So I love this mod, and am having a lot of fun with it. But I'm having a serious problem with the quest "Isengard Unleashed" that is making me consider dropping my current run.

When Rohan (my faction) got strong enough, Gandalf approached me and asked me to either help defend Hornburg/Helms Deep or go to Isengard and attack. I tried going to Hornburg to see what was going on, and I admit I wasn't fully prepared cause as soon as I entered the city, the orc attack began. I thought I had to talk to someone first or something and could get a sense of what was going on. Anyway I lost that battle as we were greatly outnumbered, and as I'm playing on "Ironman/a single save" mode, I couldn't retry it.

After that Gandalf approached me again and asked similarly to go help King Theoden defend Edoras against the orcs or go to Isengard to exploit any weaknesses. The problem now is that I've tried both, but none of them actually triggers a battle. If I go to Edoras, sure enough King Theoden is there, but no battle occurs. And it seems that whenever I enter the lands of Rohan, this quest will trigger, and Gandalf will give me this quest which will in turn cause King Theoden to go back to Edoras ASAP. But when I enter Edoras, nothing out of the ordinary happens, nor are there any new dialogue options when I talk to King Theoden. It's just the usual stuff like the quest had never been triggered.

And if instead I go to Isengard, sure enough, there are groups of Ents there waiting outside Isengard (more and more groups appear as time runs out and I fail the quest and it is re-triggered). But if I try to interact with any group of Ents, there's an Ent named Bregalad who says "Mmmmm??" and immediately after there's a new screen that says "The battle against the group of Ents continues. You have X troops fit for battle against their X". And the only option is to click "disengage", which will take you back to the World map and nothing else happens.

The quest (Isengard Unleashed) has a 2 day time limit, so I've triggered it and failed it many many times now, as I've been ignoring it and doing other quests. All the good factions are relatively strong and the evil ones pretty weak. But it just seems like I can't win the game or at least wipe out Isengard (and maybe Dunland) without managing to finish this quest? Is it bugged or am I missing something??