Mmm not really a code diver so can’t speak to that abd admittly my last played through was quite a while back. So might be misrembering things exspecially for a combat 2 MC but following the typical guide strategy how much of a difference is that acctually equating to number wise? Does it acctually affect choices a com 2 MC has to make? An if you do implement a change like that does it royally bone Cha or Int heavy mcs who chose to fight?
1 Like
To be fair, I don’t think it’s unrealistic that phalangites and nobles would have brought a significant amount of spare arms with them to account for attrition, wear and tear from extended combat, supply lines being cut, etc. If you limit the amount of arms you can get based on how large the army sent after you is, you’re severely decreasing the value of Stand and Fight, since half of the point of fighting at High Crag is to amass an incredible amount of arms that you’d otherwise wouldn’t be in a position to seize for a long time. Getting ~2000 arms from stand and fight requires making other sacrifices anyway (no learning theurgy, MC spends most of the winter recruiting and is unable to lead many raids personally, no de Firiac recruitment, hatred from the nobility), I think the current system is balanced. Charisma MCs should be able to take advantage of mass mobilization at the cost of having to outsource battlefield leadership and earning hatred from the aristocracy, imo.
6 Likes
No not really, i dont think geting that amount of arms was ever intended, IF max number of arms will be dependat on phalangties it will do few thing, 1 will make high notority final battle better as enemy sends more soliders so you can get more arms (no more low anarchy/notoraty unlimited arms) and Second it wont really impact Com 2 or INT 2 characters at all depedning on how it is implemented, only one that will lose out of it will be cha 2 that gose for max recrutment startegy and even Then winning as cha 2 would still be better then winning as com 2 or int 2 becouse cha 2 gets 200-300 more survivors after the battle, i think from balance perspective its quite funny that cha 2 not only leaves battle with much more men but also 100.000 crowns more arms, what my sugested action will do is bring it closer too other two stats(int 2 and com 2 ) and stop it being from overpowerd(at least more then it already is).
lets say that is like that, how manay weapons can you really expect to recover. most loses are spread on wast amount of land, phalangaties takes most casultys when they are comming closer before final battle, those weapons are not recovarable during the figting as we are doing ambushes, we are also lossing a lot of people so its safe to say that we are also losing arms that become unrecavrable and even after we win there is no time and safety to comb wholle forest to recover arms, us geting even 1 to 1 arms when compared to wholle host would probably be wastly optimistic autocme then it can be realisticly expected. We are not doing some open field battle where we can easly strip enemy from its equipment.
it wont really impact any strategy except one where you evacuete your troops but then get caught and have to stand and fight and can win. Probably wont even impact that that much. proposed adition should have negligable effect on most plathroughs. it at least is not changing anything form my com 2 i woud say same should hold true for most players if not all of them. Int 2 and cha 2 are not geting affected at all.
4 Likes
I would say it’s reasonable to imagine a force of elite noble phalangities carrying extra weapons. I believe it was mentioned that this tagma was one deliberately chosen due to its composition being primarily of nobles. Nobles have backup swords, bandits/rebels probably are just trying to put steel in everyone’s hands, being much more flexible in their definition of being armed.
Noble phlangites, regular nobles & their accompanying retinues carry more weapons than their sum total likely multiple times over. Nobles especially since they are aiming to bring glory to their names, wouldn’t want their peers to think them too poor to properly arm themselves.
2 Likes
That’s why I believe having more survivors left after the clash should net more arms being scavenged from the field. It’s not like the band is inexperienced in looting the corpses of the dead(while being chased). One example would be fighting the alastors at the Owlscape pass, you can kill & loot the alastors who are actively hunting you down in the forest.
2 Likes
i mean it still should, just that there upper limmit should exist. cha 2 getting 800-1000 more arms from battle at some points becomes balancing nightmare
yhea you get to end last battle with 200-300 more people alive 
and i mean you could also get more arms somthing like 200 not 1000.
whats happening now is just games codes explotation and gaming of narative moment (at least in my opinion)
3 Likes
Nobles do not join the phalangites as rankers. Its officers are primarily composed of provincial nobility, but the actual people with their boots on the ground are randos plucked up from the cities and villages and told to march. They have the sword they’re issued, and thats likely about it. The ‘noble retinues’ that join in are likely worse armed, with pikes or improvised clubs, likely some bowmen as well. These are formations lead by the nobility, not formed of them.
(Also the phalangite formation we fight is not “elite” in any particular way, it just has experience fighting brush rebellions like ours. de Arquin doesn’t seem particularly pleased to be in the ass end of nowhere trying to put us down, I can’t imagine there is much prestige in this work over the Hallasur front.)
7 Likes
I don’t think it would really change the strategies. The difference between facing zero troops and nine troops is fairly minimal, and the minmaxed 2COM build uses only 150 traps.
The basic guide for the minmaxed 2COM/1INT build is this.
2COM/1CHA is slightly better, but gets the same outcome.
