Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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How many areas near rivers need to be covered though? Obviously everywhere in Sylvania and Troll Country. But beyond that? Waystones near rivers are some of the least likely waystones to have fallen. The majority of fallen waystones will be away from rivers, where the Empire can't deploy armies.
The Drakwald doesn't have major rivers either.
Boney said that refining the enchantment would be a project unto itself. I am going to guess that means something like five years for just focusing on refining it. That's about how long the Waystone Project is taking. Maybe ten years before it is fully simplified with the focus being on producing the enchantment.
Yeah, but the problem here isn't building it but designing it. We know the Golden Age Elves and Dwarves designed a relatively simple design that could be mass produced. We don't know how they designed it, and since this is Golden Age Elves and Dwarves there's a very good chance that the theoretical basis has been partially or completely lost (and I assure you the ones that designed it weren't just random mages and runesmiths).
For what we know, this could be like the Colleges trying to reverse-engineer the Grey Lord Foundation, and the design was made to be 'replicated without being understood'.
I do think trying to reverse-engineer it could be worthwile in terms of finding new magical secrets/tricks, but that should be in a future turn, not while designing our very first Waystone.
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K von Carstein
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Stealing magical secrets is all well and good, but if it shoots our main goal in the foot it's not worth it.[X] Plan Building A Better Future (With reverse engineering)
Since spirit leylines are not popular, I will instewd try to remind the thread that part of the point of this project was to steal magical secrets, and reverse engineering does allow us to do this. Plus, we are a follow of Ranald. Sneakily stealing secret is religiously mandated of us, really.
This was the Golden Age elves and dwarves. Both species can refine their personal compétences for centuries. What a average elf mage (who would have hundreds of years to practice) can do isn't the same as what the average human (with less than a century) can reach.
The Border Princes where the dwarves are establishing client principalities is a candidate. The Black Water itself probably is as well.
The other thing is that riverine Waystones on rivers can effectively substitute for missing Waystones well away from rivers, where one link in a chain has broken, allowing the blockage to be temporarily but quickly mitigated by adding a dual purpose Waystone on a river 'upstream' of the blocked leyline.
It would be much easier to deploy large standing stones by river than to transport them through forests, swamps, hills, etc to get to the locations of blockages.
As I understand it, we know how to replicate the original design, that's what the reverse engineered design is. What we haven't managed to do is recreate the manufacturing process to easily make that design, and instead the Grey Lords have brute forced it.
The refining process will keep the design constant just incrementally work out how to make it more easily.
So, as I understand it, the design is fine, the problem is we don't know how to build it efficiently.
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We have average elf mages - and the leading competitor plan wants to use dwarven runecraft instead, which is always going to be something that needs to be done by a minority of an elder race, probably requiring greater than a human lifetime's training.
The reverse engineered version at least has the hope of eventually being made by human enchanters.
We don't have any unemployed runesmiths either though. The option you voted for requires another limited resource to be devoted to making Waystones; rather than, say, making gear to help reclaim the Silver Road.
And the reverse engineered storage enchantment doesn't require high magic, just currently archmage grade enchanting skill, it seems, if it's possible for one to exist without the other.
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Elves are considerably longer lived than dwarfs and have even longer to perfect their craft with the vanishingly small exception of Living Ancestors. Also there are just many many more dwarfs in the whole of the Karaz Ankor than there are elves in Laurelorn.
I feel like the Border Princes would have the problem of it being the Border Princes. Who would pay to deploy waystones there and why would we deploy them there over Kislev, the Empire, Bretonnia, Laurelorn, or Tilea and Estalia? Barak Varr probably wouldn't pay. Though it would probably be easier to convince Byrrnoth to attach the waystones to their network. Barak Varr's nexus is outside of Barak Varr proper, unlike the other Karaks. The Golden Age storage's difficulty would make it even more difficult to deploy them in the Border Princes of all places.
You don't actually address my point. Yes, it is easier to deploy waystones near rivers. But those areas are also the areas where they are least needed. Especially if we use the Golden Age storage mechanism, it would be a waste to deploy waystones in areas that are already covered.
Are there many more runesmiths than elves in Laurelorn.
And this is where my question of opportunity cost comes in? What else would those Eonir be doing that we care about if we don't need them making Waystone storage components versus what would those ruensmiths be doing?
