Thank you very much for understanding! The invite link for the discord is https://discord.gg/kPFvKu5. Hopefully I will do a better job keeping it alive than the last attempt!
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Are you sure the two of us played the same game? 
I still find CHA runs to be the hardest, even after having played the game countless times by this point! I never really understood how to get the number of followers up enough to engage in proper suicide bombing, or simply steamrolling the Archon with number. Initially, the times when I’ve managed to get a CHA 2 build to work was more by luck - rather than any coherent overarching strategy. I’ve at least worked out some of the mechanics of CHA 2 characters now, simply from testing as many choices as possible, but really it is a surprise to me that people feel it is much easier to make solid moves on a CHA 2 build. Well, any discussion of which choices are the most intuitive for new players is entirely subjective anyway, like you rightly pointed out. Still, the difficulty I had initially with getting any form of mild success with a CHA 2 build made me think it was likely a shared experience across the fandom. I guess my experience likely differs largely due to my fear leading me to spam traps on my very first playthrough, which maybe is not something most new players would do. Also, I must say I very much enjoy playing these IF games as brutally and ruthlessly as possible, not surprising I would find a more subtle/nuanced approach more counter-intuitive, eh? Nonetheless, I have to say I am also surprised at how much we differ even on our opinions of which COM build is easier! I definitely found playing as a helot Spartacus type character much easier than the Cavalier one you proposed above. So credit to @Havenstone for creating a game where the game is challenging in completely different ways for different people!
By the way, Havenstone, I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen in playthroughs where the MC gets all the adults slaughtered but manages to rescue the children from the camp. Are the children just going to die without any adults looking after them? Or will they band together and somehow managed to lead the rebellion without the MC? Also, if the MC further delays revealing his theurgy, would it be possible for him to reveal his theurgy abilities in later books for even more devastating effects?Destroying all the enemy theurges in one fell swoop at the end of the first book was already epic enough, but it would be even more awesome to bring down the floating palace on Aekos. That would probably be the single most satisfying delayed gratification in CoG history, if it’s an option Probably wishful thinking on my part, but I immediately thought of that when I read about it in the reference. Apologies if both questions have already been asked before, but navigating the mega thread mess that is the Infinite Sea has already proven difficult enough. I’m afraid navigating the XoR pages hasn’t been much easier.
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Happy to report that Choice of Rebels has now accumulated 1520 Google Play ratings… just barely edging out the original Heroes Rise (which however has a significantly higher score). I’d need another thousand or so ratings to be in competition with Metahuman or Choice of Robots, so this is likely to be where XoR ends up sitting in the list of most-reviewed CoG games.
Warmest thanks to Nadhief, the latest reviewer: “Confusing story and there’s too many weird elements that seems unnecessary and there’s a lot of things happening at once, though, I can recommend this to people that have a lot of spare time and patience.” 
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Time to make that 1521
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I’m glad it worked out that way. 
I should be clear that the process of doing so involved throwing a whole lot of stuff at the wall and tinkering with it on repeat playthroughs until it reached something vaguely resembling balance. There was no grand cunning masterplan. I’m constantly surprised myself by the different ways that people find to play through it.
I’m glad you asked, because I had no recollection that that was a possibility. It’s been a long time since I wrote the “rescue from the camp” options. Let me look at that and consider the answer – but it definitely won’t be “they’re all slaughtered.” Kids are too resourceful for that.
That can’t be done. To reduce one of the majillion things I’ve got to remember in the next game, the Ch 4 Plektos attack is the last possible point in Game 1 where you can be a secret Theurge. If you’re an INT 2 character, you have no choice there but to use those powers to save your life from the hound, in a way that will have been visible to the scouts of the enemy force.
So from Game 2, anyone continuing on the Theurge track will be a known Theurge. Perhaps a guilty one who really doesn’t like using it, but not a secret one. An INT-1 character who upgrades under Cerlota’s tutelage will similarly face a gate where public use of powers is the only alternative to death.
There will be satisfaction to be had in bringing down the Floating Palace on Aekos, if genocidal vengeance is your thing, but it won’t be as a secret Theurge.
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At first read, and without some background knowledge and information from the CoG forum, it could leads to some confusion for readers who are new to interactive fiction, however i don’t think there are unnecessary weird elements . With patience and invested time , choice of rebels is a game/fiction that will hook you up with the deep personality and massive drama of the game world.
It is a good thing that CoG forum serve as a platform that can guide readers into understanding a deep story such as XoR and at the same time give insightful information about the happenings in the world
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The destruction from bringing the Palace down will be on a genocidal scale? Ok, I was more thinking that it would be an easy way to destroy the military capabilities of the city, and remove an important symbol of the Thaumatarchy. Also, it seems also like poetic justice to me, dispatching the Thaumatarch in such a fashion - considering all those years ago the first Thaumatarch dropped a mountain on Nyrnakan. Murdering millions of people, however, seems inadvisable, if that’s what dropping the Palace would entail. I would definitely like to not wipe out a significant proportion of my future empire’s population. Is the Palace that big? How does it compare with the major palaces of our world?
