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[Chiefwaffles]

The Brand New Chiefwaffles 4-Year Plan of 931!
YEAR 931
1.) Design: Counter to Lucky Strike - Preferably a shell to maximize on current potential. The counter won't be at full effectiveness immediately due to the small amount of extreme-range artillery, but that will be remedied soon.
2.) Revision: Lighter steam engines/Cheaper fog-o-wars/Crystal reinforcement/Sea-based revisions - We need to start winning at sea. We're so close. The anti-magic shells will help, but a revision needs to be done to go the full stretch. Lighter steam engines means our fog-o-wars won't sink after a single hit and further improves our steam engines for general use. Cheaper fog-o-wars is self explanatory - they're superior ships to the rest of our fleet and deploying them en masse would be a huge help, although the sinking remains a problem. Crystal reinforcement, like the lighter steam engine, paves the way for the Crystalclad, and makes all of our ships/our fog-o-wars much better defended against fire and general enemy fire.
YEAR 932
3.) Design: New artillery (AS-HC3/FA1/HA1) - Even with Lucky Strike gone, we'd still be disadvantaged in artillery battles - most of our artillery is outranged, and while we have better rate of fire(?) and accuracy w/o their lucky strike, range is the most important factor. We also can't use the AM/Heretic shell to full effectiveness as our HA1's are significantly hurt as they roll into range and we just don't have enough HA1-E's.
4.) Revision: - As designs tend to have problems and more things will need countering, this revision should just be used for general bug fixing/further countering the enemy. Maybe one of the revisions listed in #2.
YEAR 933
5.) Design: Crystalclad. This will cement Arstotzkan dominance at sea. Ideally, the #2 revision will at least allow us to hold our ground at sea if not start pushing them back, but this will actually ensure that we can start winning. It has a greatly improved armament, greatly improved armor, will have greatly increased agility, and general integrity. I'm also certain the penalties will be almost nonexistent in designing this due to I
6.) Revision: Crystalclad Fixing - Chances are the Crystalclad will have a bug and this revision should be used to fix it. Otherwise, it should be used for reducing the Crystalclad's expense or anchored crystal.
YEAR 934
7.) Design: AS-DF1 "Gallant" Crystal Barrier - It starts to get iffy here since at this point we really have no clue what we'll need in 934, but the Gallant is still a design I really like.
8.) Revision: Anchored crystal - We seriously need to make crystal usable again. All we need is one revision to make it anchored. This can go up if the lower-priority revisions end up having nothing else to do. But otherwise, this would make sure the Crystalclad doesn't suddenly have melting armor, we could use the superior crystal weapons again, and crystal-based technology will become viable again.

And of course this is just a vague plan of what I'm going to be pushing. I know it's subject to spying by people in Moskurg but plans change and I most certainly can't get much of this stuff supported, but I still like posting things like this.

[RAM]

How large are our ships?

[Chiefwaffles]

They're "longships" so I would assume:

(Random picture of longship got off an image search)

The description says they carry large amounts of troops as well. For the crystalclads I'm thinking something more similar to ironclads, which I believe were usually equivalent in size to 1 deck of a frigate or ship-of-the-line in the 19th century. Or any size, really, as long as it can reliably fit a large number of cannons and enough steam engines to make it fast without sacrificing integrity.

[RAM]

My plan is for a 40 metre long flagship... Give Myark something awesome to do... I don't know if that would be crazy-huge, which I probably want but could be a risk, or boring, which is possible...

[Andres]

Eh, its as good of a idea as any.

It's not as good as mine. It's a dead end technology, or close to it. Furthermore, it is a more complex design and thus more likely to fail, and it will be of strictly limited use due to the rarity of our better cannons, which my design aims to fix.

Glory to Arstotzka.

[evictedSaint]

It seens like the SO1-AM "Equalizer" is the winning vote.  Is that correct?

[10ebbor10]

That does appear to be the case, yes.

[evictedSaint]

Design: SO1-AM "Equalizer" [2-1+1, 2-1, 1]

This turned out to be a lot tougher than we thought.

The good news is that it is possible, just...difficult.  And we were required to make some concessions in the design.

Rather than a single, massive anti-magic charm, we've instead crafted an ordinary cannon shell that has multiple anti-magic charms encrusted throughout it.  Because using charms that explode has invariable destroyed every cannon we've attempted this with (likely due to the PSF cast in the steam chamber) we've been forced instead to use our more up-to-date charms that sadly don't exploded into lethal shrapnel.  They still have a chance to break when being fired out of a cannon though, and this occassionally causes it to jam and explode violently.

