You’re looking at the most bribed officials in the country. It’s gonna take more than a measly three grand to win them over. They get more than that in regular donations.
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Yeah, but I did not know this until I donated. I might have actually donated 4000, but it was too low anyway. Unrelatedly, one of the options for nightmares in Stormwright is about a hungry child crying, but this scene is not in Uprising. It sounds very emotional, so Havenstone should write a short paragraph about it in Uprising
Edit: There are sad descriptions of your band when the rations are low, but this scenes are obviously different from 1 child crying in the night
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Did you take from priests at any point? It’s harder to get these guys to forgive you than the helots or yeomen
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No, I was trying very hard to befriend the priests, the most successful donation is simply very high
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Ok, I paid them 6k and I seem to remember them secretly thinking the angles are on my side with that amount. Also didn’t ever raid them in that one.
I get lots of money by raiding the merchants. They hate me and everyone else loves me
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On that topic - I would suggest two changes/additions.
- Give player some measurement of how much money you should donate to make change (maybe how much to take you from your current _cred bar to the higher), as currently its pretty nebulous.
- Make it possible to donate again when you go back to previous choices after donating, because there is no way to correct your donation after you give some money and its still not enough to reach desired rep with the group. Though the cap for donations - I mean that code which dimnishes your returns after you donate after certain point - would need to take that all into account.
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This would be an amazing quality of life improvement, especially for repeat playtroughs and new players! I’d definitely replay Uprising more often if this was implemented.
However, I wouldn’t want it to take time away from Irduin and future chapters, so if it never happens or it just takes a long time to be implemented, I wouldn’t mind.
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It shouldn’t be too difficult to code in but yeah same, I’d totally understand if Havie wants to focus 100% on Irduin.
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Replayed the first game over the past few days and just wanted to say that I appreciate the transparency after catching up with this thread again and looking forward to being able to continue my ‘Breden did nothing wrong’ playthrough in the next.
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There should be a mechanic for a chance of being wounded seriously in every raid that would be similar to the one for using theurgy. Characters that have great combat would have a nonexisten chance of being wounded seriously, moderately good combaters would have a very low chance, and bad combaters should have a low chance. The chance for all these to hapen would be more high if the raid fails. This would disable you from fighting in future raids, but not leading them, but leading without fighting would cause loss of morale. This is probably excessive content, but injuries (especially in retreats and/or low combat) should be mentioned, even as flavor that does not have gameplay effects. One of the events should be being isolated by 4 people, so combat 2 players would learn that they are not invincible.
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Well, we have wounds in Stormwright already.
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Yes, but protagonist survive 6 months without serious injuries unless they are a Theurge in Uprising (I just realized that I did not specify the game that the injuries should be in.
Also, my theory of how Sojourn is and was settled and abandoned after and before the Xaosization of the Xaos-lands is that its telos is to be abandoned and resettled. Also, The constant transformations of the appearance of Vigil hapen because its nature is constantly changing.
Edit: Make separate achievements for saving each person in the prologue of Uprising. I realized that the helot is saveable when it was mentioned in the customization screen of Stormwright only, because I had played the helot prologue many times to save them and tried what I thought was every combination (I touched “get away from me” only several times because the author would SURELY not make the craven option the winstate) but nothing worked. I did not even know that Charles can be saved until I read it in a guide that I was reading simply to see what is in it.
When I realized that the helot prologue allows you to visit Vigil with Wolfbait I became sad because it was an amazing sideplot, but I discovered it by using a forum and playing an unfinished game, which is the only time that I ever did either. There was a major chance that I would not have done it, and Havenstone said that the prologues will not be in the final version, so I (and most players) would have never known that it exists. This is my sob story about the consequences of not telling the player that something is possible so that they search it up to check how to do it. Oh my god, I intended the request to be the first sentence only originally, but it has inflated like a very big baloon
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I honestly think it would complicate matters too much.
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Abolishing the food system would be the real killer. That would put tens of millions of lives at risk across the continent. If plagues in the cities knocked out a quarter of the Hegemony’s urban population, that would be only eight or nine million – and you’d probably see significant deurbanization before death tolls reached that level.
The Hegemony is definitely struggling economically. The tax rates that sustain its institutions of social control (Alastors and Phalangites, mainly) and keep the urban poor in bread are crushing, even before the underfed Alastors start extorting extra to make up for it. The merchants and yeomen in particular are hungry for more autonomy and less oppression, as the Irduin chapter will hopefully make clear.
