Hmm... that is true, but if we use those channels and get it wrong we have now embarrassed the Empire as a whole because the Embassy is to the king not random nobles.
We've actually used those diplomatic channels before—when spreading news of the Skaven civil war. And whilst, from what I remember, the Bretonnian campaign was fine, there actually was a disaster as a consequence of our information—in Nuln. Thankfully, that was attributed to the Elector's poor leadership than to us, because he didn't bother to properly scout the enemy and instead just charged in assuming all will be well.
So even if the information we give is flawed, we're still protected from blowback, because it'll always be framed as "our agents have discovered this information whilst investigating a mutual foe. Do with it what you wish." And honestly, that's on Bretonnia if they don't do their due diligence and confirm the information themselves, and end up walking into a trap. And they do have the resources to follow up on anything we give them.
And if it does blowback on to us, oh no a spy has made an intelligence blunder. That's a risk of the job, and it'll be compared to our so-far spotless record, and we'll be able to jump down the throats of the Druchii diplomats and tell them to eat shit and die.
And honestly, that plan is a little too 5d chess, even for the dark elves: "we'll pretend to want to trade with the Empire (claiming we want to weaken the Asur's influence), and give them the false co-ordinates of a fleet belong to a political rival, so our rival can ambush a neighboring country's navy and get rich, burning all the fake goodwill we were pretending to accumulate for the purpose of spiting the Asur." The Druchii we spoke to don't even profit from this plan, because all the wealth goes to their rivals and it burns bridges between them and the Empire.
- We have no idea what we are entering, no one speaks that language consistently outside the White Tower, or I don't know Morathi's bedroom if she is feeling adventurous
- We have no idea how many commands there are, we are like a nineteenth civilization in the face of a nuclear reactor for the most part. Of course the memory of the system is limited, the Analytical Engine only has so balls
- Sure I'll give you that
- That does not mean its attention span is limitless or that it can impact all aspects of the system, while it, or more precisely he if he's Calendor stopped when we introduced the same commands multiple times. We do not know if he would be able to catch a subtly flawed command or how much of the system might automated, a lot of unknown unknowns about
1) it's Anoqeyån—lots of people speak it. Sarvoi has his students trawling through dictionaries as we speak trying to find phrases that might be Waystone commands.
2) you're right, we don't know how many commands there are—but we can assume that they only programmed in commands for what they expected the Waystones to be used for. Turning them on and off, adding new lines, reversing direction, splitting nexus' into two new paths etc... An overload or detonate command shouldn't be something they anticipated needing. And if inputting a certain sequence of commands does result in it overloading, that's a bug, not a feature, and I expect it to have been accounted for by the original designers.
3) nothing to add here
4) Caledor is a genius mage who's been living inside the system for thousands of years. You're right, he's not perfect—theres a lot of destroyed Waystones that indicate that. But he's clearly able to notice when we're playing silly buggers with the Waystones, and tell us to cut it out. Next time we use Waystone commands—whether we get them from the Asur, the Druchii, or we figure them out ourselves, we're going to be very careful not to piss of Caledor with our experimenting. And that means being 100% sure we know what the commands do before we use them.
On a very vaguely related note, I don't think the Druuchi literally have 6 cities only, which would be silly.
Barring their garrisons, outposts and Shade holdouts scattered about their sub-continent for military/ cultural reasons, they also have over a dozen other cities to live in, and they're called Black Arks.
This, although the dark elf land cities are likely the most prosperous and at the political apex, I strongly doubt that even half of all total Dark Elves actually live there, instead of a semi-nomadic life at sea or quietly huddled in the snow and the woods keeping an eye for Chaos raiders, what with the Druuchi are a military peer to Ulthuan, who can match them elf for elf, but is *much* bigger than even 6 Very Large Elven metropolises .
The question occasionally turns up here, and I figured it worth noting for posterity.
The Black Arks are not cities, they are floating castles. They have thousands of warriors aboard them, not self sufficient communities. On the wiki, it has a list of notable arks. The
Palace of Joyous Oblivion was sank by an Asur Dragonship. I doubt a single Dragonship could destroy a city—but a glorified fortress? Yeah, sure. Still impressive, but not implausible.
I agree that they have settlements outside of the six main cities, but those would be smaller, semi-rural towns that provide agriculture to the bulk of the population. I imagine the population in these places would be majority slaves.
