I move mine such that it has the further prereq of Ereog's Journal as well. Makes it a smidge more difficult to achieve.

I recommended this change back....I think it was 1.2 .... SD didn't go for it though.

I'm sure they have their reasons.

Yeah it should be moved back, right alongside the infinite techs.

I think the reason may be StarDock's logic is that players that are already well on their way towards winning one of the other victory types, particularly conquest, will opt for not building the towers. I disagree, though, I still think the towers are too easy to research and build and should sit at the extreme end of the tech tree. After all, Spell of Making supposedly lets the player take full control of all the magic in Elemental which sounds... pretty advanced, IMO.

Supposedly the towers require that you control one of each elemental shard type to build. I've never tested if this is actually the case, though, because I've yet to be in a situation where I was in a position to build FotO and lacked a shard.

bump

Yes, easy to mod.

But many don't mod....and shouldn't the game be the best for many?

Naturally it's assumed on my part.

I will also not deny that SD has made excellent choices in regards to FE:LH. Amongst those many choices was the decision to keep an ear to their dedicated community.

I agree Rotlung that it should be a last of the line tech. I think the idea is for those behind to have a chance to win, but really it means that is the fastest way for any faction to win. If someone is ahead, it makes it even easier.

 I had to disable it to I could get a quest victory by wiping everyone out but one faction with a city or two. Perhaps it can be scaled on the size of the map as to where it is on the tech tree? For example a small map with two factions it may be where it is, but a large or huge map it moves back in the tech tree?

Give a tech "leach" boost to factions behind? After all, the original idea and research is much harder than reverse engineering a common tech. Once someone sees, say a catapult, then it is easier to mimic than coming up with it from scratch. This is something the CIV series does fairly well.

Well, having the precursor building (Tower of the Witch) does give a -9 modifier to faction relationships, which more or less guarantees that all non-allies will attack you in short order, if not immediately.

Usually if you're building it as your only viable win condition though, you're pretty badly dogpiled already since you had to beeline the tech at the expense of other support techs, and your cities have been stuck building super-expensive towers instead of churning out infrastructure or units.

I disagreed with your premise but it was at least coherent until the end.  AoW III, of which you haven't played a single minute, is laughable and dumbed down because of the number of factions?  That's utter nonsense.  You praise Sword of Aragon, X-COM, and Centurion, all of which I have played and liked, and each of which had one playable faction.

As to your basic assertion, it is partly rose-colored glasses and partly missing the point.  Games are made to entertain us?  What a revelation, thank you for letting us know.  We had no idea!  We thought winning at video games made us awesome, but now we know that winning at old video games is what makes you awesome.  Whew, that was close.  Here's the truth:  nobody who can win XCOM on Classic Ironman cannot also beat X-COM.  Claiming that Civ II has the best AI of any Civ game is risible.  Centurion's AI is only decent because the game is so drop-dead simple; chess games have excellent AI too, but now add supply logistics, recruitment, reinforcements, and a strategic layer and see what happens.  Incidentally, I take it you have forgotten (or never played) Galactic Civilizations II, because it is a direct counter to your entire thesis.  My point is that today's games are a lot more ambitious; this does mean that they can suffer from the fact that a human will always be more flexible than static code in assessment of his/her situation, but it also means we get depth that was impossible in previous titles.  Some would call this a fair trade - you do not, okay that's fine.  But it doesn't make everyone else wrong.  It just means we play with different goals.  When I play Legendary Heroes it's just a power fantasy.  I'm not trying to prove that given a time machine I would be Alexander, and very few video games have ever been made were intended for someone who was.  They've always been about having fun.  Video game difficulty was never about proving yourself - it was about making you put another quarter into the machine.

This is pretty much what I do.  Leave it in as a victory condition for the AI to use (so far they have not been able to do it), but I pretty much ignore it.  I did it once to see what it was like, and apart from having to defend myself for a few turns while I cast the spell, it seemed sort of anti-climatic.  I suppose moving it to teh end of the tech tree, would delay it, but I am not sure it would make it a more fun ending, and it would make it too hard for the AI to accomplish it.  I have only been playing this game for a few months, but I have yet to see the AI build a single tower.

When I was building my towers, I had only one earth alter, which ended up being destroyed by enemy forces while I was building the corresponding tower, but the tower kept on building anyway, so that felt kinda cheap.

I always have the AI set to challenging.  I have only played a handful of games so far.  My first three games I had everything else set to normal/default/moderate.  The last couple of games I set the pacing to epic.  I would like to see the AI start building the towers since it would make things more interesting.

I thought the instructions in the Kingdom Report said you needed one of each type of shard to build the towers?  Did I misread that or did it just not get implemented in game the way it was described?

I've got a couple games going right now, two are with epic pacing, but one I am playing Gilden with Challenging AI and normal pacing.  I am just at the point where I picked up my third champion and am almost done building my war college and am ready to start training a bunch of troops for war.  I don't know what turn it is, but I want to say between 180 and 220.  It is a large random map, so it may take a while to conquor everyone.  Hopefully someone will start building the towers so it becomes a race to see if I can track them down and destroy them before they can cast the spell.

...how rude and just wrong you are, where are you from...warlock2-fanboy town? before making stupid comments you might wanna try and get some more infos before looking like a moron (like right now).

AoW3 has only 6 races, yes, but has also 6 classes which completely differentiate the playstyles and give you 36 variations of how to play the game. AoW:SM for example has 14 races aka 14 gameplay variations (without specialization which AoW3 has also), laughable against 36 kiddo .

also your argument that all games are designed to "entertain" is only half true, sure most of the AI in strategic games aren't die-hard and super intelligent but its also quite hard to program 4x games which a quite huge amount of features & depth and then program a competent AI with it. please show me your game and where you programmed a superior AI before bashing the genre / games in general.