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.