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[VoidSlayer]

You are using a revision to update everything we have.  That is the definition of overreach.

If you want to use one of those techs to update multiple designs, okay, but using all our magic to update every design?

[Chiefwaffles]

Nope. Ambitious, sure. "Overreach"? No.

If this was anything new, then I'd agree with you.

Resistive Layering - See what I said in the post. This is incredibly simple. We already know how to do it exactly. It was explicitly listed as one of the capabilities of the new Crystalworks Mk. 2.

More complex crystal structures can be made, such as resistive and non-resistive crystal layering and more complicated shapes.

IDE Refitting - The IDE is just a bit smaller than the steam engine and it still outputs via the same method. Super easy.

Aethergem Fitting - We already know how to make Aethergems. We already make Aethergems. We've already powered designs with Magegems, and it's literally the exact same process to fit designs with Aethergems, with a minor change to the sizes being considered.

Though I am removing the stuff involving shields/adding crystal bits. Probably not enough to convince you or Draignean, but I still feel it's a bit much myself.

[RAM]

Please stop lying about me.

RAM:
I'm actually convinced at this point that you seemingly oppose everything I type on principle. It feels like whenever I post anything in this thread it's only a matter of time before RAM comes to make up more stuff trying to "counter" it.

I said that the aethergems were fundamentally a good idea, but flawed. I made a better design, and argued for it., I frequently pointed out why they were inferior to the alternative. But I do not recall saying that they were bad, just flawed and could be improved upon. Please cite a specific quote where I said that it was a bad design. For contrast on how I define this, I regard the Titan as a bad design. THAT would have been a waste of an action.

More to the point, I often criticise all proposals when I vote. It just so happens that I generally find may many many more problems with yours than I do with anyone else's. Most everyone else's proposals are actually viable. Yours lately have a habit of being fundamentally unworkable and missing a bunch of design elements in the final product. More to the point, these inevitable failures often get lots of votes, and thus it proves necessary to warn people that they are voting for something that will fail, which they generally do, generally for the reasons that I have stated. Such as Falcons not being found, tamed, trained, and mutated with a single action, we got the one thing that made it possible at all, a mind-control spell, a fully functional and usable one, unlike what happened with plant growth, when mind control wasn't even mentioned in the proposal and without it we would have gotten slightly enlarged birds that eat our trainers. We basically got the one thing that wasn't mentions and lost everything that was, and it was the best outcome that we could have hoped for, better even. If the G.M. wasn't constantly going out of their way to reinterpret your designs into something remotely plausible then we would have ploughed into disaster so many times that it isn't funny.

The problem is that I feel almost obligated to show why the stuff you post is blatantly false.

And yet you do not do so. Please cite precisely when you showed "why" a post of mine was blatantly false. On the few occasions that you have done so I have actually been quite receptive. Like when you pointed out that the falcons were actually modified permanently, and not just suppressed temporarily. On that occasion you actually made an argument and actually got a result. Mostly you just make completely baseless accusations. Such as saying that what I post is blatantly false.

But that's at the cost of my time and the general state of the thread.

The whole thread choosing designs, I try to argue for why designs should be chosen. If there were any actual content to any of your arguments then we could maybe resolve something. If a point has been argued I am willing to drop it, but nothing is addressed...

Sure, most people can probably see right through your stuff, but there's always that miniscule chance that someone may have their opinion shifted by your baseless assumptions.

You keep making these empty claims about my flaws, nd yet have no evidence to back it up. Surely if my offences are so abundant you can find at least one that you can go into a respectable amount of detail on?

I'm fine with arguing/discussing this kind of stuff with other people, but really. Other people don't just make up stuff to counter every single sentence of what feels like every post I make. Like for a recent example, I disagree with Fallacy, but at least he makes an effort to actually support his arguments.

Exactly, I have no issue debating with Fallacy for exactly those reasons. I and Fallacy both support our arguments. You do not. Please post a quote of you supporting an argument against me and me being unreasonable about it. The thread is not going anywhere, feel free to grab a quote, any quote. The thread isn't deleting itself in a hurry, you really ought to be able to find one somewhere.

"My design is broken, just spend a revision to fix it" "Spending revisions to fix designs is bad, for vague reasons that I am not going into but are very real so long as they don't apply to me"

When anyone can tell this is, as always, blatantly untrue. Like, if you actually read the supposed "hypocrisy" I said, which is:

And it's always a good idea to not have to use Revisions to fix a Design.