In Chapter 1, you will say “Stop, the merchants are your flesh and blood” while trying to stop the Harrowing, this gives you the extra Homelander points you need for the bonus. (For roleplaying, pretend that your character initially wanted to win over Shayardene elites, but after that failed, committed to a path of vengeance).
In Chapter 3, you kill off Horion/Linos and show off their bodies, and ambush Hector while Kalt fights him.
Chapter 4 is fairly straightforward, and you’ll get a flawless victory. Note that in 2INT, you cannot attack Theurges without losing Kalt, so I don’t do that.
Chapter 2 Winter Guide:
Week 1: Scout for mule raid, beg mules with Breden, steal mules from Yeomen and Merchants, Scout Telone Raid, then remainder (65) go steal food from Yeomen
Week 2: Buy as many bushels as possible, have Breden go and recruit with everybody
Week 3: Steal mules from mine/monastery, then check how many bushels you need, multiply by 10/7, round up, add 2, and send that many people to raid Yeomen farms. Rest recruit with Radmar
Week 4: NOW switch your rations to healthy, raid Tithe Barn farm with all mules (do not scout), have Breden recruit
Week 5: Breden recruits with everybody
Week 6: Steal mules from Merchants, Steal grain from nobles, have rest recruit with Breden
Week 7-10. Remember to scout Noble raid in Week 7, and reserve mules for the sick. In Week 8, Sell 1 mules and buy 43 bushels, round off the rest with Yeomen Raids.
Noble Barn Raid in Week 9. In Week 10 you’ll do the Noble Raid, and switch rations back to Subsistence for Healthy, Healthy for Sick if necessary.
And in Week 10 have Elery steal from the Merchants (optional).
50 traps each in weeks 8-10
Recruiting
Week 7: All Breden
Week 8: All Radmar
Week 9: All Breden
Week 10: All Radmar
9 Likes
You are correct, the rank & file phalangites are commoners. The quote below from Stormwright had me thinking that perhaps they dispatched a special tagma comprised of more nobles. The quote likely meant the tagma sent was just a properly trained one, not one of the more typically less trained conscript tagmas.
“Where they can keep the peace, Auntie,” cousin Joet counters, sounding somewhat apologetic. “Last year they sent a single tagma of your well-trained noble Phalangites to quell the Rim Commotion …and it sprang up again almost as soon as they’d left. If the Archon had sent all of Vaulens’s garrison, with its thousands of conscripts, it would have ground the rebels into the dirt.”
After analyzing the spoils from the Clash of High Crag and doing some arithmetic I have concluded that if a typical player faces roughly ~500 enemy troops the gains in armaments from such a fight make little sense numerically on its face. However if we account for the following factors the spoils begin to make much more sense:
Experienced(well trained) soldiers go into battle prepared against the possibility of weapon failure, they likely have many backup weapons to fall back upon like an extra:
spear, sword, axe, mace, dagger, or pair of javelins.
The phalangites have architectoi who used axes to fell trees, stakes, and set camp. Likely having many steel tools that could be reused for the purposes of war by the looting rebels. (spades, mauls, & hammers)
Noble retinues are often a mark of prestige, to arrive at the great muster with too few bodyguards or too poorly equipped levy/man-at-arms makes a noble look weak.
If we agree that the archons forces came well equipped and the band did a good job looting the battlefield(including their own dead) then the numbers are certainly possible. (even if much of the equipment was damaged beyond repair in the fighting, or lost/scattered in numerous clashes in the forest)
7 Likes
Curently cha 2 can end battle with more then 500-550 adult followers which means geting 1500-1650 weapons. i cant see world that those poor 500 phalangites could even physicaly bring that much weapons, It would not be realistic if these was done in field battle where every arm could be recoverd much less in gurela campaign where dead bodys are all over mountain. i also dont look at phalangites like medieval soliders max weapons they could carry is 2, main weapon and side arm not 3+ which is neaded to get numbers that we are curently getting.
My main problem with these check is that it is only dependat on one factor which is how many people you have allive at the end which helps Cha 2 to determinat of all other classes.
3 Likes
My view of this is that there’s enough randomness in a playthrough that at most +9 enemies is unlikely to shift a strategy from works reasonably often to won't work at all. Our own follower count varies from sickness + death RNG in the winter and Hector’s veneurs kill anywhere between 11 and 20 followers (for a sufficiently large rebellion) in Chapter 3. Most strategies probably have buffer against this randomness as a result of being made by playtesting more than theory.
But since we’re looking at Uprising bugs, I guess it’s time to report a couple other lingering bugs related to the battle.
Bugs
Zvad as a flank commander is missing the same code as the other commanders that caps Phalangite casualties to 55 which leads to his flank killing more Phalangites than there are facing him.
*if phalcas > 55
*set phalcas 55
This eats into the total number of Phalangites outside of the flanking forces.
