Boney told us:
So between half and a quarter of the original Waystones have been destroyed.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Boney told us:
So between half and a quarter of the original Waystones have been destroyed.
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Its not really the same statements. Sylvania is the only place completely devoid of waystones. The other places have disrupted network so the other parts of it have to pick up slack or there are places where dhar pools for longer than it should.
There is a difference between threadbare and nonexistent.
I think it'll be fine. Eltharion implied that one of the problems with the waystones was getting Caledor to make titan-metal. As it is, this waystone will only temporarily require the efforts of archmages. Though it should be noted that the Asur can't use this design. I'd prefer to give them another design. The storage is so that Ulthuan feels like it needs to help refine the Golden Age storage as much as possible, making it easier to deploy our own Golden Age storage-based waystones in the Old World.
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
[ ] [RUNE] Wizard
[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
This is something Boney would have explicitly stated if it was true. Cite the source. Now.
That's a bit flimsy. I feel like you are a putting a big burden on Boney if a simple description like that is considered a full no-shenanigans promise.
It should at the very least be considered a refection of Mathilde's thoughts on the matter. Keep in mind I am not voting for nor do I like the option, but when something is said about it in the text right after the voting option I think it is reasonable to take it as true at least for the PoV is it being written in. It would not have been that difficult to write 'can' instead of 'will' and add a line about needing to convince the archmages to do the simplification.
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Why and how becomes clearer if you refer back to the full description, which is a bit more temperate:
My guess at the mechanics behind the scenes is that every time some number of Waystones are created according to this design, a progress die gets rolled, and depending on the result we accumulate a certain amount of progress toward improvement, and when the progress reaches a threshold the enchantment has been improved and becomes simpler (and probably the threshold increases, representing that it becomes harder to improve it further). So, if Boney does something like that, it'd be statistically guaranteed that eventually it improves, since eventually someone will figure out ways to streamline the design, when that happens is up to Ranald.
This is something Boney would have explicitly stated if it was true. Cite the source. Now.
Firstly, you don't get to make demands in that tone.
Secondly, I already gave the quote above about the number of missing Waystones.
We were also told about the risks of cascade failure:
And here's a reference to the wider fragility of the leyline Waystone network.
Your argument seems to be that it does deal well with those things.
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pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Thats because Eltharion is an overachiever with ludicrious standards. I can name the number of monuments from mankind´s history that have been preserved for as long as Waystone network was on one hand, and all of those are in as "bad" a shape, even without half of the world bent on destroying them. Waystones are as old as pyramids and in fair better shape despite seven millenia of enemy action and only some repairs from successor species.
If thats the standard for "not dealing well" i can´t even imagine what would deal well.
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That's fair in some ways, but Eltharion presumably has some reason to disparage the work of the Golden Age elves in this way.
There must be some weakness he's seen and probably suffered from that would motivate him to mention this in such a way that it's not one of the most salient parts of Mathilde's meeting with him so was described in the update.
The argument seems to be here that in practical terms having a backup transmission mechanism in case of downstream disruption doesn't actually make a meaningful difference to the robustness of the network in practice.
I just don't buy it. If that was the case I don't think we'd even have the option for both described in these terms:
For this to matter, to be a tangible improvement, being cut off from the wider network has to be a real problem rather than a theoretical one that empirically doesn't matter.
Remember, the origin of this discussion is what would Eltharion think about the design? It's his standards that matter.
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- Location
- Aotearoa
That's a considerably stronger interpretation of the implications than what was actually stated. Who is to say the territory that became the Empire was evenly covered to the same standard of 'full coverage' referred to in the first place? One location received three Nexuses in very close proximity, so clearly not every territory in what became the Empire was equally prioritised when the work was being carried out, even before the War of the Beard put an end to the rollout cooperation.
That's true, but Boney also said in a related discussion:
That suggest to me that full coverage would be replicating the Golden Age level of coverage. I could be wrong, but that was my interpretation.
