Like I said many revolutionaries have viewed their enemies through that lens, and the post-war state has suffered for it. If negotiation and compromise aren’t possible with a certain group under any circumstances, well I would just hope you are prepared for the scalp and ear necklace consequences of those views…
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True, but my mc cannot be “bought” off with anything but the top job and they will never willingly give that to a former helot, particularly one who is not willing to play their decadent games (my mc won’t actually allow them to “discover” proof of his lost nobility, especially not if it turns out to be genuine) nor will he marry a “proper” noble, not even a male one (not even Simon most likely). And he most certainly won’t give up practicing magic or pretend to be pious.
Nor is my mc much inclined to let any of the present “nobles” retain their wealth and power since it is literally built on the suffering of the people. The compromise he is willing to offer them is that if they surrender peacefully they will be spared and assigned a new function based on their capabilities, except in the executive branch and the new military, where they will be barred from becoming officers.
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Your character name is Pol Pot Grumpy horses?
It’s actually Mao-Stalin with a Dash of Pol-Pot.
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A pitty his is not Robespierre lol. He knew how throwing weird parties and that with that bullshit religion To the liberty and that weird Months with hippie parties. And if you forgot the day and month names Bang Guillotine
Here you go @idonotlikeusernames. This is what you will most likely do.
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Regarding slings, I think they were limited to light scout troops when hoplites and hoplite-styled troops became the dominant military order of the day. That indicates that they really aren’t as good against heavy armor and shields. Also, as cavalry became more common in the Middle East, both the role of foot scouts and the Bronze Age herding culture of the Middle East (most famously the Israelite shepherds) more-or-less died out. Slingers were still used as auxiliaries by the Eastern Romans, Persians, and the various states between them until the end of Antiquity, though.
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Reasonable assumptions. My knowledge about slings only come through Internet forums anyways, so I’m certainly not an expert.
One thing that I found out was that some (usually Greeks) commented that slings were able to hit at longer distance than bows (at the time at least, improvements to the bow and specialist training likely supplanted the slingers in long range skirmishing).
As for heavy armour and shields, I agree with you regarding the latter but not so much with the former. The advantage slings have over other projectile weaponry (not artillery) is using concussive force to damage the person in armour instead of penetration. This means that slings have an advantage over other projectile weaponry against armour if the latter were not able to penetrate.
Of course, with slings being slings, they don’t seem to have a lot of room for improvement. Mechanizing slings just gives you artillery which can be unwieldy.
Well, the medieval staff-sling seems to have been a decent grenade launcher.
As for armor being less useful, possibly - I plead ignorance on how well a Classical helmet resists a sling hit or whether they had something to defend against sling concussion. Either way, between armor and the shield wall, the metagame clearly changed to disfavor slings once hoplites took the field, and the next great innovations in missile weapons were in artillery and horse archery.
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Well, when I talked about education a few posts up, I was considering that some of us (I’m thinking about you, @idonotlikeusernames) would use something that was more critical pedagogy on the helots. I think an approach that was more Paulo Freire could help.
Adding a bit to what was said, art is also a way to remember. Not necessarily because you agree with it, but because remembering is needed, as a way to connect and fill the holes and enrichen the history of one’s country.
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That would indeed be a major help and if my mc could get someone like that, provided they come from a merchant, helot or yeoman background, to run the new ministry of education he’d be very happy indeed.
If someone like that suggest a limited preservation of historical artifacts for the edification of the populace and going light on the censorship and historical rewrites are the way to go he might even listen.
The only point he cannot be made to relent on is his own (family) history, should he really turn out to be the descendant of demoted dukes or something. 
Realistically a whole damned lot will depend on the advisers he can get (so long as they’re from the right backgrounds of course).
@Haventsone It doesn’t really make sense that a theurge who has never openly practiced theurgy before to have angered the preists with public displays of theurgy and cause them to rally a mob up to attack you.
Yeah, I was thinking more of Freire’s concept that, while education is not neutral and often serves the interests of what he calls “the oppressors”, the oppresed might use education as a tool to free themselves from the shackles imposed by the society and culture arround them and be free to make and remake themselves.
That seems to fit the helots like a glove.
But he doesn’t exist in the Rebelverse, and any big education reform will have to be headed by high INT MCs and other companions we pick up along the way.
Hey, what do you guys think of introducing a “wealth” stat, that is like 1,2,3,4 and so on, like the player stats? Down the line, as the rebellio conquers more space, choices could appear that explore this. Like “to do this you’d need 3 wealth” or something like that?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaablgjrrghfhghhfg, I’ve just spent 11 hours nonstop playing this game (must you call it ‘reading’? It’s totally playing imo), and this would probably be the best time for me to provide technical feedback, were I not drunk with sleep deprivation (hic). So I’m just gonna take some time to gush about how much fun I had, instead.
And what fun! Who says Breden sucks? I loved Breden! Especially now that I got to define their role in my rebellion*, I dig having Breden around, absolutely. I like that their relationship runs in the background instead of the foreground. I like it very much for many reasons. Especially that last scene sketched out in Chapter Four, 10/10 from me.
(*all this is coming from someone who hadn’t played the parts beyond Chapter One until now)
Hey, I liked the mules. It’s all good. Maybe everyone’s already stopped complaining about mules, I don’t know, been gone from the forum for too long, but I remember Chapter Two being talked about that way. Now, it takes a few trial runs to figure it out, for which I would’ve wished for an ability to save my game state (why no save system?), but after I got the hang of it I had a lot of fun and would’ve gladly welcomed more such management interspersed with narrative style chapters.