Glad to hear. I always imagined it would be funny if the children lock the MC up when he/she returns from the Xaos-Lands, and he/she has to persuade them that they actually need help running the rebellion, but maybe that’s a bit far fetched. I can just imagine Pin saying something along the lines of “you left us to die”, with a completely dead-eyed expression. Well, maybe funny is the wrong word, but it definitely would be an interesting scene.
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It’s a big floating hill with palaces built all over it, with a handful of bridges tethering it to the ground far below. The slums in its shadow house a couple of hundred thousand people–not millions, but still a lot more than many MCs will want to pulverize. The slum dwellers are also mostly drudges and the free urban poor rather than soldiers, Alastors, or other obvious targets of the rebellion (a couple thousand of whom do live mostly on the Floating Palace, but still, proportionality).
Ha! While this won’t happen in the game, I’d totally read a fanfic of that.
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Indeed, more appropriate to land it then loot it and finally abandon the ruins, which incidentally is also the recipe for the rest of Aekos. My mc would probably want to raze the city and that palace but given that by that time it would be a waste of useful labour and there are other projects that are actually useful that could use that labour what will probably happen is evacuation of people and industry, looting and then abandoning the ruins to their fate.
Right. XoR was my first interactive fiction game (bought it on the release day Steam sale). I immediately found the setting to be new, interesting, and compelling…but the game itself was hard, and my rebellion quickly turned into machine food in Chapter 4. I’m glad I stuck with it though, it’s a really deep, rewarding, and fun game.
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I’m sure Havenstone already knows this, but I’ll emphasize for the audience:
Much is made about the importance of originality, but it’s much easier to get people to buy into your original work if it reformulates some things they are familiar with. However, those things will be different from audience to audience.
Choice of Rebels draws heavily from European myth and history. For example, many readers here will instantly get that the Karagond Hegemony is a rough analogue of the Byzantine Empire (both combine Roman-inspired autocratic political structures with Greek-inspired culture and ethnicity with Christian-inspired religion).
But we live in a world where young people are baffled by Trivial Pursuit questions about “East Germany” (true story from a bar night: they were unaware there ever was an East Germany.) And the Byzantine Empire is much more removed in time from us than the Cold War. For a lot of readers coming from that background, something like the Karagond Hegemony probably comes across as impenetrably alien.
The same point can be made for the magic system. Elemental and blood magic are well-established within fantasy,* but the genius of Choice of Rebels is that it blends and reworks them into something brand new and unique. But while fantasy fans really appreciate it, people who aren’t familiar with the genre may also find it impenetrable.
*In the past I actually thought Havenstone had taken the blood magic factory stuff from a celebrated Civilization IV mod called “Fall From Heaven,” wherein one of the factions (and apparent fan favorite) is the Calabim, a vampiric aristocracy that uses blood harvested from human thralls to power up its vampiric nobles and fuel brutal wars of conquest.
Of course in that game you are the “Hegemony,” focused on how you can optimize the blood harvest of restive human populations. I must say it was an odd switch to be playing as the rebels.
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Listening to this as I write.
“Oooh ooh, writing Rebels just for kicks
Gonna finish it in 2066…”
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Still faster than GRRM!
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Thanks for sharing. Hope it will improve in the next update
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Forgive my ignorance, I am not well versed in the study of history, but may I ask a question? Do you mean to say that the army officers underreported the size of their formations, and that lead to being short-staffed? How did that come about in a series of events? I apologize of the answer seems obvious, but I would be grateful if you would please extrapolate, as it is quite interesting.
I believe he meant to say overreporting.
“Why, yes, we have a full 200 men in our unit, we’ve taken no casualties, can we have pay, equipment and fodder for them?”
turns to the 100 men
“Have a drink on me while I count all this money.”
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I am a very recent XoR fan, but very quickly became very invested in it. Had been missing a deep new fantasy-ish universe that would hook me, and this made me fondly reminisce my old days of getting into the Darkover fictional universe. I joined the Choice of Forums to better follow progress and discussions surrounding this work. 
I have checked around to try to find an answer for this, but may I ask if any fanwork created based on/inspired by XoR can/should be posted in this topic, or would it go elsewhere?
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I’ve always wanted a fanwork thread like that one for the Infinite Seas. See if @Havenstone would want it. At the moment there’s a Discord server though, so you might join that.
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There used to be a fanworks thread, but we closed it in a fit of forum-tidying.
You’re welcome to post fanworks here! Or to start a “Fanworks” section on the Fandom Wiki, where they’re less likely to get lost as the years go by.
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Thank you for taking the time to reply!
I think so as well, but I wanted to be certain and I’m just waiting for their answer (if ever they should, life is busy after all). Anyway, thank you again!