Thousand Needles has a shortish quest line that deals with the two sides trying to cut a deal with the Centaur for their oil. There are a couple of derricks in some of the Goblin towns. Also I recall the Goblins are drilling for oil in Felwood.

During LK there was scripted dialogue between Saurfang and Garrosh in Warsong Hold, where Saurfang states, "Anything our zeppelins cannot haul must be brought in by ship and travel the length of Northrend to reach us"; implying that the zeppelins may also be moving heavy machinery in.

I would bet that the Horde are more used to moving their war machinery by air, since they seem to depend more on zeppelins while the Alliance depends heavily on ships.

As for the oil, there's a Gnomish oil derrick in Borean Tundra, a couple of oil pools, and some random oil-covered birds (I believe the Alliance has a quest to clean them off or something along those lines).

Actually, the quest line involves you siphoning off the pools of oil that lie there rather than cleaning the wolves and birds. However, the nearby rebellious robots have dispatched cleanup robots (which attack you if they spot you) who do, in fact, clean up any birds and wolves they come across.

Really? I was under the impression a good deal of technology was steam powered. I'm fairly certain in Redridge I got "not enough steam" messages. Thus boiler systems are involved. Boilers were at least initially (if not entirely) heated by coal, not oil.

Coal is a simpler fuel source, because (to my knowledge) it doesn't need significant refining from raw product to usable fuel. Oil needs a refining process, not that it would be of any great difficulty to the alchemists (or liquor distillers) out there.

I would hazard that oil is the new fuel source that Azeroth may be moving towards. They're likely in a hybrid fuel economy transitioning from coal to oil. The age of steampunk may be ending on Azeroth, or we may just be moving to oil-heated boilers.

And this is an interesting thing to see.

You find little tidbits here and there that suggest or even show that things change in Azeroth. Technologies explode on the scene and take over.

And that's a significant phenomenon in the world of Fantasy. Fantasy is, at heart, a conservative litterature. The Good world is static. The old must be preserved - or restored. The True king is missing and must be restored to the throne. The kingdom is overthrown and must be saved. The heroes, ultimately, fight against change; when they strive to change things, you'll find that they are trying to undo much older changes.

That goes all back of course to the root of modern fantasy - with Tolkien depicting the change of industrializing england as the scourging of the Shire and all the associate metaphors. So, it's refreshing to see that World of Warcraft isn't that fully anchored in the unchanging, golden-age wishful lounging habits of Fantasy.

Well, not always.

Yes, it was a bit hasty for me to make that kind of comment about oil's requirement, I still somewhat feel it must have some kind of requirement though, would the jets be fine with steam?

Forsaken forces are defeated in Hinterlands, by the way. Forsaken invaders attack Highvale; it's up the player, a continent of Draenei who are conveniently training there and the High Elves to repel the Forsaken. -- Though, there are no Val'kyrs.

Also, for what it's worth, the Dwarves/Gnomes have gained land, have not lost any battle I know of and have not lost land. Additionally, it's my understanding the Forsaken were forced to retreat from Gilneas. And while the Gilneas didn't "win" niether did the Forsaken.

On topic of Zeppelins, don't forget Alliance do have control of at least one Zeppelin, and there are bound to be other neutral Zeppelins about (I can think of at least 2-3 crashed Zeppelins in game). And, Alliance are more known for their flying machines. (One Thorium Brotherhood quest has the player using a flying machine with a canon to take out a continent of Dark Iron Dwarves).

So it's not like the Alliance don't have air support. They clearly do; and have the Ironforge Airfield and the Gnomeregan Surface.

The portal quest is one of those mirror quests. Horde has the exact same one. I was quite anxious when I did it since an Alliance vendor stands right next to it. I really didn't want to get flagged there. But apparently he is blind or something and I waltzed right past him.

I didn't know the Alliance did the same Rhea quests. I have to say that it is pretty silly. But I guess you can argue the point that the local Allaince commander doesn't really know what's going on. The Rhea quests have a fairly hurried feel to them. So in fact, by helping clearing out the dragons, the Horde position in New Kargath is strengthened and an attack would fail against the obviously powerful defenses. The Hero (You), doesn't have time to run to the commander and tell them "hey the Orcs are in trouble in New Kargath, it's time to attack." Instead the Hero considers the immediate important things, that of what Rhea has said.
But it remains fairly silly that the player would not do something to help the Alliance in the long run. The Position of the dragons is just not very good.

The Steamwheedle port in SoS is there to capitalise on beachparties (seems like a Spring Break sort of place) and exotic cuisine. It makes sense really since SoS was 100% untapped until then. A swamp, or a jungle for that matter, has an immense amount of resources lying around fairly readily, if you know how to spot them. Since it is 'free', of course the Steamwheedle would move in eventually. And even more so now that a major battle is taking place and at least one side would gladly pay to get supplied and reinforcements through their port. One of the questguys there sums it pretty nicely, there is a profit to be made.
I don't like to mention it, but the Steamwheedle playes the part of real life warzone contractors, obviously a bit more innocently (it's a game for fun after all).