Not if we fix the Protector, which uses canons. And it's going to be exponentially harder for them to increase the effectiveness of the spell.

Note how, unlike what RAM pretends it to be, this statements work together.
Using revisions to fix a design is unavoidable. We generally shouldn't make designs with the intention of also using revisions that turn to fix the design. It's always a good idea to not have to use a revision to fix a design is true - we shouldn't intentionally put ourselves in situations where we have to use a revision to fix something.
But the Protector is buggy only because of a poor bug roll. We had a [3-1] for the bug roll, which is mostly just bad luck.

Okay, that is fair, completely lacking in foundation, the protector was obviously too ambitious and was always going to need revisions to be a tide of armour rolling over the fields. The fact is we got lucky that the G.M. decided to just ignore parts of the proposal. But still, I am willing to believe that you know little enough about what a design can actually achieve that you thought that you were submitting something that would work as you wanted in its initial form. It is worth pointing out that the average roll of a 6-sided die is 3.5. "3" is as close to average as is possible. "-1" is a consequence of the design. So you are lying or wrong about it being "just bad luck" as that is not, in fact, bad luck. That is a design going exactly as one could reasonably expect. Protector got a ridiculously average roll and came out with features just completely absent and still works about at well as can be expected. And it did not win the turn for us, because it was the wrong design at the wrong time. Which is exactly what I claimed it to be. but you are correct that, assuming that you were mistaken about the protector's ability to be a functional design, thus did not explicitly design it to need a revision, that you asking to revise it is not evidence of you operating under the idea of designing to require the use of revisions.

On the other hand, that is a very specific interpretation that you are using...

And it's always a good idea to not have to use Revisions to fix a Design.

You do not actually specify any intent. You specify a situation. Specifically that of having to use a revision to fix a design. A situation that we now find ourselves in if we need to use a revision to fix Protectors. We obviously don't, protectors are kind of pointless, they get about as much as they can out of their role in the current circumstances so no revision on them would help significantly, but if we did need one then that would be the situation that we find ourselves in as a consequence of their design. It is just really sad that you do not understand the word "blatant". When your entire argument rests upon a very specific interpretations of a very vague sentence then that is not blatant.

But then we come back to whether you actually designed the protector to require a revision.

I honestly don't trust that Evicted would ever be willing to make the Protector Cheap on the first design regardless of what we do. Also, usually Cheap/Expensive don't really make a difference for bigger things.

So you expected it to be expensive, and regard a 3 as a bad roll. 3 is as good as precisely half the possible options, that is a very likely thing to happen. It was, in fact, by your own standards, very likely that your estimations would not be met. Your estimates were "expensive" at best. You even specifically mentioned the "First design" with reference to "Protector" thus implying that there would be future "Protector" designs. And yet apparently this is not an example of designing to require a revision? Even though you plainly regard the next step up from "expensive" to be requiring of a revision:

So here's a list of the flaws I could see at a glance:

• It's Very Expensive!
• No anti-magic resistance?
• Poor propulsion - The engine's great, but the small wheels can easily crack and sink into the ground. The lack of suspension means no cannon fire on the move. The gears make turning a very slow + arduous process and are prone to breakage at high speed. And more. We could probably fix all this with a single revision.
• It's slower than a horse. Related to above (gears/suspension/wheels and the like) and could probably be fixed with a single revision along with the above.
• Magegem battery only allows up to 1 minute of unpowered operation
• AS-HAC-1 emplacement provides no protection to operator, requires an apprentice operating it, and doesn't support armor making the operator very vulnerable. Also only useful for anti-air.
• IDE can't be retrofitted to other designs. We should probably just implement it in future designs; I don't think a retrofitting revision is worth it.
• Small amounts of ammo. Not a huge deal since the HC1-E is a pretty big cannon and can do a lot with small quantities of ammo.
  

The ones in bold should probably be fixed first. I think we should prioritize the expense, but revisions fixing more than one problem would be great and may be possible. The Protector is (probably) useful as it is, and fixing a non-expense related part would probably not do much at Very Expensive.

