I always play as a noble, a charming one to be specific and I like the game so far.
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Wow, everyone’s in camp Noble! I feel a little left out! Okay, time to make my case a bit stronger.
I do think that one of the most satisfying things about being a helot is the ability to prove everyone wrong. They said helot rebellions fail? They said that helots can’t be as smart/charismatic/athletic as a noble? Make them eat their words!
As a noble, there’s no flare, no drama, no pizazz; of course a noble would have a successful rebellion, yawn. But as a helot, you bring the fire and the style! You get to shock the world and decide the new order out of a society who spat on you and everyone like you! Talk about a game-changer!
I’m exaggerating a bit 
but I do think helots are really satisfying to play! You’re clawing your way up from the absolute bottom of a pile, and succeeding in that feels really good.
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I agree with you on that Yarnball, but I would like a Noble because it makes me feel comfortable, etc
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You’re right. I slipped up myself recently in a post on FB referring to it. 
Szeric was never part of Olde Shayard – the terrain was too remote and difficult for a pre-Theurgic state to control. The Whendward Pass into Szeric wasn’t any more popular back then than it is today; and even the Owlscap Pass, which runs into a series of valleys descending north and east to Stezyc, was Wiendish hill tribe territory back then. The Shayardene incursion into “Steswick” was out of the river valleys of the northern Westriding, not coming across the hills from the Rim; the border between contemporary Shayard and Whendery there is more a valley than a pass.
Teren is the most prominent leader under 30 in the Leaguer faction.
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Going to be interesting to meet them - How an MC who’s Cosmopolitan (and if possible whilst being a Cosmopolitan, romance them) and wants to unite the Provinces, or a Homelander who’s a Laconnier supporter, or dismisses the idea of a League.
Any chance of getting them to compromise? 
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No, but you can take them by force, if you so wish, I mean that is how “nobility” traditionally got started.
My own helot mc on the other hand prefers the idea of a casteless, classless society and is more likely to simply make up the titular job descriptions for new government positions of authority as he goes along.
I think it feels even better to reject the livestock status of not only the mc personally but all the others and prove that the Hegemony criminally under utilises talent as just from our little podunk backwards, backwoods town we can have two world class mages (2-Int helot mc and Yebben) that the Hegemony was content to waste as livestock.
The helot mc has lived through the worst of the Hegemony’s constant dread and oppression themselves and those really are things that the nobles, even one as insignificant and impoverished as the noble mc is at the start simply cannot fathom. It’s an experience you need to have lived to truly comprehend it.
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Hello Guys!
Hmmm…I don’t recall this, but I go on hiatus from this forum every so often so it’s possible I missed something.
I don’t suppose you could get the maker of the new map to fix it?
The original map makes it appear that there are two approaches to Whendery from Shayard, through the hills north of the Rim, and westward through the gap south of Vendrine that was cut by the network of rivers that flow downward to Corlune. That entirely lines up with what you’ve said above.
The snazzy new map makes the pass north of Rim Square look very large, and I suppose that’s what I was going by. (It’s been awhile since I played the game, so my memory of the in game text describing the pass is very sketchy.) It also appears potentially even more easily traversable (no pesky hills) through the same wide pass along the opposite side of the river that flows down to Grand Shayard. Then there is the possibility of a small pass directly north of Grand Shayard given the slight gap in the border mountains there. I suppose the moral of the story is that the original map, while less pretty, is more accurate.
My MC will try to thread the needle between the Lanconniers and Leaguers, hopefully being able to eventually co-opt the majority of both, channelling Lanconnier nationalism into something more along the lines of post-WW2 American patriotism that is still internationalist in outlook. A lot of Europeans tend to assume nationalism must be xenophobic given their own experiences with it, but the distinction between nationalism and patriotism is a very blurry thing, and for the second half of the 20th centurty US citizens exhibited both patriotism (many would say nationalism) and internationalism simultaneously. Powerful leaders who embrace nationalism have the ability to not only use it as a social glue, but they also have the ability to put their stamp on how that nationalism is exhibited. Just compare former US President Reagan’s internationalism with current US President Trump’s isolationism.
I think much will depend on the character of the other resistance movements that are spawned during the Hegemony’s collapse, both inside and outside of Shayard, their relative size and power compared to the MC’s movement, how they and the MC react to each other, and how you spin those reactions to your supporters. We won’t immediately see successor states forming with complete control over the exact borders of the old satrapies.
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They don’t have to agree with you to romance you. But you’ll have your work cut out for you arguing them into a different perspective.
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Hello Fellow Players! Can someone please explain to me the ROs and their personalities? Please and Thank you.
Yep, it does for my mc of the resistance movements we know of I think the Laconniers will only ever be enemies second only to the Hegemony itself, as their narrow, monarchical conception of Shayard is diametrically opposed to anything my mc would value.
He also wouldn’t like the Leaguers as he doesn’t see much appeal to the Shayard-led Koinon either and they are still a bunch of nobles, but they are already obviously less bad than the Laconniers, but any deals with them would still be a deal with the devil to my mc.