When I ran SoS as Horde, it wasn't clear what happened after the asasult on Stonard. Obviously it was eventually beaten back. But since there were no more quests it was hard to guage how much damage the Horde position had taken. Everything was fine when I left it for Blasted Lands (awesome place by the way), so did both sides sort of expend themselves and it was back to square one? Seemed like it, but mostly because nothing had changed.
It is clear however that Stonard is the weaker of the two positions. Maybe it is the defenses of the camp that makes the difference in the end, with the Alliance suffering just enough extra casualties every time that they can't take it completely. And while Stonard isn't a fort like New Kargath, or the other improved places, it is actually one of the stronger 'old' camps with Burrows/Bunkers protecting the entrances, something I believe is and was unique among Horde fortifications.

The Alliance commander there explicitly states she's going to take the high ground and not slaughter the orcs like the orcs slaughtered the humans. You're told only to attack orcs who take up arms, and leave unarmed orcs alone.

It seems, this Alliance commander really isn't too interested in killing orcs, she just wants them to know the Alliance is there.

Assault on Stonard - Quest - World of Warcraft

Hm, unarmed Orcs could be taken prisoner then? Obviously as Horde only the vendors are 'unarmed' and a whole lot of guards and grunts are swarming the place. I wonder which event is canon, as it seems from the Alliance perspective Stonard is removed as a military threat (presumably all armed Horde has been killed) and from the Horde perspective the Alliance assault failed in the end.

On to other matters. Anyone read the contest winner story about Garrosh? I'm not sure how canon it is supposed to be, but it is one of the major things on the new site, and it is being presented as the first in a line of leader stories. It seems pretty much Blizzard endorsed by that.
So on to the critique.
It is nice to see a little backstory to the brown bugger. He explicitly thinks of he duel with Thrall as a loss in the making, so that one is settled once and for good. He is very impressionable, and that meshes well with my own views on him. He still has a lot of 'father' issues not yet dealt with. Also good. He is horribly arrogant and not really understanding of the plight of those around him, as seen with his clash with Krenna and Gorgonna (how he and Krenna becomes 'friends' I have no idea, there is very little to connect them). His overall behaviour is pretty well done.
But the story fails when it comes to the actual events in Northrend. Garrosh thinks about the blunder of positioning Warsong Hold on the Nerubian hive (he thinks is a transitpoint of sorts), but he doesn't actually understand that it is his fault, to the point that he doesn't even think about it as such for anyone. I guess it is understandable from his point of view, but the entire thing is basically just passed over and not treated as a blunder.
Saurfang isn't there, he appears to be in Orgrimmar. Which goes against all the experiences we have in Warsong Hold, and Northrend for that matter. Varok's position is that of, basically a tutor to Garrosh for the duration. Yet here it seems he is little more than an errandboy. Further, Varok was the one actually doing stuff at Warsong Hold, yet that is nicely ignored with Garrosh suddenly acting like a leader. And no mention of the wasteful tactics of throwing away Horde heroes that comes to help. In essence all Garrosh did in Warsong Hold that we witnessed was never mentioned.

Overall I found it to be a good representation of Garrosh as a person, and a really poor representation of his actions and abilities. It seems Blizzard, by endorsing this story, tried to gloss over the worst parts of Garrosh's performance. Without them, he would indeed be fitting with his current actions, like those in Stonetalon and towards Sylvanas. An arrogant leader, that has not only the balls but also the results to back it up.

I suppose Warsong Hold didn't happen in lore now? Without it, everything just fits extremely well together.

What do you mean by that exactly? I think maybe you're confused a bit about the time line (I had to read it twice because the transition between flashback and present was hard to miss at one point, so I think that's what got you.) All during the story you switch between the present at Warsong Hold and Garrosh reminiscing about his first visit to Orgrimmar. Varok was in Warsong Hold, and he just had a small role because the story wasn't about him.

The story starts with Thrall and Garrosh having recently passed through Agmar's Hammer after meeting in Dalaran at the start of patch 3.1. Presumably this means that the players have already passed through Borean Tundra and everything they've done is old news (the Nerubians were never defeated in the quests, destroying the sinkholes would just give a little breathing room until they dug new ones).

We're basically at the very start of Garrosh's journey in learning how to be a good leader.

Also I doubt he and Krenna ever became friends, but if she showed aptitude for being a warrior and leader I don't doubt that he would put her in a command position. I like that the story gave some motivation to Krenna's obsession with resource acquisition you see in Grizzly Hills.

Positioning Warsong Hold over a Narubian tunnel isn't really anyone's fault. No one would have known it was there until they started to pop out of the quarry. You can't really count something out of his control as a mark against him. The Alliance assault on the Barrens was thwarted by the Cataclysm, but it's not the Alliance's fault that they picked that time to invade. No one really knew it was going to happen. It's still a fiasco.