The only task that I have managed to complete in the last week has been to add the cannons to the ship. Even that has been more annoying than it was supposed to be.
The main problem with this has been getting used to the ship and its formations. The layout of the formations on this ship has been confusing me to no end. I am sure that my master has tried to simplify it, but the man has not done a very good job of it.
The first problem is that this ship was not meant to be an airship in the first place. It was meant to be a sledder, and while the design of both a sledder and an airship can be considered pretty similar. There are still fundamental differences in the design of these ships.
My master had modified the shape of his formations to accommodate this difference. Even the standard designs that he has used are completely different.
The next problem is that my master was the one who inscribed all of these formations. He did all of this on his own at that. Now, airships tend to have a pretty standard design. They have been created after millennia of research, after all. The runes tend to be fixed, and so do the spells that need to be inscribed.
The problem is that my master has his way of doing things, and that means his designs are a complete mess. (At least to anybody that is not my master.) The designs seem completely nonsensical to me. Things aren't where they are supposed to be, and even if they are, I am not able to tell easily. To put it in embarrassing terms, even the basic formations that my master makes are beyond me.
I think a good way of explaining it would be. If I were to construct a class nine formation, I would just inscribe ten runes to complete it. In my master's case, he would have almost a hundred such runes to do the same thing.
It is not like these runes are useless as well. (As is the case with inscriptions by most non-formation mages.) Each rune would have its purpose and its goal. Some might reduce the mana consumption by a fraction. Some might increase the effect of the formation by a few percent.
Well, all of this in brief means that my master's formations are very hard to understand. It is also very hard to mess with unless I want the entire thing to blow up in my face.
Just recognizing those formations and their purpose is taking me a lot of time. There is no way that I will be modifying these anytime soon.
The only reason that I have made any progress with this task is mainly due to the notes that he has left me on the topic. If that wasn't there, things would have been way harder. Thankfully, I have finally succeeded at the task of adding cannons to the ships.
To speak about those two cannons. The first is of the fire element and is a mid-range cannon. Fire cannons are the most economical cannons that you can have on a ship. Most of them pack a decent punch. That is especially true with this one. I am sure that I can wreck most ships with a single shot. Also, considering most airships are made of wood, there is the chance of fires spreading on the enemy ship. Most people don't tend to bother with the enemy ship when their ship is burning like wood at the campfire.
The second cannon of mine is of the light element. It is also a class seven formation. As is usual with this element, the range of the cannon is very high. The downside to this is that it has pretty average damage, even though it is a class seven formation.
I have managed to add these two cannons to the formations powering the ship. That means that I can now charge them up remotely and shoot them remotely. Now I won't be speaking about the formations that run this ship. That is a completely separate mess to speak about.
If I had not done this, then I would have had to go and power these cannons up individually. Let's leave the matter of shooting them. That would have certainly caused a mess since I need to pilot this ship as well. (And my master certainly would not like to pilot while I run around the ship setting off the cannons.)
Even now, it is not a perfect solution. Every shot of my cannon is going to be a risk. There is every chance that the cannons might delink with every shot. What can I say, my master creates complex formations. It is also not something that will work for more than a few cannons. To go beyond this, I will need specialised formations for this task.
Well, this is not as useless as I am making it sound. Getting in a couple of shots can make the difference between victory and defeat. Just having these cannons should intimidate most pirate ships into retreat. The important thing is that I have achieved this at the correct time. After all, we have entered into the soldar plains.
I guess I should explain why exactly the soldar plains are such a hot mess. Though every person on the hexmountain knows this bit of politics by heart. You could say our stomach depends on this after all. (Quite literally at that.)
Well, to speak about the soldar plains I will have to start with the hexmountain. The Hexmountain is the largest mountain on the continent and acts as our home base. That means what we have is an iron grip on one of the easiest places in the continent to defend. We have made full use of this as well by constructing one of the greatest fort chains on the hex mountain. All of this means one simple thing.
