Towers of wizardry are too tough

[Bear]

Some feedback after playing CoM a little

Towers of wizardry are impenetrable. They all contain high end units en mass: dragons, wyrms, etc. I have cleaned almost all arcane plane for now. All the nodes, lairs and opponents but I still cannot penetrate any tower of wizardry nor any myrran AI can. I feel like they were not the hardest objects in original game and allowed communication between worlds relatively early. The hardest one were some nodes with exceptional army and exceptional item reward that you can go for if you seek an item buff.

I believe towers should either comparable or weaker than the most protected capital in the middle of the game. Otherwise, as soon as someone somehow managed to build up an army capable of cleaning tower forces is automatically captures each and every city in the way. In other words, as soon as you penetrate other plane you won the game already.

[Sapher]

Towers of wizardry are impenetrable. They all contain high end units en mass: dragons, wyrms, etc. I still cannot penetrate any tower of wizardry nor any myrran AI can. 

It is forbidden for AI to open a tower until some turn. So there is a chance he can but is not allowed.
So you have a tower with a wyrm...you know he can not fly, right?

[Bear]

Yes. I change my mind. They are beatable by high end buffed units. Sometimes in few waves.

[Seravy]

If towers open early, whoever opens them wins the game, at least in the base game. The other plane has only one player who hasn't had the chance to fully settle the plane, so you can push in 10-20 settlers and get half the plane for yourself. That makes you the strongest wizard in the game (everyone else has less than half of a plane, you have a half plus a few more on the original plane) as long as you can maintain peace - it's trivially easy to put a spearmen in each tower so the AI can't go through (unless they are your enemy already).
In the mod however this often worked the opposite : the AI plays better and being alone on Myrror, grows at an astronomical rate, while you are busy fighting 3 others on your plane and have that much less territory. This means if the tower opens earlier than the time you can reasonably stabilize the game on your plane, the Myrran wizard will steamroll everything. Either kills you or kill-steals all the enemy cities you were about to conquer. Either way, opening towers early in a game where the starting conditions are massively unequal on the two planes results in a game balance nightmare. It also defeats the purpose of having two planes, if the other plane is no harder to reach then areas on your own, why not make it a single map in the first place?
We had several in-depth discussions about the roles of the planes, towers, and planar movement spells in the past, find the appropriate threads.

The AI isn't allowed to be the first person to open a tower, unless the game reached the intended time for that to happen. It's not fun if the last boss shows up before you can prepare and beat them, and in the existing system (1 myrran enemy and 3 on your plane) they do act like a last boss, at least, they are usually that powerful. They can, however, in extreme cases, research Plane Shift earlier and send through dangerous armies in limited quantities using the spell. That's usually a warning signal that major trouble is brewing because they are far ahead of "usual" in research progress.

[Bear]

I agree with your points.
So much work just to make human player happy.