There’s a bug in winter that gives up to 20 extra traps if you set enough to hit diminishing returns (after 75 total followers on traps, 150 for Jailbreak runs):
*if traps < 50
*set traps +round(trapfoll/3)
*if traps >= 50
*set traps +round(trapfoll/5)
On the week that you from below 50 to above 50 traps, both checks will be true sequentially, resulting in a max of 20 extra traps. Simplest fix, if we were to fix it (since this is all backend numbers, no reader would actually notice this, and it even adds some non-linearity to the followers → traps curve), is to swap the order of the two checks.
In Chapter 3, the Compassionate/Ruthless follower surge doesn’t update nonkids.
*set morale +78
*set followers +53
This affects the battle because nonkids is used to count how many adults are in the woods. This doesn’t affect the gameplay much and nonkids gets recalculated after the battle in a way that corrects this,
but during the battle, the stats page will miscount and overall there will be slightly fewer deaths.
On the topic of arms, I’m ambivalent. There’s already a 1-year timeskip where we’re in the Xaos-lands. I’m not sure how relevant the exact number of arms post-battle will be by the time we get back, past the core idea of “more than enough weapons to arm the band and future recruits for a while”. I guess that’s a question for Rim management though.
7 Likes
Thanks – fixed these for the next update!
5 Likes
@Jaher reminded me about another bug, this time during the Plektoi chase. There are already safeguards that stop the bees from killing a Plektos twice. But there’s a specific sequence of choices after killing the first Plektos that let it happen twice:
Get myself to cover. They can find me!← bee #1I want to find a narrow tunnel that could be defended by just a few followers."If we make enough noise, we may draw the Plektos back to us and save them."Retreat down another tunnel I explored long ago—I'm sure there's an opportunity there to trap the beast.← this is the bug, bee #2
This happens because the check for retreating down that tunnel is *if ((s_rel < 9) and (campsite > 0)), which is missing the (campsite < 5) that other checks use to stop the double-dipping. I think the updated check would be:
*if ((s_rel < 9) and ((campsite < 5) and (campsite > 0)))
To be safe, the next check could probably also be updated:
*if ((s_rel > 9) and (campsite < 5))
#Retreat down the tunnel ${simon} used to get here—
I also want to take this opportunity to remind people how great the bees are. Uprising has a handful of setpieces that feel like a classic adventure story (Theurgically bursting the dam in the Alastor mule raid or the Odyssean sheep escape from the Brecks also come to mind), and this one – fleeing from an unstoppable monster, only surviving through quick thinking and awareness of your surroundings (and, admittedly, violence) – does that very well:
Then the Plektos surges into view with an exultant howl and the sound of breaking rock. Spinning away, you flee along the narrow path, eyes desperately searching the mass of vines. One vine jumps and twitches: a rope, lowered by the outlaws overhead. You catch it with both hands, push yourself into a sprint and feel the line grow taut. When the ledge narrows to a tiny lip, you try to run along the cliff wall…until your feet slip away at last, sending you careening out over the void.
Clinging to the rope, you spin round helplessly to see the Plektos’s spiked tail whip toward you—and fall short by inches as the ledge disintegrates under its weight. It scrabbles for purchase, steely claws digging into the rock face as it draws back its tail for another strike. And a thousand furious bees ascend from the space where their hive had been.
The white-bees of the Whendward are famously aggressive, protecting their miserly amount of honey with stings long and venomous enough to make a bear think twice. While they can’t pierce the Plektos’s skin, they swarm vengefully around its eyes and snout. The monstrous hound bellows and bats at them with one paw and its tail while jerking its head wildly from side to side.
The hound’s Theurge keeper flies out of the tunnel before grasping what ails the beast. He screams as the bees envelop him too, flying up his coat sleeves and the gap in his cowl. Alira’s first arrow bounces off his coat, but by the time the second one hits him, he’s lost all concentration. As its Theurge topples, the Plektos loses its grip on the cliff and plunges downward with a final wail.
13 Likes
Thanks so much! Also now updated these.
5 Likes
I was just testing, and I’m pretty sure it’s possible to complete XoR: Uprising with INT 2 without publicly using Theurgy (at least with the version of Uprising on the Play store). I played as someone who didn’t stop the harrowing and was rescued, and later decided to evade the army. We successfully threaded the needle, so we needed to deal with three Plektoi. I killed the first with one of the Theurge-forged spears, killed the second with bees, and my deputy killed the third with the other spear. I didn’t use Theurgy at all in chapter 4; in fact, I didn’t have the option to use Theurgy when facing the first Plektos:
You may want to change this so that Theurgy needs to be used, for the sake of simplifying branches (and consistency with Stormwright).
7 Likes
Don’t listen to them Havie, they’re jealous of you and want to dull your spark, you should instead continue on with the secret theurge storyline even if it requires writing half a book worth of content, it doesn’t matter if it’ll take another 3 years, it’s worth it.
6 Likes
Agreed!
3 Likes
Hmm. Or maybe this can stay as the weird exception where people who played G1 have the option to be supersecret superTheurges through G2 as long as they got the plekspear? I don’t think that would actually require all that much of a content shift, @maximo_caseres notwtihstanding. 
I’ll have a look and see how that would affect G2. Regardless, thanks so much for catching this.
7 Likes