As everyone who's been reading the EA knows, we recently encountered a group of mimians part of a much larger group hiding out somewhere in the forest.
At this point, we have two real options.
One is to simply find them and either kill or enslave them, probably a little of both. The other is to attempt to bring them into our ama'varde alliance.
Now, for the latter option, we have some pros and cons.
Pros:
Another trade labor option. We could, for instance, dictate that they quarry stone in exchange for our excess mana plant seeds. Or perhaps even the right to live in our mana bubble, depends on how negotiations go and how bad off/numerous they are.
Though one of our captors was decidedly anti-nal, the fact remains that they share a common enemy. The bald slave knows of our connection to the nals but seemed to think negotiation was in the cards.
We seem to ultimately have the advantage here. The general assumption is that their forces are smaller than ours, and mana deprivation has made them weak, we'll gain more information next week, but we definitely have the muscle to back up our threats.
Cons:
They are likely to end up at odds with our other two allies all the same. They did kill two dvergar and it remains to be seen how the leaders will take that.
They're an unknown factor and thus unpredictable, the dvergar were the same way. I'm not going to lie and say it's a no-risk operation.
They want to provoke our neighbor, while we're definitely not going to march to war against mimaneid, this could eventually come back to bite us in the ass.
If there is enough support for negotiation, I'm going to want to launch a diplomatic expedition, if not, an expedition to locate this camp. I'm personally in support of negotiation though.