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I'm sceptical about the runic inductor since it makes more dhar. Production of it is probably pretty simple, but someone brought up the prospect earlier of dark magisters running off with the capstone to use as a dhar generator, which seems plausible.
 
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I feel like my expectations for deployment schedules are pretty out of sync with the threads here. I've sort of been assuming this would be a generational project from the start, if the old world is fully saturated in 100 years? That seems like a pretty quick turnaround for this kind of infrastructural investment to me. This is a time when a single cathedral might take 60 years to finish after all.
I agree - I used a decade as a lower bound so no one would argue with me that it was too high.

That said, all the more reason to spend the couple of AP making different models, for such a huge project.
 
Looking at the early leading plans, there seems to be no love at all for Spirit based riverine waystones, which the skaven at least will cheer, but there also seems to be a lot of support for runic storage, about which I don't recall much discussion.

The issue I have is that I don't think we can be confident about the capacity of runesmiths to make this? Do we know how many runesmiths there are who know the right runes and would be willing to have them used in a (experimental by their standards) device that was developed in collaboration with elves? Do we know how long it would take to make them?

We've seen how conservative runesmiths can be about using runes in novel ways in relation to putting runes on firearms, and as the Golden Age Waystones didn't use runic storage I don't think we can use it as a precedent.
 
I'm sceptical about the runic inductor since it makes more dhar. Production of it is probably pretty simple, but someone brought up the prospect earlier of dark magisters running off with the capstone to use as a dhar generator, which seems plausible.
I'm worried about the Runic Inductor at scale. If we build hundreds of them around everywhere, that extra Dhar really adds up. It might even be an issue for some Nexuses, since more Dhar and less Winds might imbalance their mechanisms.
 
Ok so the skavens thing I've heard a lot now... Do we have any reason to believe this is an issue at all? I would have thought Mathilde with her expertise in skavens warfare would have at least considered the option if it was an actual big problem?
 
Ok so the skavens thing I've heard a lot now... Do we have any reason to believe this is an issue at all? I would have thought Mathilde with her expertise in skavens warfare would have at least considered the option if it was an actual big problem?
No I think Alratan is fearmongerin. Or has some unreasonable view of Skaven at least. We are going to deploy first waystones to Sylvania and we know for a fact that there is no skaven there.

Plus they live deeper down anyway. Or in the mountains. Not in soil where farmer might accidently breach thir dens when sinking a well.
 
Looking at the early leading plans, there seems to be no love at all for Spirit based riverine waystones, which the skaven at least will cheer, but there also seems to be a lot of support for runic storage, about which I don't recall much discussion.

The issue I have is that I don't think we can be confident about the capacity of runesmiths to make this? Do we know how many runesmiths there are who know the right runes and would be willing to have them used in a (experimental by their standards) device that was developed in collaboration with elves? Do we know how long it would take to make them?

We've seen how conservative runesmiths can be about using runes in novel ways in relation to putting runes on firearms, and as the Golden Age Waystones didn't use runic storage I don't think we can use it as a precedent.

I mean I'm voting for leyline transmission and that is one of the leading plans. I don't think Skaven will be getting anything out of that. The point here is to just make Proof of Concept Waystone and have it work so we can flog it off to our backers for more support. It would be nice to get the Bretonians or have a budget that we are not paying for out of pocket.
 
I'm worried about the Runic Inductor at scale. If we build hundreds of them around everywhere, that extra Dhar really adds up. It might even be an issue for some Nexuses, since more Dhar and less Winds might imbalance their mechanisms.
More optimistically, I'm worried that making more Dhar will make whatever we come up with to use our network, like Kislev and the Dwarves do, less effective. It's not the most important priority, but it is one.

For now, as I'm going to be voting to build more Waystone variants in the coming turns, I'm voting for the more expensive, impressive variants to maximise how impressed everyone is, especially Bretonnia. We can make a cheap version next turn, or the turn after.

[X] Plan Building A Better Future
[X] Plan Building A Better Future (With reverse engineering)
[X] Plan: All-Stars
 
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Our eyes might be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to the speed of building Waystones I think. I mean how fast do you thing they were build in the Golden Age? I wouldn't be suprised to hear it took couple of centuries so trying to outspeed that by the factor of ten is probably a bit much.
 
