We can probably get mages to absorb energy from aethergems and put it into magems with an order, but I would rather not risk it, exploding wizards are bad. So I am against the upgrades to magems and aethergems while we do not actually have a means of getting power from one to the other. We could try shrinking the aethergems to fit in the magem sockets, but getting the same capacity seems unlikely, so it may not produce a large enough burst of power for a single use in some of our more power-hungry devices. So, again, seems like a bad idea. This, of course, also applies to the gemerator revision, but at least that focuses the upgrade on where we really need it for future designs.
The recharging pack gets us the armour we need for our powder rooms and gets power from the generators into devices, so it is a good idea if we want to salvage the design. I mean, we could have done gemerators and the charging circuit ought to have been simple enough to just be a piece of the design, getting power to flow from a source to a destination is sort of what circuits do, and thus actually had a working design, but the recharging pack gets us a nice full-revision's worth of armoured recharging-station bliss all ready for standardised field deployment rather than just some crude crystal platform with bare circuitry or something.
Ugh, really? The hard counter thing again?
Protector is a good example of a hard-counter to artillery that failed. It is too slow to catch the artillery so it just plods along however long it takes to break down. Breaking down isn't what ruins them, plenty of them don't break down, they just don't achieve their role of getting things to the battlefield because much of the battlefield moves faster than they do.
Crystal layering is an example of a hard-counter to lightning that may or may not work. If the idea of "their lightning spells, which they have spent many designs on, suddenly have no effect on any of the forces that we send into its influence" is not a hard counter than I don't know what is.
Antimagic charms are a hard-counter to mind-reading that was very expensive but had a lot of potential. It worked, it still works.
Antimagic fields are a hard-counter to then entire school of conjuration that works just fine so long as they don't need magic to avoid terminal velocity. We managed to counter it with a full design, and only for a single field of conjuration. Webs, caltrops, wasps, and fog are all still basically useless against their ground forces. And also useless against their air forces too, which reflects that their air forces are a hard counter to all our hand-to-hand weapons. Basically everything short ranged, and our contact-explosives.
Their artillery was a hard-counter to our entire army. We didn't recover from that. Protectors are an attempt, but are basically insignificant. More to the point, they would be more than a single revision spent countering the enemy's hard counter. Does anyone else actually remember what happened when artillery first appeared? They sent enough spears into our ranks to half our effective numbers. I still kind of suspect that they invented flechette cluster munitions along with the design. We never broke that hard-counter, we just matched it with some theoretical stuff we had been working on.
Adamantine is a hard counter to fireballs and frost towers. It is VERY difficult to describe frost towers and fireballs as not being worth it. How, precisely, are we to counter adamantine's thermal immunity with a revision? If it has any chance of working I will probably vote for it. Now, normally that would be a pretty big "if" but I have seen the G.M. pull some amazing backflips in order to get our stuff to work regardless of how messed up the proposal is, so I am finally willing to ease up a little on complete nonsense that remains nonsensical in the context of magic. I will just accept that the design is about intent, rather than method. Even though coming up with magical methods seems like more fun and ought to get us bonuses...
Hard counters worked. They required more than a revision to annul, and can have loads of side-benefits that make them worth it even if the counter is countered. We have a long history of being messed up by hard counters and even used a few, and are actively pursuing more. "hard counters don't work" is not a valid statement and is not held by any of the people advocating it. "Hard counters are not fun" may well be true, but doesn't seem to have much traction...
living crystal wall or portable crystal fabricators would be the best way to go, in my opinion.
Can I count on your vote? I suppose it would need to be updated a bit, maybe...
Communual spell: The living wall!
Blah blah blah: we mathemagically analyse fire wasp spell and extract the "life" and add it to a crystal wall.
Make attuned gems, let's say, emeralds, they all focus on the same spell and store magic for it.
Lots of wizards wielding gems, all likewise attuned, can all contribute to the same spell.
The spell is alive, it is a wall, it is crystal. 10 centimetres of steel should stop anything they care to throw at us, and the wall is alive, it gets thicker if it needs to and thinner if it can to save energy.
The wall is alive, it is perfectly capable of analysing attempts to dispel it and fighting against it as only a being formed of living and aware magic can. If it loses the fight, it just moulds itself around the antimagic and covers other places, or protects against attacks from above, or even grabs its own casters and places them out of the antimagic field.
Old magic: Summon living thing, channel a spell through a gem, mass-crystal summoning(caltrops and a wall that can 'move' by destroying itself at one point and creating itself at another sol ong as it maintains a single mass are pretty similar, but seriously, we have SO MUCH crystal expertise it isn't even sad anymore.).
New magic: Multiple people collaborating on one spell, dynamic crystal forms, maybe, not rally though, that stuff is old..., living 'magic': we have the magic wasps, which are alive, and made out of magic, but, I guess this is another step into meta so give that some acknowledgement I suppose...
If it works we can use if for ship armour.
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Topic: Wands Race - [Arstotzka] {COMPLETED} (Read 393905 times)