That is an interesting question. 
The strategy currently being pursued is building a scaffold of Theurgically reinforced steel underneath, so that the palace can be allowed to settle at roughly its current altitude. While pretty blood-intensive, that’s seen as being the most economical and lowest-risk approach to no longer having to put blood into keeping it afloat.
Probably. Depends on how close you keep Cerlota. But some of your potential rivals know the secret already or will be able to figure it out once they see it used.
Their population is also reliant on Theurgically boosted yields, yes.
The Abhuman lands south of Shayard start as desert and move into semi-arid plains, before eventually you get to forest and jungle. I agree with those who’ve said that any immediate post-collapse attempt at mass migration into the Seracca lands would die out before it put down serious roots – the arable land is too far away, and starvation/desperation/a collapsing empire doesn’t make a good staging ground for a migration push. There also (crucially) isn’t the massive military tech gap that allowed European migrants to run roughshod over so many other parts of the world; as @apple said, the Seracca would have a decisive military advantage over a desperate wave of starving migrants.
I don’t know about answering, but there will be a bunch of places where it asks it in a more structured form.
@mshan95032, I’m not at all sure that Cerlota would endorse a crusader-state Erezza under Shayardene elite control. Her top priority is keeping the Halassurqs out, but that doesn’t mean she’d easily be convinced by a homelander MC that putting Shayardenes in charge was a good idea.
She’s going to be carrying it out in strict secrecy and close enough to be in full control of the project–so near Aekos, rather than with remote workers who can inconveniently betray her and run away with the results.
@apple is right that men are only expected to let others “do the work” if they’re absent on the front. Men who do that when they’re physically present are going against social expectation, and will be seen as dishonored.
I know you were joking, but for the record: as Amartya Sen taught us, famine is almost always a result of distribution/access inequalities rather than lack of the aggregate calories to keep everyone alive. People are generally unwilling to let their kids/family/clan/clients/army skip that third meal a day, even when better sharing could keep people alive. (Hell, we don’t even share well enough to keep everyone from starving when it doesn’t require anyone skipping meals, just skipping e.g. a PlayStation game.)
Also, as @Sowe noted, the gameworld’s agri-Theurgy isn’t just yield-boosting but operation of a massive canal network to bring grain from surplus areas to deficit ones. Shayard doesn’t have non-Theurgic tech to do that at anything resembling the same scale, even if there weren’t any breakdown in the trade system due to war and political instability. The collapse of long-distance trade across an integrated continent (or inland sea, as the fall of the Roman Empire exemplifies) can lead to a catastrophic decline in prosperity and push millions into starvation, even if yields weren’t also dropping.
Depends mainly on the scale of your blood needs, and the Theurgic capacity of your neighbors. We’ll see when we get to the G5/6 game if there are raid-only equilibria to be found.
Fair suggestion, but as I’ve said elsewhere:
I’ve not included that so far, but I’ll roll it around in my mind and see how it feels as a possibility. Thanks!
Ask Pakistan. In places where electoral democracy came before the power of the aristocracy was eroded, the local lord has always tended to hold tremendous power in elections – either to win themselves or to ensure that their favored client won and governed in their interests.
You can declare that secret ballots are the law of the land… but without a revolution in state administrative capacity, you won’t be able to ensure that all (or even most) of the local power-holders comply with that law rather than hovering at the shoulders of their tenants, retainers, and dependents as they vote. You might even find it’s better for public voice votes to be the law, village-moot-style, since those aren’t as easily “fixed” by the local power-holder amending ballots during the counting process.
Are you thinking here of “lots of literacy, state capacity and a mass press”? None of those can be conjured up Theurgically, I’m afraid. 
I’m liking it! Thanks for the suggestion.
My first reaction is no, because I’ve seen firsthand how incredibly hard it is to transform the police from an extractive institution into a law-enforcing one. But I’ll read up more on how Napoleon did it and see what I reckon in light of that example.
I’d like to add a map to Stormwright – possibly not a whole gameworld map, but one of the Rim, Southriding, and a bit of Xaos – and I think the world map will be a hard necessity from G4 if not before.
Both! (Initially the former.)
I’ll look at doing that when I next make some tweaks to Uprising, thanks for the suggestion. @Sowe, I think I’ll make it possible to donate multiple times, but making the threshold explicit would be a little too immersion-breaking for my tastes. (How does the MC know at what donation level the priests will start loving them?)
I don’t see this happening – not because it’s not a good idea, but because it would require excessive rewrites and blow holes in the strategies that people have so painstakingly worked out for G1.
