I appreciate your stance but from my MC’s perspective, a child is still her society’s greatest treasure and to weaponize that treasure would be to change it forever. A childhood is fragile enough but forcing a child to morph into a soldier before they reach adulthood (whether that is considered 13, 16, or 18 is immaterial to my MC’s philosophy) would be to shatter her society beyond the pale.
Pre-adulthood training is more justifiable and is something that can be reversed in later generations but outright conversion of child to soldier is where my MC would draw the line if she could.
As I said, the topic is fraught with all sorts of echos and pitfalls which is why I don’t think @Havenstone should start down this slide. Slippery slopes and all are hard to overcome once traversed. (throw in the Pandora’s box analogy as well (sorry)),
This is likely what my character would wind up doing if given the choice between the two. I just feel like there is so much more they could be doing. They could be going off with those begging for food for example. Or doing more to care for the sick and injured. They are getting too much of a free pass. If they want to stay with the band they need to make themselves more useful.
Again, I appreciate your view-point; it has led to such things as conscripting children into the Crusades and the childhood organizations of Hitler and Mao turning their elders over to the party police. I’m not disagreeing with your assessment of their utility except in the deciding area of concern and that (in my MC’s view) is humanity.
To save the humanity from the horror of civil war is exactly why my MC wants a way to get them out of there,
From a purely game balance perspective I’d also argue they are an inbalance waiting to keep @Havenstone programing weird code that breaks often.
Edit: I’m often in the minority when it comes to issues such as this - feel free to ignore … I have a feeling the children will play an important learning experience role - so ultimately my MC is going to be disappointed.
We need to train them now if the rebellion is to survive 170 so childrens who does nothing at all are a burden so the best possible solution is to train and arm them and they would most likely survive because they are small and fast and the coming war is in the rebellion territory deep in the woods so it would have great advantages… desperate times desperate measures must be taken
This is respectable, and how I usually play other games. For some reason this one strikes me differently. So far my character has been fine with the killing (howl with elation) and figures everyone else is too. Once people start behaving differently, he’ll probably be more considerate of the lives of everyone else.
Right now all he’s really had a chance to see is people getting sad over their (assumed) friends, and figures that he would be too. Once the psychological horror of war really starts to set in, it’s going to be an entirely different game for him, for better or worse.[quote=“Eiwynn, post:4796, topic:1601”]
I’m often in the minority when it comes to issues such as this
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I usually play characters who “fight so others don’t have to”. This one just hasn’t reached that stage yet. Right now he is thinking “They need to learn to protect themselves - we wont be around forever”. But once this rebellion gets bigger and he has a real army or allies, then he will gladly let them live their lives confident in the knowledge that his death will no longer have a negative effect on the rebellion.
The zvad_here bug should now be fixed – apologies!
My idea there is that you’re not trapping the same camp; as you constantly move from camp to camp, you lay traps around the ones you expect to use most often. Until recently there was a ceiling – once you’d spent 150 or more follower-weeks on traps, you’d not be offered the option again. I’ve taken the ceiling off now and replaced it with diminishing returns in terms of the number of enemy you’ll eventually catch in said traps once you pass 150 follower-weeks.
No. At the moment, it’s only scoring the raids you specifically take part in, not all the other stuff Zvad is doing to keep the band together. This shall be fixed, thanks to feedback like yours (and also all the folks who are doing the number-crunching path to give a sense of how much anarchy Zvad would likely be causing).
As for child soldiers, you have your hands full at the moment just trying to combat-train the 14 year olds and up. The younger ones are pulling their weight, literally, by carrying most of the band’s goods, freeing up your precious mules; they can also take part in some non-violent tasks like trap-setting and smuggling. The choice of how young you want your actual soldiers will come next game… because it’s one of the moral choices that rebellions in every age are faced with and I don’t want to shy away from it unless it gets me banned from the Apple store. I’ll do my best to handle it with due thoughtfulness.
I have written multiple ways to remove the children from the rebellion zone, and MCs who want to prioritize that will almost certainly find themselves going for the “infiltrate helot camps” strategy. Not all strategies are equally consistent with protecting children.
And to touch on the conversation about why the MC has a weakness… while I may not be as thoroughgoing about it as Paul “This is not a power fantasy” Wang, I’m also uninterested in writing a story about someone who has all the skills they need for success, whose challenges are all purely external.
The MC already has a (hopefully not implausible) number of dice falling their way to get the rebellion off the ground. I don’t intend to also take away their weakness.
After P_Tigras also complained upthread that an unavoidable weakness reduced the fun for him, I did consider an IAP option to change your 0 stat to a 1. I’d just like to reiterate that I no longer plan to offer that, both because I don’t want to trigger people who are allergic to IAP and because I think it’ll be a better game without it.
Opinions will vary, and that’s fine. @P_Tigras was already planning to mod his copy of the game after buying it to make Suzane genderflip his way, and he’ll be free to also mod it to remove the 0 stat.
Meanwhile, here’s a Wayback Machine link to what I think a 0 stat means:
@VArmorVPL, if you think you’re already unlike the “many normal people in any era who would quickly die in combat, or struggle to convince a stranger of something, or find it difficult to hold lots of information in mind,” then congratulations: you’re possessed of excellent skills to start a rebellion. Alas, your MC in this game will not share all your advantages.
