with is nice too.
 
In my current game I'm going for a Tower victory. I'm running Runes of Kilmorph, so I've started spamming Soldiers of Kilmorph and hoarding gold, and I have a GE saved, so I'm going to try to rush it as soon as possible. I'm still trying to figure out if I want to hold off another 20 turns in hopes of popping another GE, or if I might have enough saved up already (20 SoK, 6k gold, 1 GE).

I have, I think, 7 magic nodes, so I've kept a few with mana types that I want to keep and just went around Dispelling and re-building the others to meet the tower pre-requisites. It's a little easier as the Amurites, because Govannon can teach spell spheres, and once a mage knows a sphere he can upgrade it even if your empire doesn't have access to that mana type. So, for example, all my new adepts get Shadow 1, even though I don't have any Shadow nodes.

The Soldiers of Kilmorph are actually a pretty good deal, if you build them in a city with the Heroic Epic and a Forge. You end up getting more hammers from the SoK than you put into them. If you add in Nationhood, a Command Post, and perhaps a Weaponsmith, you end up spending about 34 hammers to get 45 instant hammers anywhere you want.
 
If you have enough money and have Undercouncil it doesn't matter if other civs declare war - they simply won't reach you in a single turn that it takes to build it. By the time you can build ToM you should have strong enough economy that can accumulate enough money in a short time if you run 100% gold.
 
Provoke some wars before starting building ToM. If civ is already at war it will not DOW you. Sign as much def treaties as possible. Your allies will declare war on the first aggressor and will be at war when turn will pass to them.
 
Provoke some wars before starting building ToM. If civ is already at war it will not DOW you.

This bears repeating.

I just finished a ToM win. When I was ready to start the ToM, I was a little worried about the Ljosolfar/Basium alliance, both of whom were neighbors. Ljosolfar had about 200% of my power in the power graphs, and Basium was equal to me. Fortunately, they had become embroiled in an overseas war with the Svarts, so the only people declaring war on me were the bottom feeders, and I was able to rush the ToM about 8 turns later.
 
I used Grigori with Consumption + Mercantilism + City States + Military State + Undercouncil with slave trade, and slave rushed the construction. There was a major war going on (which I had caused much earlier), so only two other nations declared war on me. I built the tower so fast they did not have time to mobilize their forces.

For the mana for the four initial towers I had the mana from a few other nations I had conquered as well a few colony cities.

Once I had the towers build I spent a few turns building up a massive hoard of gold and slaves, them burned them all to build the Tower of Mastery. The gold to hammer for rushing it 4.5 gold for 1 hammer. For burning slaves it works out 1 gold for 1 hammer. Slaves are a great way to rush build any improvement or wonder.

What really helped is that if a group of units in a city selected when buying slaves, there will be a slave purchased for each unit. And recently purchased slaves can go on to purchase more slaves.

Slaves can be burned en mass to build improvements, and it will only use up the number of slaves needed to complete the improvement, but only slaves that have been around a turn can be used in a group such as that.

I'm just waiting for the day when slave revolts are introduced...
 
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