Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Those seem to be actual votes against purchases in those categories, they're just showing up as [] dwarf for some reason
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I covered this in my effortpost from before the purchase round:
I really don't think this is something we should worry about.
A known bug of the tally is that if there are multiple task votes with the same body, all of them will show up as the task of the first one to receive that vote (so, because it first registered No purchase as a vote in the dwarf category, they all show up as dwarf). It's a purely visual bug, the actual counts under the tasks are correct. This comes up every purchase round, but the last one was really short and the last one before that a long time ago, so it's reasonable to be confused.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
We have another 4 libraries to go though, and I'd expect it to show up in at least one of them. The many minor colleges, maybe.
Wastes in comparison to what? Even in those books exist we do not know in which library or how long them might take to copy. Books today and books in three years are not the same thing after all since they impact when actions are taken and the success chance of said actions.
- Location
- Earth
The backfill, which has a pretty good chance of covering those things anyway.
How would backfill cover druchii and Asur?. especially with it being social science focused...
- Location
- Earth
You do realize the Druchii and Asur books are, in fact, counted in the social sciences section, right? And that backfills specifically prioritize incomplete topics.
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Oh snap, I certainly didn't.
To add to what everyone else has said, keep in mind that chaos is much nastier on individual basis. Chaos warriors are comparable to human hero units and are at an advantage against elven and dwarven elites. And they are basic troops in the army of the everchosen. Actual elites, like chosen are nastier still, and Chaos Lords are flat out scariest individuals in setting that are neither named character nor giant monsters. Speaking of, guess what an everchosen's army would bring a lot of? Yup, giant monsters.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Since the topic has come up, here is a link to the post I made ~a week ago where I analyzed the Back-fill on social sciences, specifically for what topics we are likely to get from it. In general, the higher the + underneath a topic, the more books you should expect to get (unless it's also got a *, which means it's a restricted topic and so getting Imperial books is less likely). The clear frontrunner topics from a social sciences backfill are Ulthuan, Marauder Tribes, the Hobgoblin Khanates, and the Druchii, and I would expect that we would get a fair chunk of books on all of them. Additionally, as I mention in the analysis post, it's likely that our Backfill will be biased to books from Dwarf sources, given how many of our Social Sciences topics are restricted in the Empire, and Dwarf sources are very unlikely to be redundant with our Nuln copying actions (in the post I said guaranteed to not be redundant, but that was before I saw that our Elementalist haul contained Dwarf books, which is clearly an admonition against me personally to stop speaking in absolutes).
So why is it not straightforwardly the best option, then? Well, we don't have control over what the stuff we get is, and it's very likely that we will not fill out the topics we care the most about -- close, probably, but not complete. So if what you care about is ensuring that we have Maximum Elf Knowledge, the Barak Varr purchase is a better option for guaranteeing that we fill out those topics' available Imperial and Dwarf books (and if you care most about Nehekhara it's obviously better, since backfill is unlikely to give us much, if anything, about it), and if you think elf stuff can wait because lizardmen are sexier (and if you do, you're Valid™) then one of the Library of Mournings purchases is better.
It's all a question of what you, the voter, want to prioritize, which is why I have made a bunch of posts, both effortposts and shitposts, to help voters know how to steer the quest towards stuff they want without needing to invest substantial time and energy into understanding the library mechanics personally. Outsource that shit.
So why is it not straightforwardly the best option, then? Well, we don't have control over what the stuff we get is, and it's very likely that we will not fill out the topics we care the most about -- close, probably, but not complete. So if what you care about is ensuring that we have Maximum Elf Knowledge, the Barak Varr purchase is a better option for guaranteeing that we fill out those topics' available Imperial and Dwarf books (and if you care most about Nehekhara it's obviously better, since backfill is unlikely to give us much, if anything, about it), and if you think elf stuff can wait because lizardmen are sexier (and if you do, you're Valid™) then one of the Library of Mournings purchases is better.
It's all a question of what you, the voter, want to prioritize, which is why I have made a bunch of posts, both effortposts and shitposts, to help voters know how to steer the quest towards stuff they want without needing to invest substantial time and energy into understanding the library mechanics personally. Outsource that shit.