Anti-magic resistance is annoying, but not the end of the world. Their anti-magic still needs to be consciously cast by a wizard with the spell and our soldiers can always just wait it out or depart the vehicle when disabled.

The wheels/gears/suspension/mechanical propulsion stuff is all annoying, but we can live with it. On the bright side, a single revision could potentially fix all of this and radically progress our knowledge of engineering in this area. Seriously. It's a huge opportunity - suspensions, gear turning, better wheels.
Maybe we could implement treads.

So you do not believe that cheap is possible. You believe that very expensive requires a revision, and you do not think it is appropriate to make designs that require revisions... So you do not believe that expense rolls exist? I am really having trouble figuring out if you are deliberately lying or really don't understand something about this situation, by your own statements the only possible outcome was a single specific expense level, as though expense levels are certain. Do you perhaps think that The G.M. was unjustified in giving the design anything less than a +2 on the expense roll?
Not to mention the 6 other things that need revising on a PERFECTLY average roll with no comment about the G.M. misjudging the design... You are absolutely certain and sure that this design was not intended to need a revision?

And for another example, let's take another look at your post:

Personally, I feel that recharging a magem in an hour would be optimistic, a day would be pessimistic, a week would be something that we ought to be prepared for, five minutes would be a thousand birthdays at once, and "enough to maintain a third of our current rate of fire" would be something that we can potentially hope for, but really shouldn't.

Note how RAM is using this as evidence, yet it's literally just baseless assumptions. And I mean "baseless". There is no base to this statement. You're just saying "Well, I bet this is going to be bad, so therefore I'm right at saying it's bad!" like in nearly every argument you've made recently.

I clearly stated that it was my personal opinion. It is very very clear. How vague can "Personally, I feel that" be on this issue? I made a very clearly personal judgement on what was plausible and used it as an example to explain my own thought on the matter. And it is not baseless, it is based upon my personal assessment of the situation, and I made that very clear. I don't even regard that as "bad" as you are accusing me of. I regard those rates as being pretty good. Well, the optimistic one, and the pessimistic one is generally bad, but that is what pessimistic is. Really, you are citing the exactly how clear, concise, and descriptive I can be at my best and saying that I refuse to provide tangible arguments. These are the figures that I think are likely and why I think they are not good enough., And, as it turns out, wer, by some miracle, got even better results, they can barely be considered batteries anymore and still haven't lost any storage capacity. I blame the G.M. for being too soft. That said, they still do not generate charge quickly enough to keep pace with our firearms. So it turns out that even a success well beyond my expectations was insufficient for our purposes.

So yes, I freely admit that my very clearly labelled expectations were inaccurate. However, that is not actually any sort of problem. Somehow you managed to be completely wrong here. I did not use it as "evidence", I used it as a hypothetical example, very clearly so. It was not "baseless assumptions", it was estimates based upon my experience with the thread and the magics involved. Accumulating magic seems to be something that takes a while and now we have more than we know what to do with. I did not think that it would go "badly". I thought that it would result in a large increase in our magic generation, I just didn't think that it would be sufficient to replace magem replacement, so the proposed implementation could be improved upon and would not meet the very specific requirements that I was responding to, that of its function as a power-source for fully-functional and self-sufficient armaments. In the respect that it is completely accurate to the extent that it is advertise then yes, it is exactly like the majority of my recent arguments, however it, and my recent arguments, are completely unlike your description. So you are, in this instance, completely wrong.

Also in response to the "A mist cloud would likely be blown away":
Nope.
See our "channeling mist" spell which explicitly works against wind by being continuously generated, which is the same thing a Tower of Mist would be doing. Actually, I just know you'll say "NUH-UH" then make up another thing saying that technically it doesn't work. But let me pre-emptively prove you wrong:

Obscuring Mist:  Cloaks a squad in a fog cloud, hiding their numbers and equipment, and making them harder to hit at range.
  Variant (Channeled Fog): A denser form of Obscuring mist, continuously generated. 

Revision: Channeled Fog [5]

Well I do so love making things up, lets make pretend that the G.M. said something like this:

@EvictedSaint: How effective is our channeled fog against their wind spell? Is it still getting blown away or are we capable of maintaining constant cover on our troops?

It's about even.  The fog is continuously generated from the casting mage, so as long as the troops trying to hide are downwind it will more-or-less cover them.