This lines up most with what both my mc, and I as the player think about Breden, for now.
They are a kryptast, but one given a very undesirable task of having to live and work like a helot for who knows how long, so now they’re playing a very dangerous game where they either want the rebellion to “succeed” up to the point where they can credibly claim to their superiors that “I’m the only asset you have who can still stop this now” and that certainly makes it possible that by that point they may also give us an ultimatum (as long as they do not truly loathe us) and see who offers them the “best deal”.
Therefore it is Breden’s (seeming) piety, not their possible spying which concerns my mc most, again for now.
Here’s my older thoughts on Breden:
ZAPDOS HAS BEEN CAPABLE OF SURVIVE THE WINTER… yes, BUT HE DOESN’T ACHIEVE ANYTHING HE ONLY HUNTED DEERS. NO MONEY NO WEAPONS NO SUPPORTERS NO MORE MULES. He killed 8 of my men… HE IS STUPID PERIOD.HE WAS SITTING THERE ASKING FOR MORE HUNTERS . He didn’t try convince yaomen. Nor asking money to helots . No doing smuggling missions. No anything. My stats It was the most boring chapter I have read in a while. Blah hunt blah died blaaa deer bla died blaaa die Bla hunt deer.
My stats
[Note for playtesting:
You’re an aristo who chose to not steal.
Your morale is 95.
Your notoriety is 0.
Your anarchy is 0.
You have 38 followers, 337 drachems, and 10 arms.
Your credibility with aristos is 220, helots 140, merchants 205, priests 195, and yeomen 205.
Your followers’ leadership is: Breden 1, Zvad 7, Elery 0, Radmar 0]
How to get de firiac join the rebellion not the helot girl even after choosing only to steal from the hegemony i still get the helot… and how to make zvad not to sell the ancestral swords when choosing only participating in major raids?
@Got99, Zvad doesn’t sell the swords. And de Firiac joins based on anarchy. It should be possible to have a low-anarchy run with stealing only from the Hegemony, but you have to be discriminating.
Thanks for the feedback, Mara. By contrast to Zap-zvad, when you run through the chapter making the choices you would make, what stats do you get?
This will, for my mc, most likely depend on if and when we can get guns, how good they are and how many we can get of them. But if the answers there fall in favour of my mc then we can probably get the “Kalashnikov Kids”, after all a bullet fired by a 12 year old is just as deadly as one fired by a 40 year old. It also depends on the Hegemony’s cultural norms here, the value of child soldiers would be increased if Phalangites, Alastors and Theurges almost never expect the “cute kids” to turn on them and ambush them and decreased if they very much do.
After all child soldiers is literally where the word “infantry” comes from.
If the guns in this world have the potential to be anywhere near this easy then they will likely become a symbol of my mc’s rebellion, lol.
Don’t worry we’re not worse than Hitler and his Germany…yet… (that man had the luck of the devil by all rights he should have been assassinated and France should have been able to repel his invasion, or at least that would have been my estimate if I’d had the luxury of being an armchair general back in the 30’s).
Or Castro in Cuba, for that matter.
Thank you for your consideration, besides, like you say, we can always mod it once we buy the release version. I plan to mod mine to have Breden and Simon both male, to make my romantic entanglements more interesting in the first game.
Your MC just turned from rebel to terrorist in my MC’s eyes. If we were leading simultaneous rebellions, my MC would fight you as much, if not more then the foreign devils.
There’s also a fourth option, as unlikely as it may seem - the traitor could be a spy with good intentions. Not necessarily good for the rebellion, mind, but not ‘throne of corpses’ evil either. Presumably not everyone working for the Hegmony are bloodthirsty monsters or stone-cold killers, especially if they are motivated by piety. So someone who believes the evil empire is the best option in a bad situation could be a spy working to entrap rebels, without actually wishing any particular suffering on them. Maybe the traitor’s goal is to minimize the damage of the rebellion while subtly swaying people to his side - showing that the empire is an unavoidable necessity, or that it’s a heavenly decree that mortals cannot fight against. Even if religion doesn’t come into play, the fact that a rebellion would undoubtedly cost the lives of many innocents could be enough for good people to resist it.
I acknowledge this is a somewhat convoluted explanation, but people are rarely villains in their own mind, and being so involved in a cause that you intended to betray requires some heavy rationalization (The Traitor Baru Cormorant remains eerily relevant to this game). Since the religion is heavily involved in the justification for the Hegmony’s various evils, I’d wager that many “civil servants” rely on it to justify their own evils to their conscience. The fact that the same religion seems to be so popular among helots should be ironic, but sadly has enough real-life precedents that it’s almost expected.
A storymode coding error, just fixed (thanks). The little shits should now be consistent in their rejection of everything you care about and stand for.
Haha thanks, I’m finding it really difficult to keep their morale up when I have all those blasted children to care for. Any tips? Morale is so easy to keep up when you get thrown into prison.
Honestly, I wish you could just ASK them what they wanted, instead of marching there and being all “hey guys I picked a symbol for our rebellion because this is clearly a decision a leader of a movement makes on their own” and them being “lol no”. It feels rather self-centered to just decide on it on your own, even if they accept it - a symbol for meant to represent the many should be something that is relevant to more than just yourself.