However, if enough of the gems survive and the cannon doesn't explode, the shell will prevent any magic from being cast near where it lands.  Surprisingly, our researchers note that when the charms overlap the volume of the anti-magic field is preserved.  Having multiple charms in the same area negates magic in a larger area, although continuing to add charms has diminishing returns with respect to range.

Due to the number of charms and extra effort to craft each shell for each specific cannon, these shells are terribly expensive and we can only make enough to outfit one cannon per year.  National Effort.

[andrea]

holy bad rolls... no way we could have gotten anything with this.

[Andres]

No revision could make that design work. If we want to try again we need to do so with a full design.

Make Frost Towers cheaper. This will double the amount of Frost Towers we get, letting us double the amount of cold we're currently producing with them. This will kill all Moskurg life on the Plains. Since the current amount of Frost Towers are sufficient in the Mountains, we can move the new surplus to the Jungle, which may be enough to kill them all.

It doesn't do anything with our artillery and it doesn't help us at sea, but the Moskurgs are very close to capturing both the Plains and the Jungle. If we can keep our hold on them we will have a resource advantage. ((Note: We beat Moskurg in the last game on such an advantage.))

1 - Cheaper Frost Towers: Andres

Glory to Arstotzka.

[Roboson]

Reverse fireball
Revise our fireball to run in reverse, thus instead of creating flames, it destroys them.

[10ebbor10]

Reverse fireball
Revise our fireball to run in reverse, thus instead of creating flames, it destroys them.

We have these giant, massive frost towers.

Why not use those as basis of a spell, instead of incurring the dreaded (-2 new technology) penalty.

[10ebbor10]

Yeez, the RNG does appear to hate us. Let us hope that he hates Moskurg just as much.

Anyway, we need something we can use at Sea, lest Moskurg drives us out of ours Seas entirely.

Revision

Frost Condenser : The idea has been iterated upon several times, but this time, we're certain it will work. Using spells borrowed from our tower of Frost, including(most importantly, the climate control system), we have this time developed a cooling system that can efficiently, cheaply and effortlessly cool down the steam used in our engines without disaster. This has many benefits :

- 1) Our current, primitive condensators can only cool stuff to the temperature of it's environment, or much above that. Worse, if the environment freezes, the engine may threaten to seize. Our climate controlled cooling solution can always reach the optimum temperature, ensuring optimal power in all situations.

- 2) Rapid cooling causes steam to shrink dramatically, creating a far lower pressure. Combined with the fact that no more power needs to be wasted to push water through the cooling system, this increases our power significantly.

-3) The Frost Condensor is a tiny, tiny thing, unlike the large metal pipe and frame constructions that were used previously. This lowers metal costs and reduces weight massively.

Flame Turbine :  One day one of our apprentices asked a question that stunned the assembly. After having been punished for insulting the intelligence of his superiors, his question took the Academy by storm. "Why do we use water in the first place?" It turns out, this was a question none could answer, for there was no real good reason. The result in a steam engine, but without steam.

The engine has been opened at one. Here, one or more apprentices throw our modified fireball spells into the machine (we can throw fireballs, so we can push them into the machine). The rapidly heating air expands enormously (which is what normally cause the fireball to explode) pushing the turbine faster and faster. Finally, the remainder of the flame bursts out of the exhaust stack. Some have suggested using this flame to power a conventional steam engine, but that is not within our powers at present.

Order

Operation: Exhaustion

Remind our anti-mage forces that they are anti-mage forces. Use them as a quick flanking force to attack enemy artillery. They're to harras the enemy with fireballs (cheap, so our apprentices can do it while they need a real wizard to counter), anti-magic arrows(prepared, while they need a wizard to counter) and while carrying weapons painted to look like crystal from a distance (our cost : nothing, theirs : experienced mages).

I'm pretty certain we have more mages than them. If we force Moskurg to meet us mage for mage, they will be unable to support their forces, and said forces will crumble.

Revisions :
1 Magic Condensor : 10ebbor10
1 - Cheaper Frost Towers: Andres

Orders :
1 Operation Exhaustion : 10ebbor10

Both of these are variants on the steam engine. The first is simple, changing our steam engine to use a proper condensor.