And then let's all share a delusion that channelled fog is, in fact, affected by wind. Or, you know, maybe it just likes being downwind, because our apprentices smell nice... How many times do you have to outright lie about me making things up without ever doing anything to support your claims before your slanderous tastes are satisfied?

Rather than just casting a cloud of mist and moving it about at will, our Mages have learned how to continuously conjure the fog.  This means the cloud will grow larger and larger the longer they stand still, and moving will leave a trail of fog.  This leaves more ambiguity as to how many men are hidden in the mist, and natural wind can't dispell the fog quickly enough to leave the men uncovered.  Only time will tell if the Moskurg's control of the weather will be enough to dispell our cover.

And I don't believe they've ever actually countered this. It's just not particularly useful. But even if I missed something and it's not viable because of wind (if you do want to say this, please bring evidence for once), do you know how we can fix that? More mist. Do you know what makes a lot more mist? Towers of Mist.

I have already stated that a tower of fog would result in a giant "shoot here" arrow stretching up into the sky above the conjurer. Wind, surprisingly enough, does blow fog. True, channelled fog does, indeed, persist, due to its continuous generation, but it is still blown and it thus still completely fails to obscure the location of the person creating it.

Now, are you quite done lying about me?

[Chiefwaffles]

Aethergem Shells

Aethergems seem to explode when violently damaged, so why not load a bunch of them onto the tip of one of our Blastshells?  They can power the shell to blast towards the enemy like a Blastshells+R then cause a massive explosion when they hit the target, similarly to a Blastshells+E.  Even better they can power the blast effect throughout the arc, making them not lose accuracy at long range.  Using half the gems of a Blastshells+R/E, this should be both cheap and more effective then any current shell.

This definitely seems like it could work. Though a problem is that if we use an Aethergem to power the propulsion effect, Evicted could say the Aethergem won't explode at the end as it's discharged. But if Aethergems do explode when discharged, then that'd be great because the Aethergem shell (Blastaether Shell? Aetherblast Shell? Yes; Aetherblast Shell!) seems like it'd be a great choice.

It does make sense that Aethergems still explode when empty, after all. Charged Magegems don't explode, and the only thing different about Aethergems is their connection to the Aether. And the connection to the Aether isn't actually changed when it's discharged.


Maybe in the future we can do proper missiles with the Aethergem? Like, long-range missiles. The recharging nature of the Aethergem could make them a near-perfect match for that kind of thing.


Also, just as a note, I'm probably changing the count of Aethergems put in the AS-R1 in my Equipment Update revision to 1 instead of 2. Namely because I now realize that Aethergems are bigger and heavier than their respective size Magegems. So two would be a bit unwieldy.
Maybe. The AS-R1 did do just fine when it required 2 A-size Magegems per shot.

[andrea]

for rifle, I would get an aethergem backpack with 2 aethergems(or more, depends on size), in which the soldier can plug magegem clips to recharge them.

So, he would still have to swap out clips, but he can recharge them during the fight.

[helmacon]

An aether gem it's said to be around the size of a man's forearm. A sized mage gems are the size of a soda can. 1 1 A mage gem != 1 aether gem.

I understand the urge to put our new stuff on everything, but the R1 honestly doesn't even need an aether gem. I believe the way ES described them being used is "firing one or two shots to break formations before switching to long swords, as it takes too long to load additional bullets."
The R1 is slowed by bullet load time, not gem charge/load time. By the time they were ready to use it again, they will have had plenty of time to replace mage gems outside of combat.
If we work on the R1 at all, we need to be making it actually useful in combat, not adding bells and whistles.

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeeeah. I'll save it for if we do the R2. Really right now the R1 is only going to be used for small amounts of gunfire or from places where ammo isn't an issue.

So I'm removing the R1 from inclusion in the equipment revision.
EDIT: Removed the Restless as well. It's Expensive now anyways, so individual Restless trains (I'm starting to resent my past self for naming it the "Restless". Can you even make a plural form of that?) being destroyed don't matter nearly as much.

[RAM]

Academy Aethergems
We allocate a large supply of AAA Aethergems to the academy so that our students can frequently recharge their magical abilities, allowing them to engage in practical training for longer sustained periods and more frequently, thus accelerating their learning.

