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[andrea]

shame on you, shame.

but it happens to all of us. To me, at any rate.

any ETA?

[Chiefwaffles]

Idea:
Far Future Idea: HAx-L "Determinator"
Hybrid Artillery x - Living "Determinator"
The hybrid artillery isn't a game changer, but we can make it one.
Using the same ideas expressed in proposals by others, we can attempt to imbue a gem or crystal with life. But what if we did this with a weapon?
Behold, the HAx-L. An autonomous artillery piece. The imbued intelligence is able to use magical "motors", as our mathemagicians call them, to autonomously move the artillery. The modified PSF spell is made to be a part of the design and therefore activate-able by the intelligence. Linking the intelligence with spells we would use for sighting enemies at the time of the design allows it to be aware of the battlefield.
Perhaps the ultimate weapon.


For consideration if we progress that much into RAM's (I think) crystal life stuff.

[evictedSaint]

shame on you, shame.

but it happens to all of us. To me, at any rate.

any ETA?

In ~5 hours.  I could write it up on my phone, but I've tried that a few phases ago and it's too cumbersome.

[Andres]

For a next design, I'm thinking perhaps we should move into the next generation of cannon.

The next design is ultimately not a major one. It is two fixes and only one true advancement. The first fix is making the cannon Expensive instead of Very Expensive. The second fix is sanding away the reliability issues. The advancement is to remove the need for apprentices.

There are two ways I can see the advancement going. The first way is some kind of rune that passively draws in magical energy from the air to charge a PSF. The operator of the cannon then merely has to activate the rune - possibly by touch - and the cannon will fire. This will presumably have a lower rate of fire than apprentice cannons.
The second way is to contain the PSF spell in a crystal, which upon destruction releases the spell. This will either keep or exceed our current rate of fire, but will have an increased Ore cost.

 Glory to Arstotzka.

[FallacyofUrist]

As nice as that may be, we need to deal with bloody Lucky Strike.

Spoiler: Future ideas for dealing with that: (click to show/hide)

Anti-Magic Balloon: A manned hot-air balloon that floats over enemy artillery positions and projects an anti-magic field over them.

Anti-Magic Shells: A shell fired from one of our artillery. It explodes above the enemy position and turns into a bunch of anti-magic crystals that absorb spells within their radius... and then explode.

Dissipation Shield: We've been banishing heat into the aether for some time(Towers of Frost). Why not do the same with solid things, like, say, projectiles?
((Explanation: Where does the absorbed heat go? Not somewhere else, just... nowhere. Basically disintegration. Possibly leads to teleportation.))

Frost Shield: Alternatively, flash freeze incoming projectiles to shatter them instantly and make their greek fire useless.

Thoughts?

[Roboson]

Yeah. This is all just possibilities to go with next design phase. Mostly it's just that I like typing out the designs.

EDIT: And I wouldn't be surprised if they don't actually necessarily have gods and still use a religious power. That's a thing in fantasy, no? It could be a belief in gods that grants magic, not the gods themselves.
Maybe. This is just a guess on a guess

This was sort of the premise I was operating on. They definitely seem to have religious elements, whether it's their crazy hero, their spellbook, or that one time their mages spoke in tongues, something strange is going on. Religion is the best explanation for that. It may also explain why their antimagic doesn't seem to effect their mages. So an anti-divination (not necessarily anti-religious, but definitely covered within the divination category) jammer barrage should really muck up their magic. They're starting spells are divination, and it's quite likely they've based their other spells on that school as well. So it's not a total gamble.

Here's how I see it:
Lucky strike = divination for sure
Mind reading = divination for sure
Detect ambush = divination for sure

We can definitely counter these with an anti-divination jammer.

Anti-magic = possible divination
Their spell that allows the to coordinate extremely well (remember this one from forever ago?) = possible divination.
Sleep spell = possible, but unlikely.

These are all bonus things we may counter by going up against their starting school.


Wind = unlikely divination
Lightning = possible, but we've already countered that
Ballistas with Greek fire = if the jammer stops lucky strike, then those suddenly suck.

These are the other things they have that I remember off the top of my head. An anti-divination jammer will likely only have secondary effects on these.


All and all, it's a good gamble. It has the potential to counter their three starting spells (one of which is the bane of our existence) and has the added bonus of messing with their other spells. I'd say that's worth a design phase.

[FallacyofUrist]

That's... I like that. I'll second that once you put it up. They're going to be so confused if we guessed right...

[Chiefwaffles]

So far I'm thinking a shell design countering magic/divination/religion is the best idea. I'm fairly confident that the CO1-AM (when I actually propose it it'll be renamed to SO1-AM) can be done in a revision. It's basically just revising the anti-magic bomb to fit into a shell and leave still-active Anti-magic fragments carrpetting he area. The SO1-AD or something similar I'm not as sure about. Maybe design, maybe revision. I don't think it'd be that worth it as a design. A better route would be making the CO1-AM and revising it at some point to counter specifically divination or religion or whatever.

Again though, I still really want to go with the HA1. If we get okay rolls then we can use our revision to make the CO1-AM.
When I actually submit the HA1 I want to consider adding some of Andres' suggestions. Probably not since I want to keep the complexity low-enough for a good shot at Expensive levels.

[Chiefwaffles]

Oh yeah, and now the future I also definitely think we should look into the living crystal stuff RAM suggested. It opens up a ton of possibilities for cool useful stuff.

