As I expect he will spend a lot of time there, my magus would like a larger, custom-designed lab. Even if that comes at the cost of installing it himself out of a box. Basically, he'd like twice the usual floor space (Size +3). How would we go about arranging that?
It also occurs to me that given one of our sources of income is a sheep herd, having a percamenarius to make vellum might not be a bad idea.
And would it be unreasonable to hire a silversmith or the like to try and reduce laboratory expenditures? Just dropping one summa would allow us to hire several craftsmen and significantly reduce our yearly costs.
We also might want to take a point or two from that 3 points we had in vis stocks and give ourselves a slight store of money, since we're likely to need money as we start things up.
Alexander can easily do size +3, depending on whether you want yours enchanted or not by craft magic it might not even take him any extra time.
At some point it will need to be decided what order the labs will be built in, and more importantly how will that be decided.
I was doing some calculations on Loyalty, and have some thoughts to share.
With two sources of income, we can afford to be a bit more generous with our covenfolk. I suggest that we pay them twice normal salary and offer a pension. This will cost an extra 32 pounds/year now, with a bit more as the pensions start coming due. But it's good for a whopping +30 to loyalty. Here are the numbers as I propose them:
We have 9 magi, one is a Redcap (not sure how he counts, but I think he counts as a magi with no Gift), one has a gentle Gift, and no one has a blatant Gift. As I understand it, that gives us a base loyalty of:
[2*(0) + 7*(-30) + 0*(-105)]/9 = [0 - 210 + 0]/9 = 210/9 = -24 (rounded up)
That's a base -2 Loyalty Score. Not good.
But, we have a turb captain (Gabriel) and a steward/chamberlain (Romanos), whose various skills give us a +21 Loyalty points. We also have a +1 living condition modifier to Aging (+10 Loyalty points). That brings us up to +7, which gives us a +1 Loyaty Score. That's not bad, especially for a new covenant. And we can expect to get a bonus over time as the covenfolk get used to us.
However, if we pay double wages (+20 Loyalty points) and offer a pension (+10 Loyalty points), we get to +37 Loyalty points, which is a +3 Loyalty Score - much better.
So my thoughts are that we pay the 30-40 pounds a year to get a +2 to our Loyalty Score, since we can afford it. It's not necessary, since we'll have a +1 Loyalty Score even without bonus wages/pensions. But I think it'd be nice to have the added security of more loyal covenfolk. What do the rest of you think?
(FWIW, half-again normal salary would bring us to +27 Loyalty points at a cost of 16 pounds per year.)
Id love to see some extra loyal and happy little covvies...which is good enough for me.
I'd rather not go overboard by doubling the wages right from the start, although paying them a bit more (up to 50%) sounds good.
We'll need the extra income and it's better to build up reserves before adding to our expenditures. It's easier to raise wages if we see after a few years that we really can afford it (which would bring another boost to Loyalty), rather than risk having to reduce them because we can't meet our monetary obligations (that would be very bad for Loyalty).
Do we still have 9 magi? We recently discussed the fact that two of the players hadn't posted in a while. So I'm not sure how many we are at this time.
Maximilian thinks he can do a better job at enchanting his own lab than anyone else could (Proud flaw), so he will only want it good enough to get the Superior Construction lab virtue. And sufficient space for a Size +3 lab. 
BTW, lab improvements are quite efficient at sucking out excess income. A lab with +5 Upkeep costs 15 pounds per year just to keep it running 2 seasons per year. As opposed to a normal lab, which costs only 1 pound per year. And you can be sure that Maximilian plans on improving his lab. :mrgreen:
As for the order in which we will want the labs built, I think this should be based on need. Obviously, younger magi will spend most of their time reading books at first, so they might not need labs as much. Older magi will need their labs sooner. So will lab rats (including my Verditius).
We may consider a shared lab initially, which could be used by anyone who doesn't have his own built and installed yet. After that, the shared lab could be used for visitors. Installing the shared lab might count as covenant service.
Which leads me to another subject, which may deserve its own topic: The covenant's Charter.
That's an excellent idea!
You also miscalculated- the autocrat is good for 24 loyalty points and the turb captain 9, for a total of 33 loyalty points. Zenobia has the blatant gift (If snape is still around), so our starting base loyalty is -27, total of 6 with the 2 specialists, for a final loyalty score of 1.
Now one house rule I have used in other games is that loyalty modifies annual wealth rolls from income sources- greater loyalty means more willingness to put in the extra effort to improve success. I would like to discuss if this is a rule others think should be used, either for both sources of income, for one or neither.
Does the autocrat count as both a steward and a chamberlain? I did my numbers assuming he had to pick one.
I think Zenobia is gone. Snape deleted her from the thread.
If that's the rule we use, then we should definitely pay our workers more to increase loyalty.
autocrat counts as both
dang it, I was hoping Snape would stick around...
... just checked, nothing has been deleted.
Ah, that explains my math error.
Me too.
His thread is still there. But the first post, which had the character has been edited to simply say "Formally withdrawn".
What about having an initial order based on Hermetic age (older first), and then allowing magi to make their own arrangements to swap places on the list, if a younger magus feels they need a lab sooner?
I slit off the name thread because it was both important and seemed to have derailed actual design discussion, which right now comes down to use of build points.
Right now we seem to have the following points in general consensus:
we want a percamenarius up front, build points for this position are uncertain
we want to spend most of our build points on books
vis sources are a definite priority
If nobody disagrees with the first point we should figure out how many points we should spend (up to level 5 ability will produce cost savings on writing for the covenant) and the rest should either be discussed or expounded upon (such as what books)
I agree with all three points.
As for how many points to spend on a percamenarius, it seems like level 6 is the standard that people seem to hire. But if level 5 is better, then that's okay too.
As for how many points to spend on aspects in general, my thoughts are to spend about 30-40 on specialists, 100-150 on vis, and 350-400 on books, with a few points in vis and cash reserves.
I'm good with the three points.
I see the build points as roughly:
Library: 300-400
Lab Texts: 0
Vis Sources: 150-200
Vis Stocks: 0-10
Enchanted Items: 0
Specialists: 35-50
Money: 5-10
TOTAL: 490-670
Essentially, 60% on the library, 30% on vis sources, and the remaining 10% on the rest (specialists getting the greatest share of those).
I have no specific wishes as to the exact distribution within each category. Although, as I mentioned before, it is fairly easy to ass mundane books to the library using silver so it might not be worth using build points for those.
I'm a bit unclear as to how many build points we have exactly. We started with 150, then the "lab-in-the-box" concept adds 49 bp for each magus who will spend 2 seasons to install his lab himself instead of being ready right away. Am I getting that right? So if 8 magi do that, we might get up to 542 bp?
At this point we have 6 magi committed to the lab in a box, with Agapitus (Joel Halpern) having expressed no preference., which gives us a total currently of 444 build points.
I am pretty sure you are counting me in the 6, as my mage is Evangelos.
sorry, Agapitos is Monk of Lords.
We're down a few magi, which drops us in build points. At one point we were at 544. But we can work with what we have.
How's this for a rough guess?
Library: 250-300
Lab Texts: 0
Vis Sources: 100-150
Vis Stocks: 0-10
Enchanted Items: 0
Specialists: 35-50
Money: 5-10
TOTAL: 390-510