I like the idea of having Fire Lances. What about having 2-3 Fire Towers? Maybe not..
Well suppose I have 3 fire lances and no fire towers. I need 110 fire quantum to deal 100 damage. I can either replace a quantum tower with a fire tower, or a quantum tower with another fire lance (going one swap at a time). 4 fire lances decreases the number of fire quantum I need in order to do 100 damage from 110, to 91. This means I have to wait for 19 less quantum. With ~38 quantum towers It would take me, on average, ~ 6 turns to get 19 quantum of any one color. So adding a 4th fire lance means I save ~6 turns. If instead I add a fire tower, do I save more or less than 6 turns? I won't bother to calculate it exactly because for one it seems intuitively that I would save less than 6 turns. Adding a 5th lance means I need 73 (21+21+21+21+18 = 102) instead of 91. Which is now 18 less quantum. In short, more lances is better than fire towers. It is only after the 6th lance that a fire tower would be the best option to decrease the number of turns before the opponents death.
Do you need half your Towers non-upgraded? I would imagine you can protect them quickly since you have 6 Protect Artifacts. If you had all Towers upgraded, that would mean extra 42 random quantum, assuming you get to play them all. That would help get that fire quantum faster (not much but every quantum counts).
No I've just been too lazy to farm all those towers. lol.