We further supply it with a small supply of A Aethergems for more promising students to train with effectively greater magical capacity, letting them experience magics that are beyond them. This helps to accelerate their progress into higher fields and makes them more aware of how the limitations and potential of the more powerful magics on the battlefield.
Faster training means more apprentices means more magical power generated... It is a viscous cycle, and we wish to be viscous...

Temporary Wizards
Some of our mages are trained to wield Aethergems and magems to support their spellcasting. This allows them to draw on the powers of a more advanced category of wizard. Combined with our academy training they can control the more powerful spells that they now have access to. Thus, depending upon how many Aethergems and magems we are willing to supply to the cause, we can inflate the supply of higher-calibre spellcasters..
If they just feed the equipment then we can supply the power to our machinery without modifying it. Alternatively they could use it to throw some B.B.s at enemy carpets and such. Or use some big spell that we have been preparing. Or we could apply this to Myark and design some sort of super-national-effort Kaiju summoning...

Weightite works
As the name suggests, this will really work! Or not.. It seems ambitious, but we have been getting away with murder lately.

Gemerators
Aethergems are nice, but still recharge too slowly to effectively sustain cannonfire and hypothetical bullet summoning apparatus. We produce a new line that dedicates the whole of the gem to accumulating power, tapping into "roots" of the great beyond, to increase the magic generation at the cost of the storage capacity. We also wanted more puns, and feel that this will make for an effective weapon..

Anyway, we retool a crystal summoning platform to summon a very simple, but extremely heavy material. Which will be shaped into shells to see if our cannons can fire them, but I don't expect much... But still, if the material can be done in a revision, and we have a lot of experience with material summoning, then we will have the material for awesome things later on. I know that "really heavy" doesn't sound like much, but it is really nice.

Ugh. The Mundane is very well named. It does what it wants to... Ugh, it is tolerable, vaguely, I mean, the rate of fire is pathetic... Can you use AAAs instead? They are basically better... Or, I guess the way the G.M. basically gifted us adjustable recharge rate on a silver platter was nice. So we can use a mix of gems for half-decent firing rate. We really want a shell-summoning thing too, but crystals won't work for that... I really can't support the mundane, that rate of fire is just too low.

Equipment is badly presented. The priorities are meaningless. No matter how much it is stated, conductive and resistive crystals and layered construction is not that easy. It is a revision of its own, at LEAST a revision. Fitting maybe a revision of its own. across all designs it almost certainly is, but it does get the things into service, maybe... Changing engines is easy? Ehh, maybe, things are pretty magical around here. As a lucky-dip it ought to achieve about as much as it can, so that is not terrible, but it really needs to have some sort of prioritisation, and it just doesn't.

I want to say that rockets are more susceptible to wind than shells are, but I don't have the background to back that up. At a guess I would assume that the important factors are mass and travel-time and rockets tend to be lighter and travel for longer. But we do need longer range, so it is not bad if it works as advertised, and there is no compelling reason to believe that a rocket with no fuel would be light...

0 HA1-b "Mundane":
0 Arstotzkan Equipment Update:
0 Aethergem Shells:
0 Academy Aethergems:
0 Temporary Wizards:
0 Weightite works:
0 Gemerators:

0 Save the credit:

[Chiefwaffles]

conductive and resistive crystals and layered construction is not that easy.

Right.

Revision: Crystalworks Mk. 2 [4+1]
...
More complex crystal structures can be made, such as resistive and non-resistive crystal layering and more complicated shapes.

(Lower emphasis mine)

[helmacon]

Future design

The mage suit

The ability to artificially generate magical energy has been a breakthrough. No longer is magic the domain of a lucky elite.

Through expirimintation we have found that while only a few people may be able to draw magical energy from the aether, anyone can direct it. The mage suit is a piece of specialist armor designed to allow a mundane solider act as a mage.
It is comprised of two aether gem arrays in a backpack feeding into a series of crystalline wires. These conductive Crystal cords are spliced directly into the solider, feeding him a steady supply of magical energy to work with. With training, he can then operate as any normal mage would.

[Chiefwaffles]

Personally I think it's a better idea to just throw some Aethergems into Combat Armor and not bother with the splicing it directly into the soldier.
I'm sure we could do it, but it most certainly adds difficulty.

