Well at 50 research points total, I would say my plan just became a little less great, but depending on what we stand to earn from it, it might still be worth doing, after all there's 10s of thousands of intelligent Sarnori at minimum, depending on the size of the cities, there might easily be more than that, that's a lot of sacrifice power the old gods will get.
Even if the average undead only have 1HD(I don't know their average HD) with the modifiers for being undead and a willing sacrifice, that's 2.4HD if we assume 20k undeads that want to live again, that's 48k HD sacrificed to the old gods, although there's of course the unknown negative modifier, from putting their souls in soul gems instead of letting them pass on, but if that don't turn out to be more than a -50% modifier, that still would mean we have supplied the old gods with 24k HD, that's a lot of power they can use against the Others.
It of course also depend on how much we get out of it, but the old gods growing in power is also a gain from this, so it should also be considered, when deciding whether the research cost is worth it.
While we might have to foot a portion of the expense, I expect most of it will be paid by the Sarnori themselves. There will also be the matter of timeframe, as in we will only be able to produce so many empty Warforged husks per month. We don't have hard numbers on that, but we can get them from DP tomorrow. I think 1,000 per month would be quite generous. That could help space things out well enough to make dealing with the expense less of a burden.
Don't raise your hopes up too high on getting all aspects of what your wanting from the sacrifice route, if we decide to use it. Expecting the OG to award favor or booms for their participation in this endeavour is bound to disappoint. That's not their shtick.
I would simply be glad for the research to culminate in a process which transfers the soul of a willing Undead into an empty Warforged and reduces the price from 225 IM to 112.5 IM.
They don't grant boons beyond the initial for sacrifice yes, but the more you sacrifice to them, the more they like and listen to you, and the more power Bloodraven has to work with, we wont get direct boons beyond the reagents, but the old gods will love us even more, which mean they will be easier to convince to agree to our plans.
And that's without going into what they will spend their new power on, we can't decide what they spend their share on, but their goals often coincide with ours, they hate the Others and want more Weirwoods, so they're likely to spend a good chunk of the power we provide them, opposing the Others, and accelerating the growth of Weirwood, and both of those things are good for us too.
Also the research is sure not to result, in a flat reduction of the cost of making warforged, after all the research don't make warforged cheaper, it allow us to sacrifice the undeads old bodies for reagents, so the amount of reagents produced, will be based on how many HD the undead has, and if it has any additional abilities that count as HD modifiers, when sacrificed to the old gods.
Hell yeah, we could legitimately afford to produce a city's worth of them. Granted I only expect each city to have two to five thousand at maximum who are even capable of being embodied. And it's looking like we're only going to make the attempt on 3.5 cities out of 5 at maximum.
So probably somewhere in the area of 10,000 husks needed at maximum, and perhaps as low as 7,500.
I expect Mardosh alone to have much more than that, everyone in the city were returned as undead, and they're all sapient undead, 5000 isn't a city, that's only a town, Mardosh probably has a population at least between 50k and 100k, and I think at least 1 in 5 will want to become a Warforged over remaining undead or passing on to the afterlife, so Mardosh alone should need at least 10k husks, and might need more than 20k husks.