Pretty sure this is impossible now, mon frere–in at least some of our key markets, the achievement list is set when you first submit the game for publication, and can’t be altered thereafter.
Finally: I missed the ADAT on this, but a decade-and-a-week ago I wrote an explanation of what the anarchy stat means that may be of interest and is still relevant today.
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Maybe very late game or in the epilogue it could be the kind of religion a civilization on one of the other continents developed? 
Distant friends and trade partners right?
There are imperfect solutions, this article touches on some of them.
But for spreading news, limited printing press (which already exists) plus a postal system, even if it is just the pony express, yes finally a use for horses other than eating them, will allow for distribution of a limited number of broadsheets that can be posted to town message boards and maybe a very limited number of individual recipients and as long as the education system is in transition the old-fashioned town criers can be kept on to shout the news out loud too.
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I have a few further questions.
You mentioned before that it’s easier to increase state capacity in smaller states. How small would a state have to be to achieve my ideals, namely, a court with juries and lawyers, a parliament with universal suffrage, a fully competent executive branch, and a fully competent police force (or at least a somewhat functional vigilante force)? Also, what specific trade-offs arise as state size increases?
What are the specific technical limitations of Theurgy that prevent these from being realized?
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I’m sure hearing this will frustrate you, but the answer to those questions is going to emerge out of Game 5/6 gameplay that I can’t usefully model yet. Juggling numbers for the endgame dilemmas would be wasted effort for me right now – I need to finish Game 2, not dive into specifics of G5 that I’d just have to amend many, many times based on all the things I write between now and then.
In broad strokes: I’m not entirely sure that every one of the innovations on your list will be thinkable. We’ve talked at length above about the limits on state capacity following an imperial collapse, and how a “fully competent” executive and police force (depending on what you mean by fully) may not be realizable in the period the game chronicles. You may not like that answer, but it remains the same.
My inclination is to say that realizing all the innovations on that list will be a challenge even for a city-state, and that you may well need to prioritize between your ideals if you don’t have the capacity to achieve them all. But let’s see; I may be surprised, and when we finally get to G5/6, you may find a way to have it all.
Theurges can’t create social institutions with their magic. A mass press requires mass literacy, which requires institutions of education; state capacity likewise rests on a range of institutions, learned capacities, and techniques of social organization. Those can be built, but not magically.
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A valid point. It is true that technology alone cannot create social organization. However, I think that Theurgy contains technologies that, if released to the public, could be of great use in advancing social organization.
For example, there is technology that allows flying at 100 miles per hour. This means that there is the potential to build a global empire and communicate at a speed faster than the developed countries of the 19th century, which at least had democracies on the mainland.
I think there are many other technologies and their applications.
The challenge for players is to release it to the public and build a political system that serves social equality rather than vested interests.
In summary, I think there is more room for social advancement through the interaction of political systems and technology in this world than you may think.
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This tech has been essential for the building of a continental empire. Because it’s monopolised by a small elite, however, it’s a poor underpinning for a democratic system of mass communications – and if you open the tech of Theurgy up to everyone, you’re not just giving them access to flight and comms, but techs of violence that the social order won’t quickly adjust to. That road may eventually end in the parliament, courts etc., but not in the MC’s lifetime.
And if by “open it to everyone” you meant “keep the knowledge under control of a small elite but give non-adepts access to e.g. a Theurgic postal service to broadcast their ideas” – I think that elite control of technologies of communication at that level is unlikely to yield democracy, especially when we’re talking about a world without experience of large scale participatory politics, where everyone’s mental model of the use of those technologies is shaped by centuries of state anti-sedition measures.
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Why do we have to choose between making it public or exclusive to a select few elite?Isn’t it possible to restrict access to that knowledge? Also, not just in this example, but the technology, politics, economy, and society in this game seem to be inconsistent. For example, I’ll give you the example that I found most unnatural. It’s the combination of a pre-modern oppressive governing system and a modern city of one million people. Population concentration and urbanization would definitely be the path to a successful revolution without a somewhat democratic system or a modern totalitarian system. Therefore, if I were an imperial nobleman, I would definitely not sell off my privileges as a city resident. To be clear, I like both the fantasy flavor and the realism of this game. I just wanted to advise that more detailed and more convincing background explanations would make for better world building.
So what do you think about the idea of creating a “19th century bourgeois democracy” that is at least less oppressive than the current empire, by giving this knowledge only to yeomen and merchants?
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