Let's Play Age of Wonders III: User Input Required

Short, but momentous update -
Brenn has surrendered! Wazuhl has proven to be not only tyrannical, but treacherous as well! Following the defeat of Brenn's main army, Wazuhl attacked a border settlement, capturing and preparing to raze it. In order to protect her people, Brenn begs to join our powerful empire. In her last public message, Brenn betrays the ignorance inherent in our opposition by misspelling 'fealty.'


Upon accepting, we discover that her throne city had been underground the whole time! In fact, it was literally half a turn of movement out of sight of our scout before we returned to the surface.


We immediately summon two scout drones and set them to exploring the underground, but we will need the assistance of dwarven prospectors to dig through the walls and discover what other secrets lie beneath the surface.

In Brenn's throne city is only one unit - a trebuchet, which we will leave there to defend against roving creatures. Brenn herself proves to be a capable supporting unit, if not an excellent combatant. She gives units under her command a staggering +200 to morale and can heal units at no cost every other round. She would be quite useful as a commander to any stack of units that we can give her.

While Brenn repented and joined our cause, not all of her people felt the same way. Too set in their ways to accept the ways of Progress, the two settlements of 'Adamant' and 'Mirefield' both choose independence and rebellion over accepting our rule. Adamant is quite nearby and easily captured by Warbob Sexlizard and Warbob Sexlizard's engines of war - the crusaders guarding the city test their faith against fire and cannon and are found wanting. The second city, Mirefield, is across a narrow strait making it two turns of travel from our main contingent, but with the outpost that Wazuhl captured even closer, we turn our attentions towards this greater threat.


Wazuhl himself is in command of this group, but they are both outnumbered and outclassed and should be annihilated once our main army engages them.

Meanwhile, Imane advances into Cerrin Treefolk's territory, and spots a village under the command of one of her generals - a human warlord armed with a stolen prototype rifle. Though he has a full stack of six units in the village, our units are primarily flying, meaning that we can ignore the walls and fight head on as though it were an open field. The attacks of our fairies, in addition to dealing elemental damage, cause Brain Rot, draining the spellcasting ability of the warlord and preventing him from enhancing his troops more than once or driving our troops berserk. It is nevertheless a hard fought battle, and we lose a golden wyvern and the draconian chargers which have been with us since they were hatchlings.

Upon capturing the city, we see that Cerrin's main army, consisting of no fewer than 11 units, is holed up in a city which shares a border with the newly freed village. Fortunately, with the loss of the chargers and the acquisition of a golden wyvern mount from her earlier exploration, Imane's army is now entirely flying (or floating, which amounts to a similar advantage). She and her forces abandon the village and flee into the mountains to its south, but vow to return once we have more forces available. Cerrin recaptures the village in our wake.

We are joined by our fifth hero - an elven sorceress named Lealia the Sheer. As she has joined us at Sexberg, it will be some time before she is able to catch up to the front lines and prove her worth, but she has a decent arsenal of potent lightning spells, if we ever have the mana to waste on them.

With research in Juggernauts complete and one turn away from completion of our Industrial Plant in Lizardheim, we will soon be able to build the final word in artillery. After researching Juggernaut construction, we immediately learn Reassemble. Perhaps the defining spell in the Dreadnought arsenal, Reassemble allows us to bring a destroyed construct back into the fight at 30% of its health. This means that we can use our warmachines very aggressively without fear of their permanent loss, as long as we retain enough mana to bring them back to life and do not lose them when they are out on their own.

Finally, we celebrate the construction of our Magic Item Forge by building a Friendship Gun. It is a rocket launcher that allows the wielders to charm enemies into joining us. It's rather expensive and has sadly low chances of success against high tier enemies, but it's surely worth making at least one.
(Other alternatives proposed by our magic item research team - Chicken of Seduction, a pot of poop that allows the user to dominate undead, a Picnic Basket that launches fireballs, and boots that make all units in the stack 'volunteers' that require half of their normal upkeep)

Here are the choices that we face -
1) Where should we assign Brenn? She can either
A) Catch up with Warbob Sexlizard and assume command of the secondary stack of war engines and support, leaving one unit to follow along on its own
B) Wait for a new army to be assembled from our heartland, and then expand into the underground, capturing independent resources and potentially clearing out bandits.
2) Where should we assign Lealia? She can either
A) Move directly to Imane and join her essentially as a potent supporting unit
B) Wait for a new army to be assembled from Sexberg and our heartland, and then lead a reinforcing stack to the northern conflict.
3) What should we research, now that Reassemble is completed?

4) Should Liarsberg and Warboburg make the heavy investment in an Industrial Plant (300 mana, 200 gold, and 4 turns of building) to produce additional Juggernauts, or should they restrict their production to lower tier units like flame tanks, cannons, and engineers?
5) What should our next magic item be? [The game lets you choose the sprite for custom items. Throw out suggestions for what you want the items to do and I'll see what's possible. They cost a fair bit of mana to build and take two turns to produce]

Small, unlabelled map of our half of the world -