Lastly I want to mention the ‘Jesus’ play style. I get the feeling that someone must’ve pointed out the danger in having an option in the sacrament speech that modifies the way everyone will address you henceforth, since I remember there was a clearly written warning in the form of “-- that’s how I want my followers to address me, HINT HINT --” in the option, but still I somehow managed to brush aside the warning and select it… to my eventual chagrin! I felt like SUCH a cultist after that! I almost alienated myself from my own rebellion, ughhh. But then… I got used to being called a sister, so much so that now it’s hard to go back in another playthrough to being called a kuria! Oh, what have you done to my sweet, sweet XoR character, solidified her as a cultist in my mind? weeps
I jest. It’s a great source of amusement.
My concluding thought is that this game is really coming into its own.
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Hey @cascat07, @Bryce_Kaldwin @P_Tigras. Since I’m “working” from bed with a broken foot I’ve had more time than usual to watch old things and everything expressed by the French “noble” in the scene from 48:47 onward here is probably mild compared to how the Hegemony’s nobles view someone born a “mere Helot” wanting to better themselves and why my mc is opposed to working with him.
Even Horion probably views him more as a horse who can count, rather than a (budding) intellectual, let alone an equal. 
rabble rabble rabble!!!
Listen man I’m not saying some of the nobles don’t have it coming, they do, but many are like Simon or something in between. Shocking I know, but I expect most are just as afraid of the Hegemony as any helot and are trying to hold what they got and provide for their families. I know what you are going to say “They own slaves! They are rich! They must be horrible!” Yet Simon exists, the noble MC can exist, the MC’s father can exist, and even Ismain exists… Are their crimes so great that the only possible solution is to kill them all and takes their shit???
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I know, my mc doesn’t, more importantly he’s not impartial and will tend to interpret any “evidence” in his favour. But most of all he already made the mistake of thinking that he could trust and be friends with a “noble” once, he’s not going to make the same mistake twice. At best they probably view him as some sort of talking, reasoning animal, like Horion probably does, at worst he’s apparently evil incarnate just for being a gay helot who dares to read and use magic openly.
Well Horion’s information seems to refute that, assuming he was being truthful with us, then the Hegemony actually needs the cooperation of the nobles and if they had revolted in significant enough number within the past century or so, well we would already have a restored Shayardene Kingdom by now, wouldn’t we?
So, at best, as far as my mc is concerned they’ve already had their moment and not seized it, he’s not going to give them a second chance.
Well for my mc, pretty much, yeah…but replace rich with decadent, since he doesn’t particularly care for the trappings of the nobility, he just despises their excesses, cruelty and everything they and the priests stand for really.
He’ll use Simon, though as far as he’s concerned my mc considers his act of joining the rebellion voluntarily to a) not make him a “noble” any longer and b) after Ganelon he’s very slow to trust anyone with a noble background and really in my games it’s only Simon’s exceptional bravery that saves him, for now, since he was literally just seconds away from execution by Radmar’s axe.
Well considering that their “wealth” and decadent lifestyles are literally built on the backs of slaves…
The most damning thing though would again by the caste system and its entrenched values, that would make them view my mc as nothing more than a talking horse at best. The caste system that propagates these views also ensures that my mc will likely not work with them as they’d never let him be anything more than a sharecropper once the Hegemony is defeated, if they don’t turn on him and execute him for “heresy” immediately after.
And my mc wants to be nobody’s slave ever again, he’s fighting for his ideals (and the top-job for himself), not to be a slightly better treated slave or “servant” at best.
The fundamental problem is that if they succeed in that there’s practically nothing left for the rest of us. In the Hegemony they really are the 1% who control all the wealth and resources.
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Every human society to date has had a small percentage of the population controlling a majority of the wealth and power. Attempts to change that have not ended well because it is contrary to human nature. So far we have just ended up shifting around who comprised that 1%. I certainly don’t think a brutal slave uprising and post-revolutionary dictatorship will alleviate that fundamental condition of human society. (See Haiti circa 1804 to present…)
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There have nevertheless been societies and periods in our history where those in power have been adept at masking that fact or making sure the population was mostly content enough to not bother with uprisings (on that note we’re about to become overdue for a fresh injection of some social democracy, though the socialist in me would be all for changing human “nature” on this point. 
) and then there is the hellscape that is the Hegemony, where it is official policy that birth determines everything and any and _any and al_l social advancement across caste lines is banned, along with the practice of magic by the lower castes.
Most of the time you have a few people falling from and a few people rising to the top of the social pyramid every generation, but the Hegemony tries to keep this completely stagnant, which I’d argue is just as much against human “nature”.
So again my mc would gain absolutely nothing worth fighting for by “allying” himself with the “nobles” as he’d just be setting himself up to be enslaved again, just under maybe slightly different conditions.
That presumes “the nobles” are a monothic organization that will all behave exactly the same. We already know that isn’t so. Some goes for the church and even the lower classes. You find some helots utterly opposed to your sacrilege and loyal to the families that own them. Certainly there will be hordes of yeomen who are deeply concerned at loosing even their small step above the helots on the societal ladder. Your “us vs them” vision gives opposed groups no hope of reconciliation and no place in revolutionary society. They will fight you to the death and your supporters will hate them for it. Unless you are planning and a mass genocide there will be no way to reconcile these forces once the Hegemony collapses and certainly no grand canal project in Avisa as Halassur is making the rubble bounce throughout the enitire former Hegemony…
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