And the density of the network required for full coverage may very. The Winds are generally stronger in the north, for example, and the Middle Mountains are probably a special case.
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Ah, I'm sorry, I thought you were still trying to pedal the claim that the majority of the Empire's waystones aren't even doing anything.
We know cascade failure is a risk of the model. If were a risk as severe are you are trying to portray it, far more sections of the Empire than just Sylvania and the Drakwald would dhar-infused hells well on their way to become a new chaos wastes. Instead the network has stood for millennia with only occasional maintenance. The Belthani couldn't build waystones and they were driven out after only five centuries.
There were large periods of time when there weren't people systematically defending the waystones of the Empire, just periodic defenses of their own holdings. Like the period starting after the Time of Woes. Such as the 500 year period between Belthani getting displaced and the foundation of the Empire. Then there's the entire Era of Three Emperors in which the Empire just collapsed outright.
You are portraying the Waystone Network as far more fragile than it actually is. The Empire as a whole lost its waystones over four thousand years of bleeding. The majority of the Empire's waystones are still functioning after four thousand years of enemies wearing them down.
Eh, it's possible it wasn't completed entirely, but Sylvania had waystones. The majority of castles in Sylvania were even built around waystones. It's just that the Vampires destroyed them. Sylvania was pretty far from known elf settlements. I'd guess they got most of it.
The places that didn't get waystones in the Golden Age would have been Athel Loren and Troll Country. Athel Loren because it was hell and Troll Country because the Lynsk was the northern most extent of elven settlement. Maybe the Border Princes around the Skull River too. Mathilde theorized there would have been a nexus to attach Heidec to the Border Princes. But that's close enough to Karaz-a-Karak that it seems unlikely.
If there had been waystones in Troll Country, I don't see how they could have avoided meeting the Norse Dwarfs. Praag at least seems to have been a Dwarf settlement.
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- Location
- Argentina
Holy shit. I did not think that such a small amount of waystones could help with so much. (I apparently missed that Boneypost)
We are doing a great aervice to the world here. We will free military resources that we can use in orher places.
The forces of order shall start to gain territory again.
- Location
- Aotearoa
I missed that post, too. And yeah, it has great potential- if we successfully design Waystone(s) that can be built out on the scale described and timeline required, without diverting more resources than they free. Say, something simple and affordable that you could imagine being built in every village.
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Eltharion describes the Golden Age waystones as "the artisanry of the Inner Kingdoms" and "a Sapherian masterpiece". Yvresse is an Outer Kingdom.
This suggests to me that the mages and archmages of Yvresse do not know how to make waystones, or otherwise lack the resources for it (titan-metal, for example), and instead must commission them from Saphery and the other Inner Kingdoms. I imagine this is incredibly expensive.
The Project Waystone will still be valuable to him, because it means that not only can he get waystones from somewhere else, but he can contribute his own mages to the construction, lowering the overall price. This is absolutely a massive advantage for him, and whilst he'd probably prefer something that his people can craft by themselves, simply undercutting Saphery's monopoly is still a win.
Now imagine if we created a cheap easy Waystone that made fucking with the Middle Mountains just a question of garrisoning rather than something a polity needs to save up and outbid its allies for
I mean, to slightly caricature, the discussion went:
DP: What would Eltharion think about our new Waystone?
Me: I think he'd like it, because he expressed concern about the vulnerability of the original network and our version has a backup transmission so is less vulnerable.
Others: the network isn't actually vulnerable.
Yet others: Eltharion was wrong/ has unrealistic expectations
Those responses, to my mind, miss the point. By one of the factors by which I believe Eltharion criticised the original network, ours, in the words of Boney is a 'tangible improvement'.
You may think this isn't a meaningful issue. I would suggest that Eltharion, the person this discussion is about, disagrees. Otherwise, what else do you propose he meant by not dealing well with deliberate sabotage? The danger of cascade failure is just about the greastest vulnerability to that we've seen.
