How would magic interact with late TL5 naval warfare? & Campaign idea

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Originally Posted by Rupert

Bear in mind that, assuming a mage capable of making a golem is merely Comfortable, each energy point costs $100 - and that's using the very generous assumptions in Magic - that mages won't be charing a premium for having to work continuously without days off for six months at a stretch (fewer with a circle, but this increases the chances of someone falling ill and delaying the project), or of there being delays. On the other hand, even if stokers are paid Struggling wages the wages alone will pay for it in only four years.

A few things though - they obey the order of their creators and those that their creator tells them to obey. So, how many layers of delegation of command authority will that allow? Is it just the creator and those directly assigned command authority, or can the creator say "Follow the orders of this person, and anyone they order you to obey", and if so, can those people also say that?

Another thing is that it's explicit that only the creator can heal a golem, so if they break it might be quite difficult or impossible to get them repaired (this is one good reason to have circles of mages make them).

Hmmm, interesting. I didn't realize golems were quite that cheap and efficient to create. It seems that if there's not some limit imposed on them, they would pretty much replace ALL manual laborers, not just ship crews. So, if you are going to have them doing most of the work on ships, you'll have to say it's a setting element that they have to do most of the work in general.

And if you don't want that - either just make creating them impossible, or reduce their intelligence (maybe to IQ 5), or put some arbitrary limit on them. Maybe say the enchantments maintaining them can't be made permanent and need to be maintained at a cost of 10 FP per day, or something. So you could make limited use of them in industry or military roles but filling whole factories, mines, etc. with them would be non-viable.