Choice of Rebels: Stormwright (XoR2 WIP)

[Havenstone]

Fair – but I’d be surprised if it’s the last comment we see about high-INT being Easy Mode (with lots of bonus narrative snippets, too!) through the Xaos-lands.

Eight and a half years ago, I rolled out the bandits chapter in a messy, incomplete state with shambolic stats. I’ve done it again now with Irduin. For anyone who worries that the second half of G2 is holding together, but who did enjoy G1 Ch2, I hope that’s some consolation. What you see now is not what we’ll end up with.

And your feedback is part of that process, so thanks!

[apple]

@Havenstone

I can’t help noticing that in the space of a week, we’ve gone from readers asking why I made INT the obviously dominant stat for Game 2 to readers worrying that INT won’t come into its own until Game 6.

To be fair, the one guy talking about it being obviously dominant hadn’t even played Irduin yet and was going only off of the Xoas-Lands, where I do think Int is well implemented (notably before the stat boost). My point is more just that Int 3 does not, at this moment, feel like a substantial increase from Int 2, and I think the specializations are the root of it. You do feel your one specialization, in the one cool moment it comes up (probably two or three moments once the Sojourn fight and Irduin endings are in), but it doesn’t feel like an overall increase in the way CHA or COM 3 do, it just feels like you’ve gotten a niche new toy. That’s why I brought up widening the specializations, so that you can feel that more general power boost.

[roodcross]

What I’m hoping for late series INT character:

[Havenstone]

@apple

it doesn’t feel like an overall increase in the way CHA or COM 3 do

All really helpful thoughts, thanks! Can you say more about the way the game made you feel that CHA 3 or COM 3 were giving you something different? What made that an “overall” feeling rather than a “cool moments” feeling?

@Azthyme

the apparent lack of flying Seracca

By the way, as evidence that I do sometimes change my mind when I say I’m going to consider something, you can thank Laguz for convincing me that bat Seracca will be part of the gameworld.

[apple]

@Havenstone

Can you say more about the way the game made you feel that CHA 3 or COM 3 were giving you something different?

Honestly, I think it might just be the blood management. When you have a big bar hanging over you tracking blood expenditure you think a lot more about each discreet use in terms of “worth”, and that changes how you interact with things psychologically. I think it’s also just. I can’t think of everything that actually uses Int 3 as a stat. It always feels like “I’m having a specialization moment”, not “I’m having an Int moment”, at least not anything that can’t be done with Int 2. I think generalizing every power into an Int 3 power and saying “take half of these” would mitigate that by combining the two feelings.

Also, speaking of Seracca, is it going to be possible to romance M’kyar without (intending to start) becoming one yourself?

[Azthyme]

@Catschre

Is it impossible to save Elery at the end as well? I care not for the lives of the unnamed children.

Elery is actually very difficult to keep alive in absolute pacifist runs; I only noticed that after I started mapping them myself. This is because she gets poisoned at the High Crag and won’t make it out unless you heal her.

So the first option is exiling Breden at the end of Chapter 1, which avoids the poisoning altogether. Easy, but with a steep price. Assuming Breden isn’t actually a traitor, which I believe. Another option is 2 INT, which lets you heal Elery and co with your knowledge of herbs. Not bad, but arguably an even steeper price: you’re not 2 CHA.

There is a chain of events that feels like it should work but doesn’t. You can, in the last extremity, kill the Tagmatarch in self-defense and rescue your rebellion. You don’t get the nonviolence achievement, but this is the minimally violent route that keeps the rebellion in one piece after the Battle of the Whendward.

But a sick Elery seems to die before that rescue happens. I haven’t checked this myself in-game, but since Elery and co dying offscreen happens in the sprintdark scene, she wouldn’t be part of the rescue.

Another approach that should be feasible but I haven’t checked in-game is if you fail to escape the Phalangites and get encircled, you can appoint Elery leader of the escape party. That way, she’s not around when the poisoning happens. But it’s very easy for a pacifist run to escape the Phalangites, once you know what you’re doing at least.

