I brought up Troll Country because you said it was a good place to use a simplified waystone. That the golden age storage is too currently complex to deploy to Troll Country because of the difficulty bottleneck. I brought up that Mathilde thought that Troll Country was a great place to deploy a waystone that used the golden age storage. You brought up that a waystone with a golden age storage is too difficult to make to place it in areas that you can expect waystones to be destroyed as an argument to make a waystone without it. I brought up that Mathilde thought that the optimal place for our waystone was in places where losses would be expected. That's why I focused on the Kalti Delta. It is firmly controlled by Norscans. If we had taken that option, then the first waystone would be placed into an active warzone. It would have been extremely unreasonable to not expect the destruction waystones deployed there. Mathilde still thought it was one of the seven optimal places on the continent to place the waystone.
Is there anything I missed explaining?
Okay, I can see where the misunderstanding has come from.
The complex Waystones can move more magic, and can protect an area in Storms of Magic. The tradeoff is that they are correspondingly difficult to make, and are this very rate-limited in their deployment. They are suited to areas where they can have a large impact, which is civilised areas where losses are not expected, and hotspots where their ability to move large amounts of magic is more valuable. Despite these being contested areas, we should not be planning for these to be destroyed very often - if the Waystone is lost, it's because the small army guarding it is dead.
A hypothetical simpler Waystone would move magic slowly, and would not do anything to protect an area against Storms of Magic, but would nevertheless over time reduce the amount of magic over an area. They are suited to being out in the wilderness, where any given acre of land is not all that valuable, but that we want cleared out over time anyway. They are not expected to be the focus of fighting, but being undefended out in the wilderness will inevitably take a few losses here and there to random gribblies uncontested - but can just as easily be replaced.
I think when I said "hard to defend" you thought I meant "under heavy assault" rather than "stretched out across the wilderness where we can't station troops, or even meaningfully patrol." I hope this clears that up!
Whilst I'm sure there exist individual pockets in Troll Country that could use a stronger Waystone - if you think the Kati Delta is one I'll just take your word for it - I do not think it is well suited for mass-deploying across low-value land that cannot be consistently defended.
I can't see where Mathilde indicates she thinks this Waystone specifically is a good match for Troll Country, over other hypothetical models, beyond her considering it as an option at all? I don't think that's an argument for using this model over other models there, though.
We don't want to stop deploying the current model, we want to be producing both, and putting them where their strengths lie.
