Spires of Death | Majestypalace.com

Quest Background: Guarding the richest lands to the north are the spires of death, placed by a long forgotten goddess to banish the people who'd fallen out of her favor.

Objective: Destroy the Six Spires of Death.

Unlike the barrows in "Legendary Heroes," the spires on this map are immune to all sovereign spells other than earthquake. So using cheap wizard toward to bring them down is not an option. Furthermore, the spires will respawn after a certain amount of time after they fall, so the only way to win this map is to destroy all six of the spires within a certain time frame. To make matters worse, the fewer spires there are on the map, the more powerful each one becomes. The spires spawn a variety of different monsters, from werewolves and vampires, to massive goblin hordes, to yetis and ice dragons, depending on the circumstances.

A subtle aspect of the spires is that the difficulty of the monsters they spawn depends not only on the number of spires left on the map, but also the combined level of your heroes. Therefore, it is imperative that you keep a high efficiency in terms of hero strength per hero level. That is, you'll probably need to dismiss your rangers after they have explored the map to keep your hero levels down. With that said, a very good idea is to play defensively while hoarding a large amount of gold before going in to raze down the spires. There is no time limit on this map, so you may take as much time as you want to gather as much gold as you need before making your moves.

Using this approach, for the early part of the quest, simply reach level 2 as soon as possible by building four rogues or rangers. At level two, place a Temple to Dauros and recruit paladins. Build a marketplace and inn, and then an elven bungalow. To maximize your gold account, You'll probably want about 3 marketplaces and maybe some trading posts if there is a direction on the map that does not contain a spire. Keep holding off the monsters as efficiently as possible while limiting the number of high level heroes to keep the monster difficulty down. You want to eventually end up with a fully upgraded wizards guild with some wizard towers and a sorcerer's abode. Once you have gathered about 50,000 gold, you can start taking down the spires. You will need to gold to recruit new heroes, cast spells and attack flags.

When you're ready to attack, you might consider building temples to Helia and recruit heroes such as Monks and wizards. Solarii are very attack-oriented units and the sun scorch spell will be of tremendous help. Monks and are useful for their high magic resist and wizards are capable of dealing high amounts of damage. You should also consider that you have the earthquake spell at your disposal. The spell can be used to bring down a spire all the way down, effectively reducing the number of spires for your heroes to five. When you attack the spire, all six of the must fall within a certain timeframe. Of the six, the final three, including the one to be destroyed by earthquake, must fall nearly simultaneously or your base will be overrun by high-level monsters and your heroes at the second-to-last spire will have to fight against the vortex spell cast by the spire. The key is thus to use the elements of call to arms, change of heart, earthquake, and attack flags all "in harmony" to achieve the goal. This feat is easier described than done but since each situation will vary, there is no easy to state it more specifically. During the process, it is helpful to slow down the game speed so that you can issue as many actions as possible.

The first 3 spires can usually be destroyed as simple lairs with attack flags. During this time, you should mass produce heroes, especially those with high greed, to get them to the spires as fast as possible. If enemy units pop up, immediately use the sun scorch or lightning storm to destroy them so that they don't distract your heroes. While the first three are being taken down go down, you should already start flagging the last two spires and casting earthquake on the final spire. Use call to arms and change of heart to fine tune the placement of heroes against the 4th and 5th spires to make sure they fall simultaneously. As they fall, cast earthquake on the 6th final spire already weakened by earlier earthquakes. Watch it crumble and enjoy your hard-fought victory!

User-submitted comments

David Damerell, April 2008

I mistrust the subtle approach, and this quest is no exception. With a sufficient number of heroes, there is no need to fine-tune the approach or to take care to take out all the spires simultaneously - the respawn time is not so short that you cannot reach it simply by bashing away. The advantage of this approach over the subtle one is that, although it takes longer to win, you are much less likely to lose - a subtle approach which falls short leaves you very vulnerable, but a slow grinding approach means you have many high-level heroes when you need to weather strong attacks.

A technique I use - obvious, perhaps, but not mentioned in the walkthrough - is the "internal trading post". Build your base primarily on the opposite side of the castle to your marketplace, and you can easily fit a trading post inside your defences. The income is not as great as it could be from a more distant trading post - but the caravans actually make it to their destination and your peasants are not constantly traipsing off to repair a distant outpost which is almost impossible to defend. This meant I was not short of gold for the huge number of resurrections needed.

I built up to 3 warriors' guilds (dismissing warriors to replace them with paladins, since warriors die like flies once the yeti and ice dragons appear), 3 temples to Helia (Solarii's mix of magic and melee means they can take down anything, and Sun Scorch is great on massed enemies), temples to Agrela and Dauros (the monks are not much use, but they also don't die often), a wizards' guild (they die like anything on the spires, but they are vital for killing large numbers of goblins very quickly), and a dwarven stronghold (they also die like anything, and arguably the stronghold should be left empty). I spaced the warriors' guilds widely so that when the goblin waves turned up I could Call to Arms and suddenly fill my base with paladins, leaving the solarii to do the donkey work of destroying spires; naturally I also built a vast number of ballista towers around my base.

The heroes rapidly get to 10th level or so, and then it is simply a matter of slapping a 500 gold reward flag on every spire you see and putting a 500 gold explore flag down in unexplored territory if you can't see any spires. Often when a spire dies you get one or two heroes surrounded and killed - but your vast supply of gold (between the trading post and your heroes constantly killing tough monsters) means you can simply resurrect anyone who dies. You will spend a long time with a few spires down fighting off goblin waves, but you will eventually get into yeti and ice dragons - and then to the point where your extremely high level solarii can swat down spires faster than they respawn.