The second is the result of me realizing that we actually developed turbines. That means we already got the most important part of a gas turbine done. The other parts are the compressor (not needed because we can throw fireballs)  and the exhaust, which solves itself.

In theory, it should be feasible as a revision, though it may run into issues such as overheating, low efficiency and exhaust setting stuff on fire. If it works however, we have an extremely light (water is heavy), rapid and powerfull engine.

[RAM]

Revision: Summon water
Summons a highly condensed fog. This upgrades our steam-magic to work more intensely thus allowing us to reduce their size. It also improves hygiene by granting a source of reliably clean water, which helps with medicine. Finally, it clearly doesn't extinguish the enemy flames, but may allow their dilution, allowing it to be minimised on something important at the cost of spreading it out a bit, it also offers a chance to temporarily soak an object, which does make it last a little longer against the enemy flames, granting more time to take off an item of apparel or such. Finally finally, because it is temporary water, it is remarkably good at drying things. Soak them in this stuff and then when the duration expires, it will vanish, having replaced the majority of the previous moisture, which helps with dry laundry, which in turn has additional health and morale benefits. We have also produced a standardised warning sign to indicate the presence of temporary water, to discourage the drinking of such.

I realise that I am asking a lot here, but it is water, water is insanely useful. Also, there is some risk that bad things might happen if your drink temporary water.

Revision: Dogwizard Staves
By magically infusing a dogwood seed with magically polarised quartz, we have allowed it to achieve a small mimicry of the antimagic charms' effect of absorbing magic. The mutant trees can then feed themselves on magic to hasten their growth. In essence, this converts our dogwood staves into dogwizard staves, which can maintain their longevity by metabolising magic. A side-effect of this is that they output their post-metabolised (pure)magic into a more stable form. We have attuned this waste magic such that it accumulates in a number of temporary shoots that grow out of the tip of the staff, which can be pulled off and planted, to rapidly grow most trees(notably not dogwizard trees, which require a quartz content, and the shoots do not yet materialise quartz) as they have gradually accumulated the power of a great many conventional tree-growth spells. the downside is that they continually feed on the magic of their wizard, who must make regular contact with the staves(most difficultly sleeping with them) and become sick if exposed to magical drain and can die if exposed to such for more than about a couple dozen minutes, due to not being able to metabolise in the complete absence of ambient magic but benefitting from a naturally slow metabolism. Overall, the combination of a permanent tree-growth staff combined with a saved-up quick-grow function should outweigh the difficulties. We are also looking into the possibility of adding gems to these staves to provide temporary power storage, to prevent the difficulties associated with brief separation.

College of mathemagical manipulation, methods, and misuse.
We gather some of our brightest mathemagical minds, especially those with poor magical potential, in one place. Ostensibly, this is to train our academy students to learn the basic principals of the ever more necessary field of mathemagics, thus keeping pace with complexity issues, but it serves a more direct purpose. We have developed an extremely focused version of the antimagic charm, by embedding it into the base of a large quartz gem with directed magical channels focused into a pointed end tapered down by a master gem-smith. This has no known battle0field purpose, as it is a very large and fragile apparatus for an overall weaker antimagic charm, but in experimentation this allows the systematic disabling of specific components of a spell or magical item. This allows our mathemagicians to tease apart our designs(enemy designs tend to be impossible due to not being reproducible) and mathemagically model each aspect of them.
The effect of this is to grant a bonus to reverse-engineering existing magic. Such as tweaking an antimagic charm to only effect a single wave-length of magic, or isolating exactly what makes our fire-wasps alive.

The dice have been properly hating on us. I feel that it is too meta to be possible, from a game-balance perspective, but could the keggers be messing with our rolls?

Revisions :
1 - (Andres)Cheaper Frost Towers: Andres
0 - (Roboson)Reverse fireball:
1 - (10ebbor10)Magic Condensor : 10ebbor10
0 - (RAM)Summon water:
0 - (RAM)Dogwizard Staves:
0 - (RAM)College of mathemagical manipulation, methods, and misuse:
Orders :
1 Operation Exhaustion : 10ebbor10

[10ebbor10]

The dice have been properly hating on us. I feel that it is too meta to be possible, from a game-balance perspective, but could the keggers be messing with our rolls?

Would be way too unbalancing. Highly doubt the GM would allow it.