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The problem is that we won't know how long it takes to build a waystone until we, you know, build one.

Until we've cleared that milestone, any discussion of timeframes is going to be purely theoretical.
 
Ok so the skavens thing I've heard a lot now... Do we have any reason to believe this is an issue at all? I would have thought Mathilde with her expertise in skavens warfare would have at least considered the option if it was an actual big problem?

Baba Niedzwenka made something of a big deal about the superiority of the spirit option being that it teleported the dhar rather than it passing through the points in between, and presumably there's a reason for that.

If it didn't matter, why would Boney have her emphasise that point?

The obvious reason (to me) why it's better to teleport the Dhar is that it then can't be intercepted. As we tunnelled under the riverbed to the place the Dhar would flow to test the prototypes, it doesn't seem beyond the capabilities of other people, particularly skaven who already live under some of the rivers in question or necromancers who have untiring unbreathing labour to do the same to intercept the flow and tap into it.
No I think Alratan is fearmongerin. Or has some unreasonable view of Skaven at least. We are going to deploy first waystones to Sylvania and we know for a fact that there is no skaven there.

Plus they live deeper down anyway. Or in the mountains. Not in soil where farmer might accidently breach thir dens when sinking a well.

Skaven live right underneath the cities and settlements of the Empire. Generally those cities and settlements are on the banks or on islands in the same rivers we'd be channelling dhar through. In particular, to answer your point, many of those skaven lairs are downstream of Sylvania.

If we can tunnel beneath riverbeds to where the Dhar would flow, so can they, particularly as they can do things like live underground in Skavenblight which is in the middle of a giant waterlogged marsh, so tunnelling through saturated ground or beneath water is a problem they're very familiar with.

Not to mention their transoceanic tunnels, etc.
 
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Baba Niedzwenka made something of a big deal about the superiority of the spirit option being that it teleported the dhar rather than it passing through the points in between, and presumably there's a reason for that.
She emphasize that because it's her specialty and doesn't involve any dedicated infrastructure, also iirc it doesn't teleport, it's just letting the river do the transport directly.
 
Okay, but Skaven already have a billion and one ways to sabotage human civilization. Stealing Dhar that's flowing through solid rock a metre or so below a river isn't significantly more vulnerable than any other target they can hit.
 
Alright consider that any waystone that uses both transmission methods in truth will use Leylines first and only use river method if that gets cut. IT is a failsafe not a constant use that will draw skaven. Does that make you feel better about it?

Edit: More to point there is plenty Dhar in the Sylvania but Skaven was not interested in that. I don't think they all that much use for free flowing dhar.
 
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Human wizards are few in number so I can't for example claim that Collages can spare more enchanters than Eonir can spare High Mages. So I don't think number wise difference is going to be that big.

We need different designs that uses all 3 if we want maximum waystones.
Human wizards are few in numbers, but there's still more of them than Archmages. And the Fascis allows not only for human wizards to do it, but also all the elvish wizards that aren't Archmages. In total, there's more people who can build the Fascis than the flower.

Yes, that's the end goal... But that's a distant end goal. Our first goal is protecting as many human life's with our waystones, then roads and rivers, then fields, then forests then further out.
Yes, but concentrating on population centers isn't going to do much. First, most people don't live there but in the countryside. Second, humans need those farms to eat, and those forests to be free of grizzlies empowers by Dhar. Furthermore, I think it's more likely that the most populated zones are better covered because there's more defenders there.
 
Baba Niedzwenka's method has the spirit take the magic and move it directly to wherever on the river it's going, without crossing the intervening space.
I think that is neat method if we want to deploy waystones to Badlands but unneceserry expanse for the use in the Empire.
Human wizards are few in numbers, but there's still more of them than Archmages. And the Fascis allows not only for human wizards to do it, but also all the elvish wizards that aren't Archmages. In total, there's more people who can build the Fascis than the flower.
Not only the number of wizards that Collages can spare is likely to be less than Archmages IT also needs 8 times the work to make single piece. Meaning it will probably come about the same numbers ready for deployement even with more people working on it.
 
