More good luck, I found 10 cyclopes at the castle in Creiston Mines, so I was able to finish up that stupid quest for the rare animals and replace my royal thorns against fire based enemies. I think it's amusing that it costs 5000g to buy a cyclops and the reward is 4000g.
The dwarven lands are severely underwhelming after cutting my teeth against pirates. Most fights are "match" or "slightly weaker" which I guess makes sense because not every player would take the time to kill every single army they came across and do every single quest. So it seems I'm overleveled for this area.
I have used the lull to level up Lina, I summon her at least once every fight, although I think I've had some back luck on the actual level up bonuses. Twice, I've had the option to increase either the ice ball's offensive or defensive stats. So basically my level up had to be applied to the ice ball no matter what, and the rage cost went up. It costs 30 rage now which is too expensive for what it does in my opinion. Thankfully Gizmo is still only 12, and I can always use chargers which basically trades 6 rage for 4 mana.
The boss in laboratory 44 was also very easy. I used my royal thorns to summon thorn stacks, which summoned more thorn stacks, and I used my shamans to drop totems on the outside hexes, until I had filled the entire battlefield. If the boss decided to summon allies but there aren't enough hexes open, it just skips its turn. So basically royal thorns = free pass on this fight, and the 6600xp puts me just short of level 17.
I think this fight needs a boost. At a minimum, if the summon allies action isn't possible the boss should attack, but I think possibly the boss needs a 3rd type of attack to prevent the royal thorns exploit. Perhaps spitting webs on everyone causing mass slow (so it's harder to raise all the thorn stacks), or spitting poison on everything causing a 3-round poison debuff. I don't know, something. I mean at least the Kraken could hit multiple stacks each turn so it was pretty much impossible to fill the screen with thorns. This boss was not challenging at all.
Going to keep poking out the eyes of beholders and cyclopes over the weekend and see how far I get.