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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Gambled, lost. Kinda makes up for short circuiting Vlag with cleverness; we can't win them all.

Minds would have been interesting.
 
To me, the main value of an apparition on the battle field is persistence. Most spells, they're either fire and forget or relatively short acting; you cast them, they do something for a bit, and then it's over. Apparitions, on the other hand? Once you let one loose on an objective it keeps doing that until you call it back, no more concentration (except the occasional 'go this direction' nudge) required.

Or at least, that's how I understand it working.
 
NSMS said:
To me, the main value of an apparition on the battle field is persistence. Most spells, they're either fire and forget or relatively short acting; you cast them, they do something for a bit, and then it's over. Apparitions, on the other hand? Once you let one loose on an objective it keeps doing that until you call it back, no more concentration (except the occasional 'go this direction' nudge) required.

Or at least, that's how I understand it working.
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Something like a corrosive fog bank spell would also presumably be reasonably persistent. Not sure about mobile later, although I think we may have had mobile fog banks OKed for Warrior of Fog.
 
picklepikkl said:
It's on a member of Panthera, or the analogous Warhammer thing they have instead of a genus. As for why it's not under the Knight vote: because write-in votes are inherently chaotic and getting dozens of voters of varying levels of engagement and thread attention to format things according to a consistent schema is an impossible task.
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The reason that's unfortunate is that if if all the "knight" votes are tallied together and the sub-vote is just "what sort of creature will the knight ride" then Great Cat Knight ought to win pretty handily. But if Great Cat Knight, Knight on a Wolf, Knight on a Demigrph, and Knight on a Horse are all separate votes that each have to compete with Dämmerlichtreiter on their own, then they may well lose. Or maybe that's the intent for all the knight subvotes to begin with.
 
Alratan said:
We could have bought artillery battle magic from the College, or better, developed mist based artillery battle magic like the corrosive fog spell that we could cast as if it were Fiendishly Complex. The later would reliably produced a safer to cast result than this as it would have worked with the Staff of Mistery.

The point of buying what turned out to be Apparitions was to get something with a mind so we could have spells that did discriminate, that did make choices. Burning Shadows is more capable of that than Apparitions seem to be. That, personally, is a disappointment.

Yes, we knew we didn't buy quite what we'd wanted when we saw the results. Now we're learning that we got nothing at all of what we wanted. Something as controllable as a cannon ball isn't going to be capable of things like being ordered to defend a choke point, or harass a particular monster, or whatever. It's going to try to kill what's in its face.
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Except what Boney said was that it has a lot of collateral damage while pursuing it's target. It harassing a specific monster is exactly what this apparition does, it just is fully okay with also killing anything that gets in the way. It's as discriminatory as a cannonball, not as targetable as one. Defending a choke point is however unlikely unless we want to bar everyone, including allies, I will admit.
 
Briefvoice said:
The reason that's unfortunate is that if if all the "knight" votes are tallied together and the sub-vote is just "what sort of creature will the knight ride" then Great Cat Knight ought to win pretty handily. But if Great Cat Knight, Knight on a Wolf, Knight on a Demigrph, and Knight on a Horse are all separate votes that each have to compete with Dämmerlichtreiter on their own, then they may well lose. Or maybe that's the intent for all the knight subvotes to begin with.
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The dammerlichtreiter is basically another knight subvote as far as I personally see it so... seems fair to me?
 
rocketroland999 said:
Except what Boney said was that it has a lot of collateral damage while pursuing it's target. It harassing a specific monster is exactly what this apparition does, it just is fully okay with also killing anything that gets in the way. It's as discriminatory as a cannonball, not as targetable as one. Defending a choke point is however unlikely unless we want to bar everyone, including allies, I will admit.
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You can aim a cannonball at a specific target as well, so it seems almost exactly as targetable as a cannonball on the battlefield.

