6/9 noon
"These totems are the core of what the power of earth can be used for. Earthbind will make your enemy's footing betray him, stoneclaw will grasp their attention to distract them for a few crucial seconds, and the strength of earth totem will channel raw strength into your comrades. Once you have mastered these totems, I believe you will be ready to proceed to learning of fire." Sagorne was teaching me how to wield the powers of my earth totem, but we had an audience.
A few dozen centaur shaman, half of them queens, were listening closely, hoping to master the powers granted by their ultimate grandmother. It made me feel a little awkward, but I was the advanced student barging in on their basic training, so honestly I was the asshole here. The herds were still mostly geomancers rather than shaman, so the lesson on designing and optimizing totems was probably not unwarranted, but this was definitely skipping a few more basic lessons.
Totems were not cheap and easy as mana costs went, so I eventually wore myself out making them and needed a break. I caught up on some minor book keeping. The absurdly large quantity of 33541 energy was extremely intimidating. That's what I get for subverting an entire species that actually reproduced at a human rate.
I started with a pretty standard collection of units. 14 huntresses, 7 faerie dragons, 7 Druids of the Claw, and 42 queens. I noted that my second and third tier of armor upgrades were just sitting in the queue, and realized that they required an upgraded hatchery. Being Mr. Energybags, I upgraded the hatchery near clan Leh'Prah into a full Hive, and fully upgraded queens with missile attacks. If I was going to get a ton of them every day, I might as well get the most bang for my buck possible. Only problem? I still had more than 20k energy.
Buying out the ancient of wonders netted me some high quality healing and mana potions as well as a few enchanted orbs of venom for my heroes. This was in addition to the scrolls and staves of recall. One item I'd forgotten about went straight into my own pocket: the anti magic potion. Fifteen seconds of total immunity to magic. Get fucked, Nefarian.
I had my queens working around the clock to maximize larva production, which brought me up to 114 per day. Buying out the entire ancient of wonders still left me with more than 15k and a few hundred essence, so I needed to consider what to do with my finite production capacity and remaining essence. I considered buying a few "scarab lord" units, which I'm pretty sure were big heavy melee fighters, but they were not cheap in terms of essence. I could only have afforded 3, and honestly I was inclined to use most of my essence on upgrades and night elf units.
Going over my options for essence free nerubian purchases, I had a larger spread than I was expecting. Spiderlings of course: a very cheap, very fast melee unit with minimal defensive abilities. They were intended to overwhelm with sheer numbers, and I could get 3 for 44 energy and one larva. Overlords were very ostentatiously named, but they were essentially just intelligent weather balloons. They cost 100 energy and didn't natively have any attacks, but they could fly and carry other units inside of themselves with the right upgrades, so they seemed worth investigating. I ordered 10. Drones were worth investigating for a similar reasons. They were absolutely useless as a combat upgrade, but as the basic worker unit, presumably they could build/summon buildings at least as well as Zagara. That would free up her time for slaughter. I got 4 batches of two, purely because I wanted to buy an even 100 batches of spiderlings. The majority of my new nerubian units were drawn from the lowest rung of Centaur society, and from the waiting list in my notes I'd be able to keep that going for another week or two even at a rate of 350 per day.
What remained was buildings, and I had ten thousand left to spend on those. Dropping a hatchery in the ruins of Lordaeron to soak up energy from Undercity was a no-brainer, as well as one in my pocket plane. Each of those could give me another 7 queens and spawned with 3 larvae ready to go; 14 queens and 18 spiderlings were drawn from the population of Undercity. With those lined up, my eyes settled on the two defensive structures. The Nerubian Flak Tower and the Nerubian anti-personnel tower, optimized for airborne and land based targets respectively. Both were quite cheap, actually, at 125 and 150 energy a pop. Cheap enough that I had to build a lot of them.
I ordered a handful at every single hatchery I had, plus Valhalla and the Twilight grove. Two flak towers and two antipersonnel towers each. After that, I dropped off an even split of 20 at my forward position near Hive Re'gal. I had enough energy that I didn't even care if the towers got abandoned later; my field troops could use the extra firepower. Another thousand energy went to reinforce the Bulwark between Tirisfal and the Plaguelands. The process would take long enough that some of the drones would be participating by the end.
After all that, I still had a bit more energy. Seriously. I decided on an ancient of wind. As much as I love my buddies at the ancient of lore, dryads, mountain giants, and Druids of the Claw all have steep essence costs. In contrast, the magic immune faerie dragons and magically inclined Druids of the Talon were both fairly cheap in terms of essence, the only resource I was particularly worried about now. I could say the same of huntresses and archers, but I already had two ancients of war.
After another round of drilling rapidfire summoning and dismissal of totems, I planned out my forces. I didn't actually have all that many "trained" units, but I had enough that I thought it would be wise to start organizing them into units that covered each other well.
1 archer
50 huntresses
8 druid of the claw
14 mountain giants
1 dryad (Aegwynn)
14 Faerie Dragons
336 spiderlings
105 queens
10 overlords
8 drones
Archers, drones, overlords, talons and dryads were not included in the planning for now. I just didn't have enough of them to matter yet, or I didn't know enough about them in practice. I thought of each unit in gaming terms, based on what abilities they had. Giants were tanks, queens and Claws were healers, spiderlings and huntresses were DPS, and faerie dragons were tech that countered enemy mages. I considered distributions for a bit before coming up with something I liked, which I called a Fist. The fist would be my standard unit for fighting enemies I actually wanted dead in an open field, made up of people who aren't part of a preexisting military. Mass demons swarming over the enemy would still be my most common strategy, but I'd let Kathra'Natir manage the training and organization of Valhalla into a more practical format.