That brings me to a really interesting detail that I think is intentional. A lot of the low violence dialogue with Tamran checks (violence > 1) for violent rebellions, not 0, which means the kind of rebellion I listed earlier where you kill once instead of willingly picking martyrdom still gets perceived as nonviolent. It does make me think there’s a little bit of slack being given, which I think is good.

@Vrangel_RIP

Stopping the Harrowing while sparing everybody also works

You don’t even have to successfully spare everybody, to be clear, or else only 2 CHA would be able to be pacifist. There’s a separate variable tracking if you successfully kept the Rim Square uprising nonviolent, but so long as you call for mercy and refuse to order people to rob the aristos and merchants, you are still on track for the nonviolence achievement. Which I think makes sense: you did your best, and it’s not your fault if you tried and failed to convince others to not be violent.

It’s barely not possible to recruit Kal into a nonviolent rebellion with that in mind. I tried, but you can only hit 19 Anarchy at most while being pacifist.

[Zoilus]

@Havenstone

By the way, as evidence that I do sometimes change my mind when I say I’m going to consider something, you can thank Laguz for convincing me that bat Seracca will be part of the gameworld.

Oho, you mean to say I can make myself a eugief?

[VernonRoche]

I think the lacking piece of INT right now is that it feels too mage-focused. The big things you can do with Int, unless I’m misremembering, all have to do with Theurgy.

Both trainers for Int when you boost the stat focus on Theurgy - not administration, spycraft, logistics, statecraft, etc.

An example of an INT option id like to see is poisoning the noble lady and framing her daughter. If those exist and I didn’t find them, cool, but most of what I saw on my INT 2 Com 2 playthrough had to do with Theurgy.

[roodcross]

Cerlotta ought to have extensive experience in administration if she was being considered as a possible successor to one of the nine, so it seems like another area she could help the MC learn.

It’s probably partially a timing issue though. CHA kind of should be the most powerful stat when you’re trying to grow your movement. INT beyond Theurgy ought to be more helpful once we actually have a territory to help administrate or have attached ourselves to a larger rebel movement.

@Havenstone - how charismatic is Teren?

Trying to come up with an idea of the high CHA NPCs that an INT or COM player might attach themselves to if they want to be part of a larger state and not just carve out a smaller one.

[HughMyronBrough]

I would like to say that “failure” is a very loaded term. In this game, in any choice game, success and failure is defined by YOU.

It is true that 2-Combat builds are the only ones which have an RNG-proof win against a near-maximal-Notoriety (ie: show off Horion’s corpse) Archon’s army while using a Helot with the weakest attribute combination. 2-Charisma and 2-Intellect are a bit too brittle to hit that mark, though they get better results than 2-Combat you hide Horion’s corpse.

Is that the metric of what makes a build good in XoR? Who says you need to maximize Notoriety? Or be a Helot? Or use only Ruthless/Skeptical/Homelander? Or even fight the Archon’s army to begin with?

Or you can even decide “winning” is unrelated to “building a large and active rebellion.” Maybe you “win” by getting the Healer achievement (which only a 2-Intellect build with “suboptimal” pathing can do). Maybe you “win” by making the merchants hate you so much they offer chests of gold for your head (really hard to do!). Maybe you “win” by maximizing how much Nobles like you? Maybe you “win” by doing a minmaxed Pacifist run?

I guess that Ledd and I share a lot of the blame for this state of affairs, given that we worked hard to minmax the game. But we never intended that to be the only way people wanted to play XoR.

[Nm6k]

@HughMyronBrough

I guess that Ledd and I share a lot of the blame for this state of affairs, given that we worked hard to minmax the game. But we never intended that to be the only way people wanted to play XoR.

Nah it’s just that most gamers tends to be naturally minmaxers

Plus the large amount of time left players to try perfecting thier runs. Something of the same already happened with Lords

[roodcross]

@Nm6k

Nah it’s just that most gamers tends to be naturally minmaxers

Absolutely. I’m an exception in that I will intentionally choose options I know are suboptimal because I care more about the RP aspect.

