BTW an easy way to kill turtle is to use 2 stacks of thorns with just a single thorn in each of them. You will need either haste lvl 2 or tactics + haste lvl 1 though, and battle cry. (and may be archmages for the telekinesis). Each of these plants should spawn a new plant from the corpse of the other stack when it is killed. You need battle cry when it spawns a hunter cause his initiative is lower than turtle's. You will get 2 loses in the end but that is not too much
For the maps, may be 100k gold is not that much, as it is somewhat abundant at the islands.
I started a new game, and decided to check how marauders do, and I am pretty impressed by the amounts of gold they can make. With the zombie wife they rock
They break the morale of the archers but I can live with this so far ...