A fist would consist of one stone giant supported by twenty spiderlings, five queens, a druid of the claw, two faerie dragons, and ten huntresses. The stone giant's taunt ability would force the enemy to engage with them, while the queens laid down supporting fire and healed him. The spiderlings would guard the queens and keep the giant from being completely overwhelmed, while the druid of the claw cast roar to buff everyone and turned into a bear to serve as a heavy melee unit unless his stronger heal was required; he'd also be holding the scroll of town portal if the Fist needed to bug out. The huntresses would use their superior mobility to threaten the enemy's flanks if at all possible, and the faerie dragons would fly along with the huntresses unless the enemy had a particularly irritating mage.
Absolutely none of these troops should be just the baseline, but the core strategy was based around the standardized abilities they would definitely have. Spiderlings would receive training from Gina and Darcell that would make them better in the role of fast, aggressive front liners. Mountain Giants would be trained in Defensive stance by King Varian while a body double hand picked from Irma's administrators managed the kingdom, making them better tanks. Half of my huntresses were already being trained by Sylvanas and Nathanos as rangers. Given their ability to flicker out of existence if struck, faerie dragons seemed like they would make excellent rogues with a little training from Valeera (between assassinations). Queens would probably do a bang up job as shaman, dropping totems to make the whole unit stronger. While they weren't part of the original core, it occurred to me that one or two of Doan's students standing with the queens would be one hell of a force multiplier.
So on and so forth; make them more of what they already are, and then train them to fight as a cohesive unit. I'd be training one or two fists at a time over the course of a few days, hopefully resulting in fairly elite units that could function as the cores of my joint assaults or a self contained unit that could fight its own battles. The majority of my troops would not be organized into fists purely for logistical reasons, but those that were would be given the most resources, easiest access to potions and equipment, and exclusive access to my best trainers. With any luck, I'd be able to wean myself off of being hyper-reliant on big name champions. It's a simple fact of the world of Warcraft that a team of 40 coordinated individuals with the best available equipment and excellent training could kill literally anything on a good day.
One more round of totem practice later, this time trying to optimize my stoneskin totem for more power, I finally bought my regional upgrade from Ashenvale. Making Anveena a mage PC, making Jaina a Lich, getting my hands on the human tech tree, making Aegwynn supernaturally forgettable, or sharing all of my lures with everyone in the retinue with the limitation of blonde women only.
Low profile Aegwynn was eliminated first. It didn't synergize with how I used her. The human tech tree would be even more redundant now than it was before I got the zerg, as I'd probably just use it to spam footmen and build a few more human heroes. The blondes thing was amusing to think about and would probably help with recruitment, but it was also a utility upgrade in an area that I wasn't exactly hurting for. As such I was either powering up Jaina or Anveena; I went with Jaina. Anveena, being the Sunwell, would potentially have some extremely powerful thematic upgrades while Jaina becoming a Lich was probably about as good as I was going to get. Plus Anveena was already attending class with Doan; she wasn't hurting for firepower.
Speaking of upgrades, I had enough credits to go shopping. I was thinking that talent and lure sharing would probably give me the most bang for my buck, since my retinue was now in the quintuple digits. The question was if I was going to invest in lures to further expand upon my ability to capture people or talents to make my team stronger? I scanned through the options and decided that sharing Red String of Fate would probably give me a lot of return on investment; after all, it was essentially "detect low hanging fruit" for my recruiters. I also wanted science talent, but that could wait.
That said, while I was considering science talent several things clicked together in my mind:
One. Science talent would serve me best if I had more engineers; I only had a handful. Admittedly Gazlowe was pretty up there as engineers went, but I wanted more. A lot more.
Two. Scouting out isolated tribes of stupid people for Sylvanas to yoink was taking up a moderately large amount of time to coordinate each day, and was generally inefficient. A single location with a large population she could consistently chip away at would pay off more. She could work there full time while a body double stood in her place and a now-trustworthy Varimathras could handle administration of the Undercity.
Three. While savvy investment was certainly good and was going to be vital to finish off the war effort missions, the lion's share had come from giving the Forsaken a giant valuable thing in the form of Naxxramas. I would probably need to repeat that trick if I wanted to finish the Alliance half of the mission, but there weren't all that many things of equal value just lying around.
There was one place I knew of that was absolutely full of engineers, schematics, spare parts, tens of thousands of mentally compromised people, and infrastructure that could be repaired and bent towards the Alliance's war efforts. I could even spin it into a PR win for the High King mission. "Sylvanas. I need you to dress up as a Dark Iron Ambassador, and then you're going to Gnomeregan. I authorize you to bring and network with any and all ghosts who are not currently involved in a top priority mission."
••••••••••
As promised, the regional mission options for Magatha.
Strength: The OG Elite Tauren Chieftain: Cairne gains template stacking: ETC from Heroes of the Storm, vastly increasing his mobility and endurance, granting him multiple sound based abilities, and allowing him to be even more impressive to the ladies.
Agility: Forever Young: the fact that members of the retinue are rejuvenated and become young again will never be noticed unless it is beneficial to the retinue. For example, an infiltrator who is suddenly in their early 20s will not be given away by the transformation, but will be able to trade on their newly restored looks or offer eternal youth to someone as a bargaining chip.
Stamina- Refuses to die. Cairne's ultimate ability, reincarnate, allows him to stand up from death fully healed once per day. With this upgrade the cooldown on this ability is reduced to 4 minutes, as it is in Warcraft 3.
Intellect: The Old Ways: your builders gain the ability to construct Tauren Totems, allowing for the training and Upgrading of the Tauren and Spirit Walker units.
Spirit: Revered Elder: Cairne gains the ability to accept love confessions. In addition, oaths of fealty or subservience count as love confessions when given to appropriate members of the retinue. (Erich, Talaada, Cairne)