Well you can get a really good scene in book 2 (and a achievement) with it but I think Have said there will be others ways to get the knowledge it gets you so probably not. Plus you get healing from being taught by M’kyar in book 2 if you get to int 3
The others in the discord are less squamish then me about getting thier people killed
To be specific you have to lead the force in the road against Hector yourself (so not the ambush force), then sharpen your outlaws’ spears with theurgy. After that do anything except pulling it out (or bluffing Hector with 0 Cha) and you’ll live, learning healing in the process. Do note that with this route you can’t win a perfect victory (but still a victory, with only a handful of casualties), and you’re exposed as a theurge which makes the final battle harder, but its required to unlock healing scenes in the final battle/Xaos-Lands, so up to you if the trade is worthwhile.
I have no major objections to getting some of my people killed when necessary, but I mostly play aristos, so I can stop the hunters without sacrificing troops I’ll need for later on and revealing my theurgy
At the last battle, Hurlphal5, if you manage to use theurgy to crash the ceiling down on the theurges and kill them all, your followers get depressed that you killed theurges.
Set morale -(Theurges*50)
When I’m pretty sure it should be theirmorale that goes down.
I’m not seeing that around hurlphal5 – is that actually the closest label?
In my version, there are only two *set morale -(theurges*x) code snippets – one times 10, one times 15 – and they both show up when the Theurges are whaling on you rather than vice versa.
Any chance you’re playing on a modded version? 
Thanks! My version of hounds.txt goes to a gosub there which reduces theirmorale rather than morale. Maybe that’s a fix I made but haven’t pushed? Next time I send an update, it’ll be sorted.
At chapter 1, 2 int noble mc can teach helots to read and it’s actually increase literacy by 10. Maybe make it 2 int helot get the same advantage too?
Perfect, and since you’re making fixes, we found another bug, or at least an inconsistency in Hounds.txt. If you try to evade the Phalangites, at the moment of evading the encirclement, evading them by night doesn’t affect theirmorale, even if you do it perfectly with 2 int or Elery and all the necessary preparations. Meanwhile, successfully evading them at dawn, hurts theirmorale as much as losing 2 theurges, -100 theirmorale, even though in both scenarios you leave the phalangites looking around like fools where they thought you were encircled, in one they shrug it off, and in the other they get depression.
Also, they get morale from soldiers who never even made it to the fight, as the check to establish theirmorale comes before the check that starts reducing their numbers based on good helot, merchant and aristo rep. Reducing theirmorale by how many didn’t make it would make sense, especially with the helots because they stop the Aristos by getting them all sick.
While we’re talking about leaving at night, there’s one more thing I think is not intended beyond the lack of the theirmorale hit. The code below implies that you’re mean to succeed at leaving at night with less than 44 rebels inwoods irrespective of the strategy.
*if inwoods < 44
*set cas +round(inadults/13)
*if cas < 1
*set cas 1
You slip, scrape, and tumble your way through the seemingly never-ending night, lit by the moon and (for one terrifying hour) the campfires of the Phalangite host far below you.
*if cas = 1
One of your followers breaks her neck in a fall while fording a steep watercourse in the dark.
*if cas > 1
*set d2n_num cas
*gosub d2n_np
$!{display_numb} of your followers are severely injured as you hurriedly ford a stream in the dark; one breaks her neck slipping from a boulder.
But there's few enough of you that you manage to stick together and keep your profile low.
*gosub cascheck
*goto bydawn
which routes to
*label bydawn
By dawn, you regroup for a silent fastbreaking. It takes less than half an hour for everyone to eat, and then you press on again (save a few scouts who hold back to see if you're being followed). Only by mid-afternoon, with no Theurges having appeared overhead all day, do you wearily make camp.
"They're scouring the area they thought they had us trapped in, ${addressu}," Alira reports when she arrives later that day, eyes heavy-lidded but satisfied. "We've got clean away from them. Our safest camp isn't far from here. Tomorrow we'll climb up there; there are caves where we can rest properly."
*goto campsite
This feels like it’s supposed to set lostem true, but the routing occurs to after that variable is set. So if you’re making those other changes, I’d suggest adding a set lostem true and the theirmorale penalty (if you add it to the night escape path) just prior to the *goto bydawn line.
It would be cool if outright avoiding the Fedrel betrayal greatly increased the band’s morale, by something like, a third of our band total, after all, we got them all through a third of the winter without casualties and on healthy rations since week 2.
As it stands now, the band’s morale increases if someone tries to kill you from Radmar lifting their spirits.
I’ve been digging deeper into the hounds.txt code to better understand it for when I get to that part of my LP on Something Awful. I suspect I’ve found another bug, but I’m not sure.
*if (literate > 2) and (helcamp < (literate/2))
Your
*set d2n_num literate
*gosub d2n
literate outlaws (most of whom learned their letters from you during the past year) scrawl additional messages on every tree and slate outcrop they pass.
*set theirmorale -(literate*2)
Here something weird seems to be going on with the (helcamp < (literate/2)) condition. helcamp is only ever set to anything non-zero in strategy 3, and in the strategy 3 prep, you have *set helcamp +(literate*4). Given this, assuming (literate > 2), (helcamp < (literate/2)) is not actually achievable, if my maths is right. It’s only theoretically achievable if you have have bad relations with the helots, yeomanry, less than 2 CHA, Breden isn’t present and you’ve embraced kenon, but seeing as you need 2 CHA to embrace kenon you can never get all the necessary conditions at the same time.
So, is the aim of the (helcamp < (literate/2)) conditional to stop this ever triggering in the case that you’re trying to infiltrate the Rim? So, you’re only meant to get the morale effects from yourself and your lieutenants? If that’s the case, then this is working right.
