You might like to look at the 10080 tile game! I am now beginning to understand why, the introduction of the Big meeple in Inns and Cathedrals and Wagon are so important. The AI in JCZ ran out of meeple well before 100 tiles! Towers, bridges and Castles probably need just as much tweaking. If I were to run the game again, I'd give the AI another 600 meeple to see them through to near the end. That's near a 2x multiplier, for every 72 tiles, if that makes sense!
Having 50 high towers is pretty crazy too, imagine if someone sneezed. I'm not sure you need to add more tower pieces unless you are adding more tower tiles to your game. Perhaps towers have a limited range in the same way you don't make inns more valuable in larger games because there are more road tiles being added to the game, so getting one makes it easier to finish. They have a limited output.eg: 18 tower tiles :30 tower pieces36 tower tiles : 60 tower pieces.Just because the game is getting bigger doesn't mean that tower's function has to scale across larger areas.I think if you want to make the Tower more significant the trick is to add more tower-tiles.
In my opinion vanilla tiles are all tiles which don't trigger or enable an extra action or hinder a usual action. Usual actions are place a drawn tile (and follower on that tile) and score.Extra actions are features like take a follower (princess), dragon movement, place a tower piece, place a not drawn tile (abbey, german castles, halflings), move an extra figure (fairy, robber, mage & witch ...), make a basar, score the wheel of fortune, place a follower on another tile (magic gate, flyer) ...In my opinion the river tiles alternative start tiles. Like the usual start tile they are no vanilla tiles, but they are not extraordinary. Cathedral tiles, inns at a lake tiles and trade good city tiles are vanilla in my opinion - they only change the scoring, but they don't enable extra actions.
I guess the other things you have to contend with, is that for larger games, the chances of being on a Tower's Line of Sight is greatly reduced. Perhaps you need to consider a different distancing algorithm?
Regarding the Tower how about each wooden tower piece is a square from the center?With three tower pieces I count up to three tiles using the Dragon movement style, no diagonal movements.
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