[X] [LIBRARY] Colleges of Magic: Apparitions, Power Stones, Forest Spirits, Liminal Realms
[X] [LIBRARY] Colleges of Magic: Apparitions, Power Stones, Forest Spirits, Aethyr
[X] [PURCHASE] The Lady: Extensive Bretonnian, Shallya: Extensive Bretonnian, The Kingdom Of Bretonnia: Extensive Bretonnian, Trade: Extensive Eonir, A dwarven axe for Baba Brzeginias/Gerdouen
Righto, back to voting for me!
Anyway, lemme make my arguments...
Ok, to start? Backfill is not a bad option. In fact, it seems to me like its probably going to always be a good option. Its going to give a bunch of bonuses, and its going to probably be much more useful per action to the average library user than the other options. It'll also help give that wonderful feeling of progress. Wonderful completeness, wonderful dopamine.
We don't really know how much Backfill will, ah, fill, but I doubt it'll fill everything instantly. But that's another argument for backfill right now: Learning exactly how good Backfill is as an option will help us make better decisions around Backfill in the future.
So, if Backfill is a good choice, and will probably always be a good choice even if we've picked it multiple times already, why am I voting for the College acquisition?
Well, what are the scenarios in which we would pick the other options? I can think of a few.
1: The specific books are something we can only get for a limited time.
If we can only get certain books for a limited time, then if we backfill, we may permanently lose the chance to get those books. Whereas if we get those books now, we can always backfill later. This is an argument I've seen used in favor of certain Library of Mourning picks, mainly with the concern that they might be made unavailable later as the elves realize they're more important than they realized.
I think this is a very dangerous road to go down, though. Human minds are very vulnerable to FOMO(Fear Of Missing Out), and it can very easily lead to us making decisions that aren't actually all that beneficial to us. I would be very cautious of using this as a reason for not picking Backfill.
2: The specific books are something that will notably improve or enable important actions in our very immediate future.
Backfill is probably very powerful, but it is also unspecific. So if we have significant use/need for specific books in our immediate future, then I think specific acquisitions will often be the better choice.
Now, I don't think this is a super common situation. I expect that most of the time, Backfill will be the right choice. But I do think this is the situation we are in right now. Apparitions and powerstones are things that a number of people are very interested in doing in the very near future. We're also spending a lot of time in a place full of forest spirits, but I think thats secondary to the apparitions and powerstones.
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So, all in all, Backfill is a great option, but it's unspecific, and I don't think its ever a priority. Rather, I think it's just a very good fallback option that presents a high bar to clear for other options to be worth it. Like a decision tree of "Is this option really important and better than backfill? If yes do it, otherwise always Backfill".
I suspect a lot of our previous library acquisitions would've been better off as Backfill, and most of our upcoming ones are probably going to be best off as Backfill as well. I just think that right now, the College books are a higher priority because it is my impression that there's a lot of people that feel like certain actions they value highly(and have waited for for quite some time) can't be done until we have these very specific books.