Thank you to both @idonotlikeusernames and @Havenstone! I never realized that the game has a Facebook page, so I will definitely check it out.
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Hmmm… curiously wondering , could it be something similar to the medieval of Castile, Aragon and Navarra ? while the Empire of Halassur similar to France? 
I always got the impression that Shayard is similar to France, due to the traditional style of names, abundant and fertile farmland, large number of ports, and their significant cultural influence pre-Karagond conquest.
If I remember right, western (or was it eastern?) Shayard is based on the Anglo-Saxons, with the eastern half being more French influenced.
Well… logistically , Shayard looks like Aragon with the Barcelona port 
Then there will be a British Isles somewhere in the North ? Across the sea ? 
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I feel Havenstone probably needs to make a codex or wiki like Cata for all the lore. Shayard is actually an unholy mix of a Franco-British union. You’ll note the part where the mc hails from is more anglo-saxon, while the more affluent southern and coastal regions are more French inspired.
Here’s the guide to Shayard’s major ethnic and cultural divisions.
The other “provinces” of the Hegemony likely have their own divides too, but at the moment only Havenstone knows what they are.
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Definitely. Much like the Sabres series, one of the things I really like about the game is the in-depth world building. Maybe after Havenstone gets the second game up he can start putting together something along the lines of Cataphrak’s Soldier’s Guide. At least, we can always hope. 
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The Soldier guide will be interesting …especially this is a fantasy world with mythical creature and magical troops
Oh yeah… now i have their most powerful magic sword in one of my play through as well 
Does this mean that a straight MC could be pair up with the heir? =O
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I hope so… since he/she is referring to Breden , i would assume we could decide the Heir’s gender based on our preference similar to Breden
Why ? Are you interested to become Queen of the Realm ? 
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I just hope it is not tied to Breden like Simon’s.
≥﹏≤
Maybe… ٩(●˙—˙●)۶
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I seriously don’t think so although i may stay loyal to Suzanne since i find her courtly love and honour above all personality is very appealing , not to mention she is also a skillful knight who pair well with my CHA 2 INT 1 MC 
So, will you allow your king to rule with his absolute power or will you ask him to share half of the ruling power with you ?
@random-dude-78 , i am assuming you also agree that Suzanne is the most appealing love interest thus far ? 
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I have to check out the Heir’s personality first. It would be nice to have the half of the ruling power or if possible, the power behind the throne.
(○ﾟεﾟ○)
I might create another save for the heir so while waiting I might try out Simon’s. XD
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You really should 
although Simon/Suzanne may only have limited scene in Book 1, seems like they will be interesting love interest starting Book 2, i remember the author mention there will be a Ball event in Book 2, which i suspect will be the prefect time for me to ask for Suzanne’s hand…and for Simon to ask for your hand
I already have 2 MC ready for Book 2, one marry with Breden while the other engage with Suzanne … i may consider another Aristocrat MC who didn’t engage with Suzanne but waiting for either Teren or the Heir, i really don’t want to betray Suzanne just to try out Teren/heir
@Ramidel, do you think Calea will be loyal to our course long term ? so far she seems willing to risk it all with my MC …
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Have I missed something? It was mentioned Teren is part of Leaguer faction, but I can’t recall any mention of them…do they differ from the Laconnier somehow
Horion and his fellow-thinkers, the people who want to replace the Hegemony with a koinon.
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The leaguer faction probably wants to realize Horion’s vision of a Shayard-led Koinon. This doesn’t necessarily seem incompatible with Shayard having a Laconnier monarch but I’m guessing the Laconniers would need to make serious concessions to the leaguers in order to make that work as too much overt Shayardene nationalism coupled with a Laconnier monarch who is almost as powerful and possibly tyrannical as the Thaumatarch would be would dis-incentivize the other would-be nations to sign up for the Koinon.
For example there are several monarchies in the EU, but no monarch could take a leading role and they’d have to tolerate a supranational bureaucracy, weak though it may still be in many instances above them and their role as national sovereigns. It would be the same for the Laconniers with regards the Koinon.
Of course my mc has his own ideas which are incompatible with both of those visions, for example he wishes to have a new Union with a stronger central government (think Soviet-Union), not an EU-like, confederal structure. And he, really, really doesn’t like the Laconniers being a bunch of foppish “noble” pretenders who want to revive an idealised past that has never existed. Besides any monarch would at best seem like a Thaumatarch-lite to him.
A foolish idea that would greatly weaken the territory of the former Hegemony by splitting it into at least four nation-states. Besides it would bind my mc to Shayard and prevent him from ever industrializing, as Shayard does not have the mineral resources of Erezza or even, presumably Wiendrj or Nyral. So a Koinon would greatly hinder industrialization and doom Shayard to perpetual pastoral backwardness.