The reason I’ve assumed this isn’t the case, is that if that were your goal you’d probably have gone with *if (literate > 2) and (strategy != 3). Therefore, I suspect it’s meant to be possible for (helcamp < (literate/2)) to equal TRUE. Was this originally meant to stop people who are no longer there from impacting the morale of the attacking army?
Right, finally getting around to checking these. Really grateful to you all for combing through the mess!
I’ll give +5 for a literate helot MC. An aristo MC who wants Breden’s gang to learn reading has more of a captive audience, but the ones who really want to learn reading clearly still do so from the helot MC.
I could be wrong, but I think the option you’re talking about that earns a -100 theirmorale hit isn’t best described as “evading them at dawn” rather than nighttime. It’s the *if inwoods < 44 option, right? i.e. the one that you’re offered when you have a very small band and you decide from the time the Phalangites first arrive in the wilds to give them no trace of you (rather than e.g. harrying them or littering your backtrail with rebel propaganda).
The text notes that you successfully do that for several weeks before they’re finally able to deploy Plektoi to sniff you out at High Crag. So the low morale represents the frustration of an army that’s been running through a remote wilderness on combat rations for more than a month chasing nothing… an army by now mostly convinced that they’ve been sent on a goose chase by hysterical local aristoi who should have shrugged off the problem and/or dealt with it themselves.
That’s not a mindset that prepares them for the petty rebels suddenly emerging from their warrens to kill Plektoi and Theurges. As and when that happens, it’s a much bigger shock than it would have been if they’d spent the past month facing some degree of resistance or written taunts, rather than just crickets and ghosts.
We could debate whether 100 is the right number to represent that morale hit, but I’m happy to say that it’s at least in the appropriate ballpark, and leave it as is rather than throwing off people’s carefully honed strategies too much.
Those soldiers were there at the big muster, and the rest of the army still have the mindset that they’ll be joining them any time now. The game treats the initial morale of the divided army (into flanking forces, as well as the ones your allies have discreetly slowed down) as being proportionate to the army’s total maximum strength, notwithstanding the fact that it’s split into multiple forces.
That said, both the unexpected sickness (helot) and the absence of one Theurge (aristo) do deserve a minor hit to morale. I’ll add a -10 for each at the next update.
You’re right, it totally should have. 
I’ll move that down to below *label bydawn.
I hear you, and it’s a reasonable idea – but keeping the band well-fed through the whole winter comes with its own intrinsic morale bonuses, and I don’t think I’ll make avoiding a hypothetical betrayal boost it further. Neither Fedrel nor anyone else knows that you prevented his treachery, after all.
That is indeed weird, and you’re 100% right that the effect is to foreclose that bonus to anyone infiltrating the Rim, which would be far more elegantly expressed with (strategy != 3).
I’m pretty sure this is an artifact of the chapter’s piecemeal development. “If you haven’t sent more than half your literate rebels to the Rim” was my tentative condition for whatever was originally going to be here, before sending people to the Rim turned into “all your literate rebels who aren’t named NPCs go back to be seeds of infiltration cells, making it possible for you to send way more people than you otherwise could.”
Anyone who didn’t pick strategy 3 should get morale effects from every literate outlaw, right? A literacy-maximizer might be able to knock 160-ish points off enemy morale here.
I’ll fix this up in the coming update (which I’ll try to push to CoG this evening)…I think the code here also suffers a little from the long-ago use of literate to just track the people you taught, rather than the literate Chapter 3 joiners.
No, while choosing from the start to evade the phalangites with a small band does lead to a -100 morale hit, there’s another way to get it. If you choose a different plan to torment the Archon’s forces, like, say, leaving false trails so they don’t know what they’re looking for, we end up at the choice of trying to avoid phalangites at night or at dawn. And, if we choose to go at dawn, have been preparing for evasion, and have less than 44 followers, then that leads back to *campblurb, where the -100 theirmorale hit is for being a very small party. That’s what we want, we want to absolutely destroy the phalangites morale.
Make it 20 for losing the theurge.
Thanks so much for catching me on that. I’ll move theirmorale -100 to above *label campblurb, since it shouldn’t be a consequence of mere late-hunt humiliation.
I get that that’s the opposite answer of what you were hoping for, but temporarily giving them the slip shouldn’t be morale-destroying.
I thought you were cool Havie.
@Havenstone If you’re looking at this today, just a one more thing that I may as well bring up (and then you’ll be glad to here that’s all I’ve spotted!).
Here:
*label nextwar
*page_break
*if theirmorale < (alltroops/7)
*goto youwon
As far as I can see, every other test like this has both a morale and enemy numbers check, so you can break them if their morale has been shattered or if there are fewer troops left than your outlaws. Should this be *if (alltroops < inadults) or (theirmorale < (alltroops/7))?
Thanks for bringing it up! That’s the first check that could get you to *label youwon, and is accordingly harder to reach than the later ones – not only because the Phalangites aren’t yet super-bothered about whether you outnumber them, but becuse the morale collapse threshold is lower (alltroops/7, as opposed to later checks with alltroops/4 or alltroops/2). I’ll keep it as is for now, but grateful for your checking.
The only thing I can think of if you’re tweaking Uprising beyond reports already made over the past few years is that the prologues could use a numerical balance pass, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. There’s a fair discrepancy between the stat adjustment each opening allows compared to the others. It’s marginal, but it can matter for reaching that 75 breakpoint.
Congrats on finally pushing this update out!
I think I’m going to let the discrepancies there stand – recognizing that it makes a difference for hardcore optimization play, but that it is marginal for the great majority of readers.
Yeah, I did an update in '23 but think I overlooked a few things from earlier feedback. Hopefully getting it fixed now – but if anyone’s fed me a bug report on XoR1 in the last few years and it doesn’t look like it’s fixed by next week, please feel free to remind me!