Stoneport Lighthouse

Gnomes have amazing technology if you can put up with them. They're annoying as fuck, they over promise, under bid, there are huge delays and cost overruns.

You tell a gnome you want one of their Fresnel Lens lighthouses and they say it'll take 1 year and cost you 1,000,000 cp. You agree, and then before you know it your town is overrun with 50 gnomes who are setting up loud workshops, running them day and night, taking over your bars and taverns with their inane prater and rhyming, but at least they're working on the light house and it'll only be for a year. Then after 6 months you learn that the 1,000,000 cp has been spent already setting up workshops and building the lens, but there's no progress on the actual building yet. They're asking for another 1,000,000 cp.

So you give them 500,000 cp and tell them if they keep their schedule they'll get the next installment. Construction begins on the tower (swarming with gnomes who talk in rhyme and at great length about every single detail). You can see from your window that the structure is being built but every time you go to check up on it in person you end up spending the whole day talking with them about you don't even know what. So you stay in your keep and watch from afar (maybe you buy one of their spy glasses to be able to watch in detail from your window). After a few months you swing by to take a look in person again (ugh) and realize that the stairs on the inside of the lighthouse are built to a gnomish scale, and of course they are - only gnomes are building it so they're building it so they can use it. They can't use human stairs, those are way too big for them, but they do know that humans will operate it so the ceilings are the right size. Oh and someone knocked over part of the lens construction and they'll have to start over on it, but now they've got it down so it'll be easier this time around. They just need the second half of their 500,000 cp and then probably another 500,000 cp to adjust the stairs and rebuild the first lens that broke. It's been almost year now and the building is 1/4 done (and partially wrong) and the lens is... damaged? ruined? fixable? Who can even tell what the hell they're saying or what exactly it is they mean.

You decide to have humans take over the construction of the building itself and just have the gnomes do the lens. They protest, saying they brought so many people from so far away with the promise of building a perfect gnomish lighthouse here, claiming that you're backing out of your deal with them but you just can't stand them anymore and tell them its your way or the highway. So they're angry, but now some of them are leaving which is nice and construction goes ahead. Then the true horror of the cost dawns on you. Of the 50 that showed up, 35 were here to build the structure, but only 10 are leaving. The other 25 really like this area now and want to stay and raise a family here... but gnomes live like 150 years so that's going to be at least 30 years with at least 25 gnomes in your town, maybe more if the rest like it and want to stay too.

Another year rolls around (and another 500,000 cp), the humans have built the building, the gnomes are working on polishing the glass, and things are looking up when the head gnome tells you that your humans fucked up the building and they can't walk the lens up the staircase because the stairwell isn't wide enough at the top. You ask if they can use a crane and lift it up that way, but it means disassembling part of the lighthouse to build the crane and make room for the lens to come in. When asking the humans why the hell they didn't account for this, you learn, understandably, that coordination and communication between the two groups has been poor and when the construction workers asked why the gnomes had originally built the staircase 10' wide (instead of the usual 4' for such towers) the answer was so long and complicated they didn't really understand it. Trying to clear up the matter only made things worse and the gnomes were talking about sending for the original construction crew to return to supervise the human labor and it took 5 hours to get to this point in the conversation and a day of lost work so finally the humans screamed at them, "Do the stairs need to be 10' wide, yes or no, and I swear by Voraci if your answer is more than 1 word I will drown you". The gnome replied, "no", because of course it doesn't need to be 10' wide but the human wasn't listening to his detailed answer.

Finally the crane is built, the lens is being lifted and shifted into position. It's done. It's finally done. You ask for a demonstration and when everybody is assembled for the lighting.... oh wait, they were so busy working out the exact optics of the mirrors that they overlooked how to create space to create the light inside! It's an easy fix, they just need to rebuild the lens (3rd time now). They can probably keep most of the same parts, it'll just be another 6 months and another 250,000 cp, but really this time it's not going to be a problem. Turns out it is a problem and they have to rebuild it from scratch, but they didn't get to that point until they had blown through the 250,000cp and 4 months. So now it's another 250,000 cp and 6 more months.

Ok, it's finally done. It's taken about 3 years (instead of 1) and cost somewhere around 3,500,000 cp (including human costs for construction) and now you have a population of 30 gnomes who want to live here "to raise their kids, it'll only be about 30 years then we'll move on with them to some new project" and you're thinking to yourself, "this is the rest of my life. They'll be here for as long as I live and what if they like it enough that they want to stay forever? They've already built their workshops and have started to produce goods in them to ship elsewhere. The lighthouse was supposed to turn the town into a bigger trade hub, but that's more reason for them to stay! By the gods, what have I done to my people?!" The lighthouse is amazing. It's prefect. The light reaches 5x as far as any other lighthouse on your coast. But at what cost? It's 3.5x over budget, 3x as long in construction costs, there are gnomes living in your town now, and other gnomes come here to visit family and inspect the lighthouse. They're everywhere, taking measurements of everything in and out of town and setting up strange contraptions to measure godsknowwhat. A human lighthouse could have been done for much cheaper, in a much shorter time, and wouldn't have had any long term consequences other than working right.

Note: These costs and building times are not researched. Real costs and times may vary