I mean I'm voting for leyline transmission and that is one of the leading plans. I don't think Skaven will be getting anything out of that. The point here is to just make Proof of Concept Waystone and have it work so we can flog it off to our backers for more support. It would be nice to get the Bretonians or have a budget that we are not paying for out of pocket.

This is where I think having the initial Waystone be very impressive is important. The first Waystone we make will get the most attention, and if we can present it as superior to the Golden Age version that should be massive coup that really impresses our stakeholders, more than a less functional version.

I think this is a moment where it pays to go big, as increasing difficulty of production by choosing more features apparently doesn't impact the difficulty of making the initial demonstration model.
She emphasize that because it's her specialty and doesn't involve any dedicated infrastructure, also iirc it doesn't teleport, it's just letting the river do the transport directly.

It does teleport, or something functionally equivilent to it:
"Get the river spirit to handle it," Niedzwenka says. "They exist everywhere along it at once, so they can move things from one end to another without having to go through the points in between. Very useful for smuggling. They'd probably ask something that'd be expensive or annoying for an individual, but easy enough for a country."

Not passing through the points in between sounds like teleporting to me.

Alright consider that any waystone that uses both transmission methods in truth will use Leylines first and only use river method if that gets cut. IT is a failsafe not a constant use that will draw skaven. Does that make you feel better about it?

Edit: More to point there is plenty Dhar in the Sylvania but Skaven was not interested in that. I don't think they all that much use for free flowing dhar.

That's not the case though. Thee riverine method is particularly valuable in places where there isn't a Waystone network anymore, like Sylvania, so you deploy a Waystone in a settlement on a river to protect it and not worry about building a string of Waystones to rebuild the network connections first.

And the dhar flow produced won't just be random pools of ambient Dhar, it would be a concentrated replenishing flow. If they can divert it they can probably condense warpstone out of it like a blocked Waystone can do - and even if they can't they can use it loike dhar users generally exploit Waystone blockages that create dhar.
 
I think that is neat method if we want to deploy waystones to Badlands but unneceserry expanse for the use in the Empire.

Not only the number of wizards that Collages can spare is likely to be less than Archmages IT also needs 8 times the work to make single piece. Meaning it will probably come about the same numbers ready for deployement even with more people working on it.
Except all the people who can do flowers, can also do the fasces.
Also, i seriously doubt that the collegiate version requires 8 times more wizard time than the archmage level enchantment.
Them being a less complicated enchantment probably means that they take less time for dedicated craftsman, or might be possibly to make several at one go.
We can only do one, because we can't generally subdivide AP, but that is not ncessarily the case for npc's working in the background.
 
This is where I think having the initial Waystone be very impressive is important. The first Waystone we make will get the most attention, and if we can present it as superior to the Golden Age version that should be massive coup that really impresses our stakeholders, more than a less functional version.

It is already very impressive to anyone who is not Ulthuan, it has far more functionality compared to the present locally sourced Bretonnian alternative of Nothing Flat (TM). We are not competing with the Golden Age since they can't make Golden Age stones. Also increasing complexity makes it more likely it will blow up with low enough rolls.
 
[X] Plan Simple and Functional
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[X] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[X] [STORAGE] [Moderate] Runed
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

[X] Plan Keep It Simple
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[X] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[X] [STORAGE] [Moderate] Enchanted
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

[X] Plan Keep It Simple, with Material
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[X] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[X] [STORAGE] [Moderate] Material
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

Edit:
[X] Plan Building A Better Future
 
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[X] Plan Spend Money Not Effort
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[X] [RUNE] Carved
-[X] [STORAGE] Expensive Material
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

Trying to use wizards and runesmiths in as few places as possible (so keeping them out of the rune and the storage), eliminate "ongoing maintenance" where the waystone breaks down if someone doesn't attend to it for a while, and where where we do need magic make it so that the broadest possible base of people can execute.

EDIT: Approval vote for the only option with a realistic chance not to have insanely complicated transmission.

[X] Plan Simple and Functional

EDIT2: CURSES. It's not what I want... but it's the lesser of two evils.

[X] Plan Building A Better Future
 
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Voting for highest option with River Spirits, cause it is important politically to give non-wind human traditions a dub.
[X] Plan Near-Original+
 
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