In Warhammer though, the ballistic arc you fire cannon balls on means you usually go over most of the people in the ways heads though
 
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I mean... it's actually pretty useful so long as you use it right? Like everything can potentially be dangerous on a battlefield that's the point.
Alratan said:
We could have bought artillery battle magic from the College, or better, developed mist based artillery battle magic like the corrosive fog spell that we could cast as if it were Fiendishly Complex.
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This would honestly have about the same chances of killing friendlies as the Riders. It's a cannon, aim it right, fire at the right moment, and don't mess up the powder charge/casting and you've got a highly effective weapon. Honestly that's what I've always seen it as, another weapon to add to arsenal, we have plenty of tools for espionage.
Alratan said:
it was stated to be as capable of discrimination as a cannon ball. That's not a sentient mind capable of being ordered.
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If used wrongly, cannon balls can't hunt specific targets, or be commanded to attack/hit that specific thing or person. Like it's an entity that hunts and kills people, it has about the same intelligence level of an animal, if you tell it "Kill that thing" it'll kill that thing. Even if it crushes or shoves everything and everyone in it's way. Basically:
rocketroland999 said:
Except what Boney said was that it has a lot of collateral damage while pursuing it's target. It harassing a specific monster is exactly what this apparition does, it just is fully okay with also killing anything that gets in the way. It's as discriminatory as a cannonball, not as targetable as one. Defending a choke point is however unlikely unless we want to bar everyone, including allies, I will admit.
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This^
 
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Alratan said:
it was stated to be as capable of discrimination as a cannon ball. That's not a sentient mind capable of being ordered. You can train a dog to know who its friends and enemies are. You can train a dog to be able to only hurt people you order it to. You can train a dog to defend a location you specify in a command.

You can't order a cannonball to do any of that, and I thought we were getting something as capable of taking instruction as a dog.

And when we bought what turned out to be Apparition knowledge I believe the thread thought we were getting something that could do more that could be more discriminating than a cannonball.
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You are wildly overinterpreting what was pretty clearly a narrow comparison. The apparition has no concern for collateral damage. Neither does a cannonball. This does not mean that the apparition behaves in all other respects (e.g. targeting, tracking, ability to hold position) as would a cannonball.
 
I do still think that even with our Pocket Monster, our standard battlefield approach of "Miasma + Counterspelling (+ maybe key assassinations)" holds true. That's what I'll be voting for by default when it comes up again.

The knight is an emergency button, if only because if it dies (which it will in the kind of things that qualify as an emergency where we need to pull it out) we will later have to spend AP/CF re-collecting another one to replace it.

It's an "Oh shit, Mathilde is alone and cornered by Orcs again" spell. Not an "Ah, Mathilde and her buddies are fighting a bunch of Orcs" spell.
 
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Something I want to point out about the Apparition is that we can use it along with other magic. We let lose the Red Rider and point it in one direction and it goes to kill whatever is in that direction without needing Mathilde to concentrate.

Which means Mathilde could do other things like idk, cast Pit of Shades on the other direction if she knew the spell
 
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Zaratustra said:
I think you are reading too much into:

Like there may be better ideas, but that doesn't make the wraits a bad idea in itself.
Most of the problems you are bringing up are going to be problems no matter what form we vote for, everyone is always trying to obscure their aparitions spells are actual aparition and they still get questions if they are medling with daemons from time to time. I guarantee no matter what we pick they will finds a way to raise a fuss.
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Ehhh, this kinda misses the point? Me bringing up the optics of apparitions was to stress that managing the reputation of an apparition spell is already very difficult without also making that apparition look like necromancy.

I also don't think this is reading any deeper into it than Gehenna himself and the gold college liason we got the secret from did. We had an entire update of them banging the drum that they do not want us saying what the golden hounds actually are, and that's something to pay attention to IMO.

They went out of their way to play to the optics and were really averse to mucking that up even by proxy. Every reason I gave could be wrong, and I'd still at least entertain the idea that their reason for doing it is valid and applies to us. Making the surface impression of our minion worse instead of using the opportunity to make the optics convenient just doesn't seem like a good idea.
 
