On the cheerie subject, I think that we could use the attack from the heroes as an opportunity to kill everyone, or maybe have Cheerie as an ally when she is about to die and we save her, or something like that.
+1
... -1
Cheerie is off her cheerios, off her rocker, whatever you want to use to compare her level of insanity to, she's probably crazier than that.
Plus she's at least potentially near our level of power.
How about this - lets talk with Chemista about what it would take to have a real chance of successfully converting Cheerie? I bet the answer requires mindium, just like it did for us.
(apologies for any spelling errors in game words, it's been a while and posting from work, I don't have time to look up correct spellings).
Keep the splintercog alive and functional until we can disassemble him while keeping his mind intact. His skills are impressive.
Do not build self-conscious combat cogs. Making our cannon fodder able to realise that it is cannon fodder is a recipe for disaster.
But they won't be our cannon fodder! Being able to produce more of them is going to take a bunch of weight off our cog factory.
You know, if they are going to die, they run instead of dying. That saves time. A lot of time.
Then the damage they would have absorbed does not get absorbed, and is instead passed up the follower chain to be absorbed by someone/something more powerful and harder to replace - but not necessarily better damage resistant.
We -can- replace cogs fast and easy, even if we don't want to. It's way slower to replace most of the other higher powered stuff.