I think the opportunity costs of the runesmiths being dedicated to this are higher.
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Not A Nice Person At All
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[X] Plan Building A Better Future (With reverse engineering)
K von Carstein
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We have a few average elf mages, and a lot of average human wizards. And the reverse engineered requires a runesmith, who are in much greater supply than Archmages. Sure, we could maybe allow average human wizards to build it, but it's by no lean certain.
Rn, legendary wizards specialized in enchanting are the only humans who can build that, and the only elves are Archmages. That's a tiny bottleneck given that there's less than 20 people who can cast Qaysh in Laurelorn, let alone Archmages. And there's no guarantees it will become easy enough to make that as many human wizards than runesmith can make.
they could be doing the flower.
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I hope I did. Just because the Waystone of the settlement on the river has survived doesn't mean that every Waystone on the leyline going through the wilds 'downstream' linking it to its nexus has.
If we install a dual purpose Waystone where a leyline crosses a river then all the Waystones on the 'upstream' leylines can then discharge into the river, allowing us to quickly bypass downstream blockages and restore network functionality without having to locate destroyed Waystones deep in the wilds, transport a new Waystone there, install it, and protect it from whatever nasties live there.
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[X] Plan Simple and Functional
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
If the Reverse Engineered enchantment is so hard that it's hampering production, we'll just get a turn where we go 'this could be somewhat faster' and then consider working on an alternative.
Alternatively, we might get actions to help out with simplifying the enchantment ourselves, considering our traits and proclivities.
Alternatively, we might get actions to help out with simplifying the enchantment ourselves, considering our traits and proclivities.
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[X] Plan Building A Better Future
[X] Plan Simple and Functional
[X] Plan Simple and Functional
No you did not and you have not. We have somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 waystones to erect to fully cover the Empire. I assume that number includes Laurelorn. Kislev might add another thousand to that number. I don't know how much Bretonnia would add.
You're suggesting that, rather than covering areas that don't have any coverage, we erect new waystones in areas that already have waystones covering them. That is a complete waste of time. If you want to do that, then we need literally any other storage method than the one the thread is voting for right now.
Edit: Huh I thought the thread was voting for the Golden Age storage. But still, if you are going to do it, vote for cheap components.
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Because of the reluctance of the Eonir and probably Ulthuan to share information on their demographics, productivity, or availability of their enchanters, this is mostly unknowable.
There could be more available highly skilled Eonir enchanters than there are enchanters at all in the colleges, or there could be fewer. We just don't know. We don't know how many Eonir would be willing or able to learn enchanting, or how long it would take.
I also don't think we know if Archmages are a subset of High Mages, or whether they're the overlapping Venn diagrams, with some Archmages not having learned High Magic and some High Mages not being skilled enough to receive the title of archmage.
And currently; there are probably more runesmiths than archmages. That doesn't mean we prefer the opportunity cost for the runesmiths using their time to the opportunity cost of the archmages spending there's. We also don't know how long it would take to refine the reverse engineered design manufacturing process to the point where non-archmages can make it, or how many storage enchantments the runesmiths have capability to make in that time, so we don't know when a crossover point in total construction would be.
I'd like to point out very simple runic items are uniquely suitable as an export from Karak Vlag. Their Rhunkit seem to compromise a significant proportion of their population, and tying them to their neighbours economically is intrinsically valuable.
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You know since I only tap in when there are boney updates, until the second paragraph, I thought this was responding to a particularly bad skull river theory rather than responding to a leyline take.
I'm clearly not explaining this very well; I may need a diagram.
My point is that sections of the Waystone network can get cut off from the wider network because of a downstream blockage. Just because all the Waystones in an area are still intact doesn't mean the Waystones are able to drain Dhar from the region if there's nowhere for the Dhar to go.
The dual purpose Waystones would allow us to get isolated sections of the network like that working again by installing a single such Waystone on a river and allowing the Dhar to drain out through there.
The problem is that would probably require that a regular runesmith teaches them the required runes, and that could be a big issue. As would us or other dwaves buying turns that might have been produced in a heretical fashion.
The idea that every single elf in Laurelorn is a potential caster of the reverse engineered storage method is... rather dubious.