The thing is we don't really have any useful spells for someone in something like the Mage Suit to use. We have magitech. And it'd be a lot easier to simply have armor that can plug into tools/equipment or have gauntlets that conduct magical energy or something like that.
My vision for future armor is an Aethergem core in it that powers equipment used by the occupant. They hold a rifle and it's powered by the armor. They can charge depleted [Mage/Aether]gems manually, like an apprentice, if needed as well. But really for anything that wouldn't be handheld equipment it could probably just do better with an Aethergem. Since Expense is Rolls combined with the most expensive item, and isn't cumulative with different components. Having 10 different Expensive components is better than having 9 Cheap components and 5x of an Expensive component.

Here's what I think we should do:
1.) Make our Magitech able to be used by mundane people, eliminating the need for apprentices and mages to power magitech.
2.) Make spells that can then be used by our masses of mages with nothing else to do.


I also like the idea of just turning our wizards into supersoldiers that can basically get 200% out of magitech. Sure, this guy with Aethergems in his equipment can fire his AS-R2 once per three seconds, but our wizard here can fire twice per second and can have his power armor set to ON constantly!

[RAM]

More complex crystal structures can be made, such as resistive and non-resistive crystal layering and more complicated shapes.

(Lower emphasis mine)

Oh, wow, I did not notice that. Huh... It... still doesn't actually work that way. I mean lightning that is, either coat yourself in a resistive layer, and I mean air-tight, especially at the bottom, so that any path through you also goes through highly resistive materials, or coat yourself relatively casually(An open cage is fine)in something highly conductive, so that There is always an easier path than the one through you, and even with their arrow-lightning it should still just be a matter of a single layer of resistant coating that lightning will deflect off of, but still, I did not spot that we could do that now. I guess I will have to find some way to make use of it...

P.S.
 Congratulations! You were actually right about something! Can you tell the difference?

[Chiefwaffles]

P.S.
 Congratulations! You were actually right about something! Can you tell the difference?

Unneeded explicitly personal attack is unneeded.

More complex crystal structures can be made, such as resistive and non-resistive crystal layering and more complicated shapes.

(Lower emphasis mine)

Oh, wow, I did not notice that. Huh... It... still doesn't actually work that way. I mean lightning that is, either coat yourself in a resistive layer, and I mean air-tight, especially at the bottom, so that any path through you also goes through highly resistive materials, or coat yourself relatively casually(An open cage is fine)in something highly conductive, so that There is always an easier path than the one through you, and even with their arrow-lightning it should still just be a matter of a single layer of resistant coating that lightning will deflect off of, but still, I did not spot that we could do that now. I guess I will have to find some way to make use of it...

I'm... pretty sure that's not how electricity works.

Electricity doesn't just take the path of least resistance. It takes all paths. It's just that some materials are resistive enough to make the amount of electricity passing through negligible.

The problem with steel is that it's not a great conductor, and heats up by very large amounts when hit by lightning. The reason why Crystal helps against lightning, even before we created resistive Crystal, is that it's a very good conductor of electricity and doesn't heat up when electricity passes through this.
The problem, however, was that electricity could pass through the Crystal into bits that don't react well with electricity. This is how Moskurg was hitting our Crystalclads with lightning - our engines then (and now, to a much lesser degree) were made out of steel. So they could destroy our engines. With Personal Armor, the electricity just went into the human. And humans aren't particularly great when dealing with extreme amounts of electricity.

And no, making super conductive crystal wouldn't work either. Humans are actually pretty conductive. You know how capacitive touch screens work? The human body conducts electricity, and the effect this makes upon touching the screen can be measured.
But anyways. Humans are conductive. More-so than many things, like the ground. So electricity would largely pass through conductive crystal to the body instead of the ground because of differences in resistances. And large amounts of electricity, again, doesn't mesh well with humans.

When we created Resistive Crystal, we also made lightning rods to work with it. The lightning would go through the steel into the ground as the steel is much conductive than Resistive Crystal. The problem was that the lightning rod, being made out of steel, didn't survive multiple strikes.

But Moskurg countered this by allowing their lightning to be precise enough to hit the person, not the lightning rod. So the lightning is forced through the Resistive Crystal, creating extreme amounts of heat. But this ability is clearly superficial - they can just choose the path lightning takes through the air.