My “canon” playthrough in Infiniverse leaves a lot of zero cost soldiering on the table from being antagonistic to Caz.

[Nm6k]

For me I tend to try to minmax within my rp chosen limits in order not to do things that would make absolutely no sense for my mc’s to do like in XOR raiding helots with my compassionate mc’s (or not killing all nobles with my ruthless helot) or in Morrowind joining the thieves guild with my honorable Spellsword Nord who has near 0 thief skills. Saying that I still try my best to get my mc to near the end of a game or series and if I need to make changes to their character in order to to so

[Kat_Landrie]

On my initial playthrough I went int 2 cha 1 and was expecting Lenin (narrowly beating cha 2 int 1, Castro) but when int 2 turned out to mostly give me blood magic I just rolled with it, but man, on subsequent playthroughs I always think “brother I sure wish I didn’t have to be a wizard to know how to read”

[apple]

@Kat_Landrie

I always think “brother I sure wish I didn’t have to be a wizard to know how to read”

Unironically as a helot this is really frustrating and it’s what prevents me from really committing to non-Theurge helot builds. With a longer Sojourn would it be possible to spend a time slot learning how to read? Or perhaps asking Ulmey or someone for help in Irduin, on the dl?

[CaptainAcab]

I feel this so bad lmao I’m just trying to do a public education run (max literacy) and i guess I’ll do some magic on the side!!! I take comfort in knowing that, alongside literacy programs, my helot MC will also have a wisardry studies department.

It is minorly frustrating to me that a charismatic helot can’t pursue educating their fellow rebels. I don’t believe you need to be the smartest person in the room to care about education. And it seems likely to me that an INT 1 helot would see the need to build an educational infrastructure even if they might not be the best person to spearhead that endeavor.

I guess it may be possible to do that in later installments if you bump up your int to 2 but that seems dependent on having similar management options as the winter chapter in game one.

[Azthyme]

A truly ancient piece of out-of-game lore from just shy of 11 years ago is that initially we weren’t going to learn Theurgy until Stormwright, I assume under the tutelage of Cerlota.

@Havenstone

And while I’m at it, a public thanks to Adam Morse for his suggestion (well over a year ago now) that the game would be more fun if a high INT player could use Theurgy. Originally I was going to save that for INT 3 (i.e. next game). It would have been quite a different game.

As is, an illiterate helot receiving mentorship from Cerlota or M’kyar in INT does become literate after those lessons, which creates a narrow window for being literate but not being a mage. Though it might be worth making that accessible to characters who are already INT 1 but receive different mentorship? I could see the benefits of a staggered system where basic level literacy becomes available to increasingly low INT levels as time progresses, and incidentally as the protagonist’s experiences and responsibilities grow.

As for literacy programs: what we can pursue in the winter woods is pretty small-scale and very limited. Without a 2 INT helot or an aristo, there aren’t even openly literate people in the Whendward Band. There should be opportunity for that to change as recruitment expands: the Devout/Skeptical and Homelander/Cosmopolitan recruits at the end of Uprising are literate and could theoretically be the foundation of a literacy program for the band; it’s just that they arrived right before the army was due to arrive, and we left the band shortly afterwards. Probably something that would be addressed in the remote rebellion content.

@apple

I can’t think of everything that actually uses Int 3 as a stat.

But yeah, there really isn’t much in Irduin that’s unique to INT 3 that doesn’t involve blood magic.

[CaptainAcab]

Apologies as i do not know how to do quotes in replies but regarding literate followers aside from an MC, I can think of at least one who can be recruited if you play your cards right - although, admittedly, they won’t join until the later weeks hit which doesn’t leave a lot of room for education. There’s two if we extend to the very end of winter - if you, again, play your cards right.

Admittedly, I’m just kind of bitter that i must choose between having literate rebels and being the prophet of kenon as i find them to be complimentary lol

[comradelenin]

@CaptainAcab

Apologies as i do not know how to do quotes in replies

You highlight the words you want to reply to and a little menu pops up. One option should say “quote”.

[apple]

You sure you’re in the right thread IDNLUN?