[Roboson]

I'm pretty sure the SO1-AD jamming shells would be a design. It's a fairly big change from the anti-magic charms we equip our thanes with.

[RAM]

For a next design, I'm thinking perhaps we should move into the next generation of cannon.

The next design is ultimately not a major one. It is two fixes and only one true advancement. The first fix is making the cannon Expensive instead of Very Expensive. The second fix is sanding away the reliability issues. The advancement is to remove the need for apprentices.

There are two ways I can see the advancement going. The first way is some kind of rune that passively draws in magical energy from the air to charge a PSF. The operator of the cannon then merely has to activate the rune - possibly by touch - and the cannon will fire. This will presumably have a lower rate of fire than apprentice cannons.
The second way is to contain the PSF spell in a crystal, which upon destruction releases the spell. This will either keep or exceed our current rate of fire, but will have an increased Ore cost.

 Glory to Arstotzka.

We have gems that can be a sort of symbiosis of some sort with crystal axes that allow the axe to be permanent so long as a wizard stops by and renews the spell. I exect that we could do the same thing with a firewall, although it is permanent temperature magic instead of permanent conjuration magic. And there is the further problem that the fireball that launches it is not permanent, it is activated. Having the apprentice only need to fire the cannon might allow them to operate several while the crew reloads them, but it would not negate the problem. If we could extend the gem-fed magic technology into a wand-like contraption and have a mundane activation, or perhaps a miniscule-magic activation combined with a revision to the academy to teach our apprentices to teach our troops in order to give them "You can't magic on your own, but this is how to use trace-magic to activate a pre-charged magic device" abilities then a system derived from a wand might be able to relegate our apprentices to a role akin to batteries ammunition-haulers with a lot more free time... We might even be able to construct magic-storage gems at the home-front that can be used to recharge particularly advanced cannons that don't even need any subtlety when being recharged.

[andrea]

If things go bad, maybe we can turn on the nuclear option, bring eternal polar winter over the entire island, and make our people survive with fire and plant magic.

[OceanSoul]

Why not a editing anti-magic into magical inversion for their divination? Lucky strike would become unlucky, Mind Reading would reveal what someone doesn't know (or make the caster forget what the target knows), and detect ambush would further conceal ambushes. There are some problems in that, notably that they can make their spells that normally do the opposite to counteract it, or other tricky ways (like finding areas with extra concealment to detect our ambushes), and there would still be making sure it's directed at the enemy without affecting other spell casters on the front line, and who knows how it might effect magical objects, like crystal spears or our Towers of Frost.
Then again, magical inversion could be used to make opposites to our own spells. Those Mushkurgs can't handle the cold, so how about some Iceballs? Add in a little crystal magic, and we can send shrapnel en masse to our front lines. Our concealing fog could become a Revealing Fog...or it could dispel fog. And, for your information, clouds are essentially high bundles of fog, so we may have some anti-weather magic there

We could also tune our Antimagic to divination specifically. Speaking, what if there was a way to make an anti magic crystal absorb a spell, instead of negating it? If we did this, we may be able to unleash those spells back on the enemy, or if we're lucky, reverse-engineer them to learn how to cast them for ourselves.

[Chiefwaffles]

Well, currently our charms do work by absorbing their magic. But it's less "spell" and more just "energy" that it absorbs.

The problem with revisions to our charms is that we can't make the revision useful in just one turn. Sure, we could make them Anti-divination charms but they still have short ranges and are expensive. Increasing their range isn't useful as it'd then probably be medium range which doesn't help if they're killed before getting to medium range because of lucky strike.

Hence the shells. They're easy delivery decides to the enemy lines. We don't have to worry nearly as much about range when we can bring them to the enemy with the range of our artillery.

My current ideal plan of action:
1. Develop HA1. This should hopefully be the culmination of all our artillery efforts and could last us quite a while while we focus on other things. Without doubt a design.
2. Recuse SO1-AM. While the AD variant is definitely a design, the AM variant, like I've said before, is more so a revision of the anti-magic bomb. Put it in shell form (extremely easy) then make it shatter in still-active shrapnel once it hits a magic field and is primed by launch. This part is the actual revision.

With no failed rolls (who am I kidding) well have the dominant artillery and he best weapon in our arsenal and a shell to capitalize on that weapon and counter the enemy lucky strike and many other spells. Then later we can revise the AM to make an AD variant with ease.

Note to self: Include priming mechanism in SO1-AM variant.

[RAM]

An inversion-charm might be possible if, instead of converting magic into sound, it converted it into inverted magic. The problem is that the magic would mix with the inverse magic. And the idea that inverse magic can even exists. You culd try to tweak it so that it only absorbs normal magic, and not opposed-magic(opmagic, or O.P.M....)? Antimagic currently works a bit like a kettle, in a tub of water, with open sides... Water gets pulled in by the boilerplate, pushed up into the whistle, and make/becomes sound. If we replaced the whistle with an ice-cube maker, the had a pump with a slitted rounded intake so that ice-cubes couldn't easily block it, then the water would be sucked-up and thrown out as ice-cubes, and the tub would go from water-filled, where you can float and swim, to ice-cube filled, where you will tend to sink due to density but that doesn't happen because its nature went from mostly-permeable to mostly impermeable for walking instead of swimming...

I do not think that it is impossible for opmagic to work, but attuning the output into opmagic, and assuming that opmagic is a state that can exist, amd preventing the thing from just absorbing opmagic and converting it into normal magic or lovecraftian magic, are both difficulties.