And now we get to Resistive+Non-Resistive layering. By layering like this we create two paths in say, a person in layered combat armor, for lightning. To get to the person, the electricity would have to pass through the very non-conductive Resistive Crystal. Or, to get to the ground, electricity would have to pass through the very conductive Non-Resistive Crystal.
So the extreme majority of the electricity will get grounded with no other effects, and a negligible amount of electricity will go through the resistive crystal.

I would also like to point out that the lightning rod system, which worked (until it was explicitly hard countered), is just a cruder version of this. And no, their counter to lightning rods will not work against layered R/N-R Crystal. Observe the combat phase where Moskurg introduced their counter:

Titled "Heretics Fallacy", this frightening spell allows user to exert greater control over where and how lightning strikes.  They can't force it to perform impossible tasks, but they can encourage it to flow through an Arstotzkan soldier rather than down a lightning rod.

"They can't force it to perform impossible tasks" means essentially that they can path the lightning through the air to the armor. But to counter resistive crystal layering, they'd have to fundamentally break some very fundamental laws of how electricity works. Way more-so than they currently are.


TL;DR: Electricity largely goes through the path of least resistance. When a human is in conductive armor, electricity will largely go through the human instead of the ground. When the human is covered by resistive crystal, electricity will largely go through the ground instead of through the human.

[Andres]

Revision: Magegem Capacity Upgrade

Same thing as before: increase magegem capacity up by one level. It's an incremental improvement, it's an improvement we've done before, and we have the Crystalworks Mk. 2, so this should be pretty easy to do.

Revision: Blastshell Modularity

Our current blastshells come in E+, R+, and ER+ forms. Each of them use AA magegems to achieve their effects, which are all equivalent to one PSF. Once magegems get their capacities increased, they will use AAA magegems to achieve their effects. This revision aims to allow them to use the availability of different kinds of magegems to have additional effect.

We will now go forward with the assumption that magegems have had their capacity increase upgrade.

Here are examples of what this revision will do:
E+ blastshell has the explosive power of a PSF using AAA magegems.
After the revision, we can make E++ blastshells which use AA magegems, giving them a bigger boom in exchange for going one Expense level up.
After the revision, we can also make E+++ blastshells which use A magegems which have an even bigger boom than AA magegems.
This is not limited to explosive power. After the revision, R++ and R+++ can also be made to give them longer range. Not only that, but different combinations can be made, such as E+R++ or E++R+.

To make it easier to write down the capabilities of these shells, a new naming scheme will be brought into effect. Pluses will be replaced with numbers. For example, E+ shells will now be called E1 shells, E++ shells are now E2 shells, E++R+ shells are E2R1 shells, etc.

With the Crystalworks 2.0 lowering shell costs by 1 Expense level, E2/R2/E1R1 shells will be Cheap and shells with a total number of 4 (such as E4 or E2R2) can be made at Very Expensive cost rather than National Effort cost.

Between Crystalworks Mk. 2 and our extensive experience with artillery, the Fireball spell, and circuits, this shouldn't be a very challenging revision at all.

0 HA1-b "Mundane":
0 Arstotzkan Equipment Update:
0 Aethergem Shells:
0 Academy Aethergems:
0 Temporary Wizards:
0 Weightite works:
0 Gemerators:
1 - Magegem Capacity Upgrade: Andres
1 - Blastshell Modularity: Andres

0 Save the credit:

These two revisions will be very useful to us. Together, it would completely counter the effect of their range-dampening magic, giving us complete artillery dominance once more. Because of the increased firepower the revision also gives us, said artillery dominance would be utterly devastating, enough to defeat anything they throw at us next turn and then some.

Glory to Arstotzka.

EDIT: What would make this artillery even MORE devastating is that thanks to aethergems, we can have more apprentices crewing more artillery rather than charging magegems. Seriously, we have the opportunity to do a shit ton of damage here.

[Chiefwaffles]

We should really be doing the revisions one-by-one. Evicted's asked us not to do them both at the same time before and it's generally just annoying to many people involved.
Like, seriously. Please.

0 - HA1-b "Mundane":
1 - Arstotzkan Equipment Update: Chiefwaffles
0 - Aethergem Shells:
0 - Academy Aethergems:
0 - Temporary Wizards:
0 - Weightite works:
0 - Gemerators:
1 - Magegem Capacity Upgrade: Andres
1 - Blastshell Modularity: Andres

0 Save the credit: