What would we have the institute research? Like we gave away all of our Skaven technology. The Tongs are unconfirmed and potential helped by Windherder which doesn't seem like it'd be a frequent trait. We're already pretty far into AV. Theurgy leans into our Avatar Trait. There's talk about why we want to make the Sevirscope ourselves.
1. We
swapped our Skaven Technology for AIs.
I'd be shocked if we got the whole tree in one go - odds are, we would be taken to around where AV is now, and the tree is as complex as the Skaven Tech tree would have been.
2. We haven't finished the AV tree.
We've only managed to find a use for AV, that the Dawi would pay for. I have a suspicion that enchantment exploration actions merely unlocks an entire enchantment tree with five or six options.
3. Ulgu Tongs feeds into Windherder. To use Windherder, we need collaborators, there is no way around there. To have more collaborators wander in into the EIght Peaks without having to pay for favor cost, a Branch College
would be extremely useful. There currently is no way to bring either our employees or Ducklings into Windherder right now.
4. Enchanted Engineering
is brand new, and born from weeks of thread madness, that often ended with BoneyM clarifying you'd need a sapient mind for some of these projects. Now we have the prospect of AIs that don't breach the articles on the research table, odds are this changes. Besides, odds are, Enchanted Engineering is one massive tree, since there are so many Engineering applications and possibilities.
5. Waystone Project
is never going to be a five years and it's done project, unlike Project Queekish.
6. The self-updating MMAP is still on the table, and probably something that'd greatly help the Karak's defenses.
7. There's still the goo research.
8. As we've seen in recent months,
the thread will never fall short of proposing new research projects.
At
one effective research AP for
any of these topics, you can never pursue any of these potentially world-changing topics in any sane amount of time. In the status quo, alot of research is
boring to talk about because Mathilde can only research the topic slowly one piece at a time, which means for example, we read turn after turn of Mathilde assembling the AV Safety sheet, because it takes four actions to make that sheet and only one action could be invested in it per turn.
Moreover, I imagine that Mathilde would not dispense with the Duckling Club. Infact, it offers the potential to see the Duckling Club grow, from an informal collection of wizards, to a small annual conclave of a Research Institute, potentially with the funds and political backing of a state. And that's before the Boon actually can mean a research institute that tackles any and everything.
No Dwarf knows, broadly, what a College of Magic is. They arguably can't know, being so insulated from the Winds.
They know what a Guild is. Belegar would almost certainly interpret the request as "fund"/"Patronize" a gathering of scholars and wizards to do research (ie: pay for infrastructure, and within reasonable limits, hiring minions), which allows Mathilde to access the resources of the Eight Peaks to build something that far exceeds anything she could ever do in personal resources. BoneyM did give the analogy of how long a piece of string was, a page ago, on that issue.
As to whether this eats on Mathilde's AP.... as far as I understand, no, because the 1.5AP currently used to manage the Wizards of the Eight Peaks will represent the Research Institue.