Boney said:
They're trying to figure out how to take magical photographs before regular photography exists so it's kind of a rough process, they have the basic idea of how to make a sort of single-Wind daguerreotype and then overlay eight of them to create a single image similar to something called chromoxylography, which also hasn't been invented yet (except in Cathay), or to project light through all of them at once like technicolour film.
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Adela Burgstaller: ahhh, shit. here we go again.... all aboard the rocket brain!
 
Alratan said:
I have to admit, I'd hoped that Apparitions were more controllable than cannonballs in flight. We bought them from the Gold College because they'd have a mind and so could make decisions, after all. It does seem that this really was a complete failure. If all they can do is indiscriminately kill anything in the direction they're pointed, even on a battlefield they're not going to be as useful as I, at least had hoped. Less a summoned ally and more another form of artillery spell.

If this ends up as non-mist battlemagic I can't see many cases where I'd want to cast the spell. I feel we'd have been better off with Penumbral Pendulum.
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How did we get from 'accidentally trampling over allies' to 'indiscriminately kill anything in the direction they're pointed'? Neither cannon nor Gehenna's Golden Hounds do that. Both of them are aimed, and both of them go badly if you forget to check if there's someone you like standing directly between you and the target.

There are three examples given in the quest of what Apparition-powered spells might look like. All of them are pointed at an enemy and then they do bad things to that enemy. I don't know what I could possibly have done to make it clearer what the limitations are. I was pretty sure I had already succeeded in doing so because I've already heard this type of very dramatic lament about it before.

I don't like this dynamic I seem to go through with you quite often, where you post that of course X thing will bring you the moon and the stars in a basket, and then I have to explain that it won't, and you react like I just told you that its only capability is to kill your dog and spit in your cereal, and then I have to explain that no, it's somehow in this middle state between 'completely perfect' and 'completely useless'. It turns out many things are! No, the Rider in Red doesn't have infallible built-in IFF, you do have to actually think a bit before you fire it off. That doesn't mean it murders every friendly soldier in a 135-degree arc. Here we are again, in that middle ground you keep skipping over! Please join the rest of us in it!

Alratan said:
We could have bought artillery battle magic from the College, or better, developed mist based artillery battle magic like the corrosive fog spell that we could cast as if it were Fiendishly Complex. The later would reliably produced a safer to cast result than this as it would have worked with the Staff of Mistery.

The point of buying what turned out to be Apparitions was to get something with a mind so we could have spells that did discriminate, that did make choices. Burning Shadows is more capable of that than Apparitions seem to be. That, personally, is a disappointment.

Yes, we knew we didn't buy quite what we'd wanted when we saw the results. Now we're learning that we got nothing at all of what we wanted. Something as controllable as a cannon ball isn't going to be capable of things like being ordered to defend a choke point, or harass a particular monster, or whatever. It's going to try to kill what's in its face.
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Alratan said:
it was stated to be as capable of discrimination as a cannon ball. That's not a sentient mind capable of being ordered. You can train a dog to know who its friends and enemies are. You can train a dog to be able to only hurt people you order it to. You can train a dog to defend a location you specify in a command.

You can't order a cannonball to do any of that, and I thought we were getting something as capable of taking instruction as a dog.

And when we bought what turned out to be Apparition knowledge I believe the thread thought we were getting something that could do more that could be more discriminating than a cannonball.
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I'd have felt bad about writing all of this (as well as, as always, terrified of confrontation) and backspaced it away by now if you hadn't written two more posts along these lines in the time it took me to do so!

And while I'm worked up enough to speak my mind, you have a clear pattern of deciding what result you'd like to win, then coming up with arguments that you think will make that happen, without any consideration about whether those arguments are based in truth or not - and then I'm the one that has to clear up the misconceptions you've weaponized and inflicted on others. If it weren't for that I'd be more likely to think that all of the above was just a certain amount of propensity towards catastrophizing on your part, but as it is it makes me suspect that this is all performative. That either you're forcing me to describe at length the downsides of these things because you didn't want them to happen in the first place and you want to get back at the people who voted for it, or you're trying to guilt me into making the thing better by saying that it's self-evident that it's super awesome and then making a big production about your disappointment when I correct you. These are both bad options.