Our enemies can come and try to lay siege to the hexmountain for however long they want. I am not even sure if the enemy will be able to put even a dent in our lands by attacking us directly.
The mountain is also where most of our strength is concentrated. Almost nine-tenths of the buildings of the black mountain are present here. The remaining tenth tends to be outposts spread out across the continent. (Mostly for the scholars.) Their loss won't even be noticed by us. Therefore, our enemies have no real way to strike us until they manage to cripple the hexmountain.
The fact that the Hexmountain is such a mighty fort is the reason that the Soldar Plain is in such a chaotic state. You can say that the Soldar Plain is the breadbasket of the Hexmountain. This can be considered to be one of the only weaknesses of the hexmountain. When you can't destroy an enemy fort, the next best thing that you can do is to starve them.
The soldar plains are a valley surrounding the hexmountain. Firstly, the only thing that is of any real importance in the plains is their grains and their farms.
The only real consumer of grain that these people have is the hexmountain. I mean, they could sell it to the north and the south, but they would have to be able to transport it there first. That is pretty costly.
That quickly leads to a complication of positions as every faction here attacks everything in their sights. After all, the hexmountain will buy grain from the person with the cheapest price. Costs (and therefore price) tend to go up if a pirate were to enter your land and torch the grain that you have grown. Driving costs tend to be a good way of making sure your things get sold in this place.
Most do this through funding pirates (behind the scenes, of course.) Their job is to go into any other territory and do their banditry. That is why every pirate that is worth his salt always has people going for those grain ships. (It is also a good way to train their recruits, I have heard.)
Most pirates end up being financed by somebody or the other. All of this has led to a complex web of alliances and betrayals that make this place so chaotic. Nobody here knows who to trust in this place.
The guard corps does try to maintain order in this place. We hunt and destroy any of the pirates that cross the line. Stealing grain is one thing, but killing villages for the heck of it is not. The problem is that the guard corps cannot take too much action, or things could get really bad for us.
To explain it, we need the people of the plains to be divided and united at the same time, in a nutshell. The hexmountain cannot have a single power rule over the plains. That would give them too much power over the hexmountain. If all these guys were to suddenly decide that they did not need to sell us their food, a majority of us would starve.
Well, maybe not starve, but it will certainly be a hit on our coffers. After all, it would be quite costly to transport food from the north or the south to our location. (which means that we are dependent on each other.) Whatever happens, we cannot let the Soldar Plains unite under a single man.
At the same time, we cannot allow too many people to rule over the plains. If that were to occur, they would be too busy fighting each other for the farmers to do their work properly. The result of that will also be equivalent to the previous case. We therefore need to maintain a balance. Destroy any faction that looks like it will be able to unite these people. Promote any faction that will cause more discord.
That is why the guard corps has to be very careful in how we act here. We make use of a mixture of negotiations, threats, and alliances to keep the plains stable. We also cannot do this in a heavy-handed manner, or we might just end up uniting the plains against us.
All of this is further complicated by the fact that all of our enemies are also interfering with this place.
Some of our enemies tend to fund a single group to make them achieve domination over the entire place. Some tend to fund them all so that they fight each other. Their goal is to devolve the place into chaos. Most tend to do a mixture of this, trying to achieve either.
Even now, we have identified nine powers that rule the soldar plains. Of them, we are sure that at least seven powers are related to outside powers in some way or another. Not that we are going to tell them about knowing that, though. The devil you know is better than the demon you don't.
If we were serious, just the guard corps would not be enough to manage this complicated mess. The scholars are there in the background assisting them. Not that the scholars will ever admit to this, though. This place is just too chaotic for them to learn anything. All I can say is that even they struggle to figure this place out.
Otherwise, this place would not hang over our necks like an executioner's blade. All in all, this place is a proper mess. One that I need to go through with a precious ship. (Especially one that looks precious.)