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A good chance to cover some of them yes, but all? To fill it all we would need Druchi +5 I and Asur +3D/3I
Here is what the last back-fill looked like
Anatomy - +3 D
Chemistry - +2 I / +1 D
Geography - +3 I
Toxins +3 D
Arthropods +3 D
Dragons +1 D
Rodents and Mustelids +1 I
The Dark Lands +2 D
Dragon Isles +1 D
The Old World +2 I / +2 D
Empire +3 D
Kislev +1 D
Ulthuan +2 I
Greenskins +3 D
Ogre Kingdoms +2 I
Undead +2 D
Agriculture +2 I
Architecture +2 I
Grungni +2 D
Valaya +2 D
Grimnir +2 D
Highest value and the single +4 underlined. So we we care about having the maximum amount of context when dealing with murder elves and maritime empire elves or are we fine with +1/2/3? That is a choice worth considering
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I'm mostly voting for the Nehekaran books, partly for the coin papers, partly as a prelude to learning the language, and partly because I kinda want to poke them for waystone stuff in the near future. Might as well as do it now, attached to the much more immediate elf diplomacy research we need to undertake.
- Location
- Earth
And we can't really use that as a reference because Boney is changing how the system works. There was no "pick a specific section to focus on" thing back then. Besides, I remember us specifically getting out-of-pocket Bretonnian books on Druchii rather than choosing it as a Barak Varr topic because there were no Dwarven books, and to set things up for a future backfill.
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What system? We do not know how those rolls worked/if there were rolls, much less if anything changed. We get to pick from a narrower selection yes but it is still 'whatever they can find at a good price'. I think it is reasonable to assume that will not include the full quantity of the three things we want, or else back-fill would always be best choice.
The above is the only example we have for back-fill which out of the twenty-one categories to which it added books did a +4 on precisely one of them. The Barak Var choice on the other hand will get +5 +6 and +10 respectively
Eh, sort of? I doubt he's massively changing how it works—narratively speaking, last time we were just cleaning out our suppliers unsold stock, so it was truly random. This time, we're asking them to acquire any book they can within a certain cross section of topics, so I imagine that the numbers of books generated may be similar, even if Boney takes a different approach to generate those numbers.
Either way, it's still very luck dependent as to what we can get hold of, and I think it might be better to focus on a smaller number of guaranteed topics, especially with the copying actions happening next turn. Honestly, backfill might be a stronger action after we do the copying, because we'll have more categories to backfill.
For context there are 13 non-filled social science sections which is about two thirds of of the subjects the previous back fill covered. If we assume as many books proportionally get acquired that would put the highest result at +5/+6, but even in that case we would have to get lucky for it to fall on Asur, much less that the same should happen to the Druchi and we can forget about +10 for Nehekara IMO.
Of course Boney changing the back-fill is relevant, what are you even talking about? A narrower amount of topics means more books for each topic, unless you think that Boney just made back-fill worse. Last turn got us +47 book bonus total over 21 topics, so each topic got not that many books. As pickle pointed out in this post it'll take +47 to fill out our social science section, which is exactly the amount our last back-fill gave!
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We do not know if it scales perfectly, even if it does that single +4 would proportional become +5.3, we have no guarantee that it will fall on something we care about and more to the point we do not know how lucky we got last time in and endeavor that probably was at least partly luck based.
You are assuming that the thing which is going to scale is the bonus each individual topic got last time, rather than the total number of books. Why would that be a resonable assumption? No section in our library has 23 incomplete topics, which is as much as our last back-fill covered; do you think Boney just made back-fill unambiguously much worse in all circumstances?
Obviously the Barak-Varr purchase will get us all books on these specific topics (and on Nehekhara which as you correctly point out is not an incomplete topic) and a back-fill might only get some, but the logic you're using to imply that it will probably only get us a +3 or so is extremely questionable.
We have a single aggregate data point of +47 which is about as bad of a baseline for a random or semi-random system as you can have, one the other hand we have 23 results ranging from +1 to +4, weighted towards the middle of the scale, looking at it like that you have more data points. As for it being unambiguously worse, it is not, I think it is worse if you want specific topics which makes sense narratively.
[X] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr booksellers: Druchii of Naggaroth, Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan, Kingdom of Nehekhara
Since I want to do the elfcation as soon as possible I guess I shoud vote for the option preparing us for that...
EDIT : Lol, fine.
[X] [LIBRARY] Back-fill: Romance
Since I want to do the elfcation as soon as possible I guess I shoud vote for the option preparing us for that...
EDIT : Lol, fine.
[X] [LIBRARY] Back-fill: Romance
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