How to open planar towers early?

[JustOneMoreTurn]

so the cheese part is repeatedly taking them into the tower.

Is that a good part of the game?  I don't have a strong opinion on it at the moment, but I thought it was worth posing the question.  It seems like a minor exploit for the human player, since it does take time (and 2 mana/sprite/turn or food and gold for draconian bowmen).  The AI doesn't seem to do it; they just wait until they have a stack powerful enough to win at once.  Furthermore, there are a limited number of lairs that it works on.  So, I guess while it may be cheese, it's not actually bad cheese.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

Thinking more about cheese: I think the availability of cheese in MOM was one thing that made it really popular. 11-book strategies, certain retort combos; people had fun finding such exploits. So, we shouldn't try to remove all the potential cheese. Allow players to have fun with dwarves with rich minerals, or some other settings that hamper the AI or benefit your specific wizard/race/realms combo. MOM/COM shouldn't be about absolute fairness all the time. It should be about fun.

[Anskiy]

4xes are going to be inherently unbalanced anyway; the AI cheats hard to pose any kind of challenge to the average 4x player because none has figured out how to code one that will play such games well without significant overhead. On top of that, Master of Magic is clearly designed around the assumption that every school of magic is overpowered in its own way, and thus they roughly balance each other by one upping one broken tool with another.

[Tiltowait]

Master of Magic at its most basic is all about discovering and implementing overpowered combos that break the game and let you win. You then start over with a different starting condition and find new, entertaining ways to break the game. I don't think it was ever meant to be a balanced, even game despite all the furious effort to shoehorn the game into being so.

[drugges]

I totally agree; it was never meant to be balanced. And that is what makes it the best game ever. Too balanced games are boring. If all schools were balanced, it wouldn't matter what schools you picked. It would just be like picking the color for your player.