Agreed. I didn't mean anything against either of those points while discussing cultivation speeds, but I was also trying to be somewhat concise and wanted to avoid adding little qualifying phrases everywhere like "ignoring narrative".
The real problem is that NPCs
don't Cultivate the way we do. Of the mechanics we can see,
only Ling Qi runs on them. Yes, there are tools that Yrs uses to measure the growth of other characters, but those tools are
very simplified. No rolling thousands of dice in a single turn, for a single character, for anybody
but Ling Qi.
So, when discussing Cultivation mechanics, we can only truly look at Ling Qi's growth with any degree of certainty, because we only have the mechanics for Ling Qi's growth.
Examining the growth of any other character is fuzzy at best.
These are fantastic for the story and tend to make for better reading than "Ling Qi out-cultivated him". I hope all future conflicts are similarly interesting.
But at the same time, these narrative reasons are also somewhat divorced from mechanic discussions about whether talent is powerful enough or whether it's mechanically believable that either of them managed to keep pace with the other (so that the narrative could reasonably allow either to win without ignoring the mechanical cultivation side entirely).
That's because Cultivation mechanics aren't strictly tied to the narrative of the story. In part because only LQ runs on those mechanics, and in part because there is nothing in place to seriously tie them together. Mechanically, there is no reason you can't have techs from SCS and TRF active at the same time; narratively, one wants to be always moving and the other wants to stand still, so the mindset involved in using each Art is different.
Second, Cultivation Mechanics aren't tied to
Combat mechanics. Cultivation is what grants the tools that people fight with, but it doesn't tell them how to actually
use those tools, and the
combat mechanics have moved away from a strict simulation to be substantially more narrative.
The words used are 'rubber-banding', and it's an unfortunate side effect of having more going on than Yrs wants to keep close track of.
Sure, a race differing by 1 talent comes down to resources. The question has become how much extra resources should be required to overcome a 1 talent gap. Right now it's about ~1 GSS per month. Should it be 0.6GSS/M? Should it be 1.6? Should it be 3?
There is literally no way to accurately measure this, due exactly to the separation of LQ's simulationist mechanics from the narrative mechanics everybody else operates under.
Now, you could compare a talent 6 LQ with a talent 7 LQ, but that runs into other problems - namely, that you aren't comparing LQ to other people anymore, but to herself, and while that's workable it skips the point of the question - 'how much better do we have to do to out Cultivate someone else with one more talent?' - because everybody
else is operating under a different system, and so that is liable to get factually incorrect results.
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Another factor is that Yrsillar likes making simulationist systems, but doesn't tie them into the narrative in any real way. The systems he designs aren't
evocative of much of anything, which is what I
think you're looking for here. I'm sorry to say that you won't find it.