On the other hand if he can get Cabel’s rebellion into a big tent coalition it may be worth making some compromises, while he will never be a Shayardene nationalist in either the broad or narrow sense the main problem he has with Cabel’s rebels is that he thinks their ideal of the family owned (yeoman) farm as the cornerstone of the rural economy is not particularly viable in this day and age.
That is in fact something my mc may be wrong about as it may actually be a superior model to the collective farms he envisages provided some other bright spark can invent something like the cooperative model of farming that made my own tiny country a great agricultural producer by allowing all those family farms to unite in cooperatives that did allow them to mechanise and compete in economies of scale…which is at present my mc’s main objection to Cabel’s main policy goal.
And one of the other aspects of Cabel’s rebellion may be a boon for my mc, if properly utilised, in that Cabel’s rebellion is mainly concerned with the Anglo-Saxon bits of Shayard which would fit in nicely with my mc’s goals of splitting up the current giant provinces into more manageable chunks as future provinces (or states, depending on how much federalisation is needed).
As for the others, come to think of it, even my mc already has one thing that may be vaguely comparable to a title as the the Wiends in the band always seem to bombard the mc into being the nominal head of a new Wiendish Clan, which seems to be necessary to get Wiends from diverse clans and backgrounds to join up in the first place without killing each other over the feuds of their old clans.
So we’ll have to find out whether this will become a boon or a hindrance in the future, but it does already remove him quite a bit from being a Shayardene nationalist.
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If I’m not mistaken, you also need theurged-up wheat if you’re going to keep a bloodless (albeit partially mechanized) Shayard as a breadbasket.
One thing you likely can’t do through mechanization alone is monoculture farming. Without access to blood, engineered crops or petroleum fertilizer, you need to employ crop rotation and the use of animals and dung to keep the land fertile. And you need the equivalent of a Norman Borlaug dwarf wheat strain if you want to keep production at levels that won’t necessitate a die-back.
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Here you are! @WarMaster999
Breden: Charismatic helot, clever and charming. You meet Breden at the beginning of the game and your relationship with them is very important to the start of your rebellion.
Simon/Suzanne de Firiac: A blademaster noble who is chivalrous and traditional.
Kalt/Kala: A hotheaded helot who is ruthless and bloodthirsty.
I didn’t want to give too much away about their personalities, but I hope this helped! As a note, you can only meet Simon/Suzanne if you don’t meet Kalt/Kala, and vice versa.
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@yarnball is there any kind noble like nice, kind, compassionate, etc
And What do you mean Traditional?
All true, just posted that to show that my mc is open to some necessarily painful compromises with other rebels who are not diametrically opposed to his vision. If it should really prove to be necessary to defeat either the Hegemony or the Laconniers he could even do a deal with the devil with the Leaguers, though of course preferably it won’t come to that.
Buying seeds and livestock at scale was one of the primary functions of the cooperatives and the largest eventually went on to found our two agricultural universities mainly to research and produce better seeds, tractors, crop harvesters, etc.
As for the fertiliser as long as no truly bloodless method is found agricultural theurges can be employed by cooperatives just as easily as they can be by the planter aristocracy, even if they are far too expensive for any single family farm to employ individually. They can even start training them themselves if they found the game world equivalent of our agricultural universities eventually as liberalisation of education, including access to magical knowledge is still one of my mc’s core policies.
The cooperative is still something that has to be thought out by someone other than my mc himself as he has no experience with family farming and the aforementioned doubts about whether it is even a viable alternative to the giant plantations of today’s Hegemony, but he could certainly see the value of the idea if someone were to pitch it to him.
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@WarMaster999 I’d say that Suzanne/Simon is nice and kind! I think you should make your own judgement about them, though. And what I mean by traditional is that there are guidelines for courting/relationships that the nobility abide by, and Suzanne/Simon wants to pursue a traditional relationship in that sense. It’s a bit complicated to explain without giving a lot away, but it’s very interesting to learn about and explore!
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@yarnball Thank you so much! I shall never forget this! And by the way, do you have discord?
It’s less that and by the time you overthrow the Hegemony you’re going to be in a massive famine already due to the population already being artificially inflated far beyond sustainability due to our reliance on magic to maintain harvests capable of feeding the Hegemony.
There’s also the fact you’ll run out of nobles and yeomanry to harrow unless you conquer more territory.
Since I stated this before, the deathblow to the Hegemony happened the moment Hera the Immortal was assassinated and her son locked the borders down to deal with the presumably large scaled violent revolts of the conquered populations.
This allowed for Hallasur to rebound and fortify the isthmus and also with the loss of momentum the Hegemony could no longer do the mass campaign of attrition with the heavy casualties it’d entail without violent revolts due to the unsustainable political system that was implemented.
Something I’d point you to is the Northern Zhou and Tang Dynasty’s Equal Field Policy which can be considered the first times that a Government was able to maintain the belief that cultivatable land belonged to the government and they had the right to place farmers and allot land as needed.
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WarMaster, if you don’t mind spoilers for what I’m broadly planning in Games 2-5, here are the other planned ROs from the next game or two.
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I presume the Karagond commanders and mage-lords sided with Hera’s son more out of: “let’s defend the conquests then go back to scheming and plotting each other’s demise when they are once again on their hands and knees begging for mercy.”
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