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Not necessarily, depending on how the koinon was established and what powers the federal government in Grand Shayard, Aekos or the new city had. Or, for that matter, what powers the guilds/syntechnia had.
The fact is that any industrializaton will require trade and there’s no reason why Erezza will necessarily become a heartland of industry while Shayard won’t. Industrial production, expansion and development in the late 1800s was still based in agricultural factors, after all. The main thing that will kick off industry everywhere is something you’re already doing - manumitting the helots.
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Hmmmm…most self-respecting European nations still used to be self=sufficient in coal and steel as a matter of principle, even if they needed colonial empires to do so. In our case our industry used to be more fueled by Indonesian resources then what we traded with France, Germany and Britain, which for the most part were the finished, surplus products of said industry, not the raw materials (oil when that came in vogue was a tad more complicated).
Then, again unless the caste system is truly broken a former helot will most likely not be eligible to lead the Koinon, no matter how accomplished they are. There is also the matter that my mc would like to reorganize the administrative divisions away from the currently existing provinces, who would be the basis of the new nation-states for Horion’s koinon and claim Avezia as the capital, something that will not be possible is Erezza is going to be its own, fully independent nation-state, since a Shayardene mc (even though my mc doesn’t feel very Shayardene nor necessarily self-identify as such) risks tearing open that old grievance as the old Shayard Horion and the Laconniers both want to resurrect in one form or another had conquered Avezia once before. And there is simply no other existing city so ideally situated to become the new capital as Avezia seems to be.
Moving on from Havenstone’s Facebook:
“I finally read James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” after years of recommendations from friends. It’s a terrific book, very relevant to my day job–and to my surprise, even more relevant to Choice of Rebels. I’ll try not to be too plagiaristic in how I apply it to Stormwright!”
I vaguely remember having read this in college and some of its generalizations do leave me uncomfortable, his railing against standardized weights and measures felt more like the standard American rant against the metric system that has served most nations of the world quite well for a long time now, despite the sometimes less than gentle measures used to introduce it has become pretty well internalized by a majority of the current global populace and greatly facilitates and simplifies trade and indeed the whole EU and EEC before it projects. It is damned hard to run anything unified when you let every village use its own measurements, “natural” and based on the human scale they may be. Areas where rice is almost never cooked have no use and no understanding of a time measurement given in “three rice cookings”, as one example from that book seems to go, if I recall.
Scott occasionally seems to let a sort of nostalgia for “pre-modern (state)” times cloud his analysis and count on my mc to point out in-game to the Laconniers that old Shayard has not existed for a very long time now and their idealized version of it never has. A return to the free yeomen tending the family farm as the basic economic unit has been made pretty much impossible by the “intensive” farming methods the Hegemony and by extension Shayard now rely on in order to feed their population, and that would be just one example.
Scott also posits himself as an heir to Hayek and an adherent of the Austrian school of economics, now of course even in real-life I do not agree with Austrian economics, but in a society where most people need to be raised from slavery, such as the Hegemony and have little knowledge of, much less a fully-fledged civil society to rely on it would be a particularly poor fit.
He also largely forgets to focus on the more benign and indeed absolutely vital for modern civil society to function sides of population legibility that allow a state to provide policing, public healthcare, standardized education and collect enough taxes to maintain vital infrastructure and engage in wealth-redistribution that makes society more egalitarian and ultimately livable, instead he mostly focuses on how, yes, these things can like everything else humans have ever though of be abused, often in horrific ways, by totalitarian regimes. But modern states and by extension modern society absolutely need measures of population legibility, such as a good census to facilitate modern civilization as the best that can be done without most of the measures Scott seems to object to would be a thoroughly pre-modern feudal civilization of the kind that the Hegemony, at least in its more developed areas and Karagond itself seems to have long surpassed already. Even the faux-feudalism of the backwards areas the mc hails from are backed by far more modern infrastructure and measures of legibility to enable the rigid caste system and theocratic tyranny in the background.
But it is also true that the same sort of Dutch census that got me my education and when I needed it disability payments also facilitated the Nazi’s and their local collaborators to target jews and even gays much more easily then in many of our neighbouring countries. But that instruments like the census and government that make use of them are bad in general is the entirely wrong lesson to take away from that blackest of episodes., in my opinion of course.
For me Hardin’s criticisms in review of it ring more true then most of the premises of Scott’s book itself.
But again, I am of course not free of my own biases and I’m absolutely not an adherent of the Austrian school of economics.
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Well, US states generally weren’t (which bit the Confederacy in the ass when they tried to secede, obviously - but then we don’t want to encourage secession). So in a koinon, trade in basic resources is more likely.
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