It doesn't matter objectively how great the original Waystone network is, only what he thinks. He set it as a success criteria. I think we met it.
You could alternatively have Mathilde go and tell Eltharion he's wrong to care about this, but I don't think she'd get very far.
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Aliya
Someone I might become
- Location
- Kazakhstan
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- They/She/It
I do think that current winning designs ar eprobably not optimised for what Eltharion wants, but I think he'll be ok with it. I also think he would really appreciate the suggested boat prototype, since it seems cheap as hell, which he will appreciate.
Note that Caledor is an inner kingdom, and I think they have a monopoly on making the Titan-metal and gold alloy for the Golfen Age design's capstone.
We don't know how many Priests of Vaul there are who can make the alloy there are, or whether it requires facilities with a limited bandwidth.
Although Saphery's mages do the final assembly and enchanting the other components, it's possible they aren't the bottleneck, and that if we share the design and resell them dwarf carved Waystones runes they might be able to increase their production.
As a side note, unless Saphery still has some dwarf carved runes remaining from their pre-War stockpiles, they can't be using the original design. They must have redesigned it to take account of a less effective rune if they're still making Waystones.
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I really don't like how the vote's turned out.
I made my plan to try and make a waystone with the best components we had. It turned out that I was wrong about the Storage, and the reverse-engineered Storage would store the most energy. If that was all, I'd have switched over to the winning plan. But there are only two "Very difficult" components, and the winning plan picks both of them. This waystone design is going to be a total PITA to build in numbers, far more than the plan it's a variant of. (And even if we build enough for the difficulty to go down a level, with this design it'll take far longer to get to that point.) I would absolutely trade off a massive difficulty spike in exchange for somewhat less storage capacity. Maybe that's the kind of trade-off I should have considered earlier. Maybe the winning plan would've happened regardless of anything I posted earlier. But I think it's a really big mistake to crank the difficulty up as high as it could go, and I feel like I'm part of that decision being made even though I disagree with it.
I made my plan to try and make a waystone with the best components we had. It turned out that I was wrong about the Storage, and the reverse-engineered Storage would store the most energy. If that was all, I'd have switched over to the winning plan. But there are only two "Very difficult" components, and the winning plan picks both of them. This waystone design is going to be a total PITA to build in numbers, far more than the plan it's a variant of. (And even if we build enough for the difficulty to go down a level, with this design it'll take far longer to get to that point.) I would absolutely trade off a massive difficulty spike in exchange for somewhat less storage capacity. Maybe that's the kind of trade-off I should have considered earlier. Maybe the winning plan would've happened regardless of anything I posted earlier. But I think it's a really big mistake to crank the difficulty up as high as it could go, and I feel like I'm part of that decision being made even though I disagree with it.
- Location
- Probably Not Behind You
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Plan Building A Better Future
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[X] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[X] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Runed
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Both (Jade Riverine)
-[X] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[X] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[X] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Runed
-[X] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[X] [TRANSMISSION] Both (Jade Riverine)
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Sure, but one of the very difficult components will become less so. We dunno by how much, but we do know the original enchanting process had to be relatively easy, otherwise they never would´ve made that many.
In that sense, not picking the storage would´ve been a lost opportunity.
There is already a perfectly good protection against morrslieb and its called a roof/ceiling.
In its absence, a sufficiently bolstered waystone network means that it would be nonissue anyway.
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Keep in mind that first elven stones were done without dwarven involvement. So assuming Saphery kept that data, all they had to do is get the older design out of the archives.
The job of our first design is to restore severed lines and plug up holes. I think out current leading design is over engineered for that job, but whatever.
If we want to make our second design the cheap, mundane option with clockwork and stonemasons, that's fine. It will have its uses.
If we want to make our second design the cheap, mundane option with clockwork and stonemasons, that's fine. It will have its uses.