Please make better contributions to this thread, because the alternative is no contributions and I don't like to inflict that on anybody.
 
making a fictional knightly order using components of our heraldry especially 'unseen but not unfelt', feels like the perfect amount of tongue in cheek… but Great Cat Knight feels like such a weird non-sequiter. We've got Wolf, we've got Shadowsteeds, we've got We, we've worked extensively along Demigryphs at least… but the closest cats have ever been to relevance is maybe Ranald used them to mess with us a few times (including the time he did save our life tbf).

[X] [RIDER] Mist-shrouded Grey Wizard on a Shadowsteed
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] The Dämmerlichtreiter
[X] [RIDER] Knight
-[X] Conventional Empire (Mathilde's Heraldry)
 
Boney said:
I'd have felt bad about writing all of this (as well as, as always, terrified of confrontation) and backspaced it away by now if you hadn't written two more posts along these lines in the time it took me to do so!

And while I'm worked up enough to speak my mind, you have a clear pattern of deciding what result you'd like to win, then coming up with arguments that you think will make that happen, without any consideration about whether those arguments are based in truth or not - and then I'm the one that has to clear up the misconceptions you've weaponized and inflicted on others. If it weren't for that I'd be more likely to think that all of the above was just a certain amount of propensity towards catastrophizing on your part, but as it is it makes me suspect that this is all performative. That either you're forcing me to describe at length the downsides of these things because you didn't want them to happen in the first place and you want to get back at the people who voted for it, or you're trying to guilt me into making the thing better by saying that it's self-evident that it's super awesome and then making a big production about your disappointment when I correct you. These are both bad options.

Please make better contributions to this thread, because the alternative is no contributions and I don't like to inflict that on anybody.
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Many apologies. I really over-interpreted your comment about being as discriminating as a cannonball as a more general statement than it was in its context, which I'm sorry for. This was not done deliberately at all - I was just really enthusiastic about the possibilities I thought it had, and then thought I'd even more massively overplayed what it could do than I had..
 
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths

Mathilde is really kind of egoistic in the end, isn't she? ;3
 
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Gavin Prince said:
It's an "Oh shit, Mathilde is alone and cornered by Orcs again" spell. Not an "Ah, Mathilde and her buddies are fighting a bunch of Orcs" spell.
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I'm not sure I agree- I feel like there's a use case we've been overlooking.

That is to say, giving a Mathilde who is commanding armies or with the commander a deployable hero unit to counter an enemy hero or Lord, without her moving from command/control/counterspell position.

Or, in the same situation but different frame, it lets Mathilde publicly contribute to the fighting while keeping her attention on the politics going on around her with the high command.

Like, a spell that is a statement about having more important things to do than fight you personally. An opening move, to gauge if escalation is needed.

....

An opening move for the supreme matriarch fight. Pin down dragomas before he can get the dragon transformation up, use shadowknives plus smoke and mirrors to keep him from killing the rider. Best him the same way we won our magister duel, except with magic.
 
For the Great Cat Knight- personally I'd prefer Winter Wolves or Demigryphs, and am voting for them too, but Cat is what actually has a good chance of winning and I like it more than the other leading options.

Also, as much as I prefer other versions of 'knight mounted on killy thing', there is a sort of charm to a big cat- Mathilde's first ever friend, before even Ranald himself, was a cat she named Morr to try to loophole her own Dooming. Summoning a knight riding a big cat (that I at least will imagine being the same color as Morr) to continue protecting her from death- and indeed her Dooming by insuring that she's never truly alone, feels clever and appropriate to me.

Well shit, I've talked myself into liking the Great Cat Knight more.
 
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