Choice of Rebels: Uprising — Lead the revolt against a bloodthirsty empire!

[Norilinde]

@idonotlikeusernames

Geographically I’ve hardly made it a secret since my mc can easily see the same once he gets access to even half-decent maps. There is but one choice for him and that is and will always remain Avezia. As it seems to lie on one of the most strategical locations in the Hegemony already and that again would only be enhanced by future infrastructure.

In particular it seems that since the Hegemony gets perhaps most of the materials it needs to feed its more conventional industry from Erezza already it should be relatively easy, not to mention much more efficient to industrialize Avezia then it would be to ship all those materials to distant Grand Shayard.

It should allow for a powerful navy and if it all goes very well even the Grand Canal. It is also both politically and geographically neither Shayardene nor Karagond, which is likely a plus for a new Capital.

Courtesy of @Havenstone’s Facebook:

@idonotlikeusernames

Grand Shayard for my mc would be even worse than keeping Aekos as he does not want to be perceived as a Shayardene homelander and would like to build a new central or federal state, not Horion’s idea of the Shayard-led Koinon.

Besides the current huge provinces, particularly Shayard and Karagon itself desperately need to be broken up into more manageable districts.

But Grand Shayard specifically is the powerbase of the Shayardene nobility and likely the Laconnier conspiracy, which makes it less than fertile territory for my mc.

From the XOR 1 WIP thread:

Unfortunately, the Halassurqs were unable to make progress up the isthmus toward Karagon, so the Nyr were left to fight largely alone. They held their own for a while, but after a decade of war the Thaumatarch Hera dropped a mountain on Nyrnakan, marking the end of Nyrish liberties (and religion). Forty years after that, the Broracha’s infamous Goety catastrophically backfired, creating the Xaos-Lands… and leaving Halassur with no independent allies against the Hegemony.

My MC would view building the new capital either on top of or beside the ruins of the old Nyrish capital as a useful statement of the rebellion’s ideology. The fact that such a capital would be in the homeland of skepticism would suit my MC perfectly.

@Havenstone

This will be explained in the first chapter of Game II (which I’m currently writing), so your speculations will soon–“soon”?–be confirmed.

Yay ! I realize this is a matter for the future, but when testing on XOR 2 begins, I think if it does not already exist then there needs to be some sort of system for the WIP to read in the variables from the end of XOR 1. Merely picking a few choices along the lines of skipping ahead to Chapters in XOR 1 could leave a lot of bugs undiscovered. The Steam save files get uploaded to COG so maybe some way to access uploaded saves or perhaps like how @jeantown’s amazing Guenevere WIP gives the save state at various points.

@Havenstone

For now, I’ll just say that if it were possible to substitute tree sap, the Harrowers would be tree-munching machines and this would be a very different story.

Well it may depend on how closely human nature carries over.

As @cascat07 pointed out:

Actually I do think the Hegemony probably internally has wrestled many times with their system that even its proponents seem to see problems with (the possible exception of the Theruges we fight themselves). Their problem is the society is founded on dehumanizing the helots and any attempt to reverse that makes one question the whole thing. In the calculation of those in power the dangers external to the Hegemony are far more horrific and justify the ones going on inside of it. Hopefully that calculus is in err but ultimately the equation requires therugy in some quantity to sum to something greater than zero.

The Hegemony admitting that there were an alternative to treating the helots as divine fuel would mean admitting that their religion had lied from the beginning. Even if the Hegemony could claim that the purpose of helots had changed to something other than fuel, it would be unacceptable to those in power for the helots to decide that being something more than fuel means the helots should have rights.

Furthermore there may also be industrial/commercial reasons to continue producing and maintaining Harrowers along the lines of oil companies pursuing renewable energy patents for decades while publicly opposing renewable energy.