I have to ask: who would win if Teran and Tierra went to war?
Teran would be dictating peace terms in the Cortes Chamber within six weeks on the strength of universal conscription and wide-spread motorised transport alone.
One of my issues is that the actual military hardware that Teran has access to isn’t detailed, or even alluded to, but given the general tech levels, I expect rapid-firing breech-loaded artillery, magazine-fed rifles, primitive armoured vehicles, and mechanised logistics.
One Teranese division (does the Teranese army have divisions? Another question left unanswered) could rotate the entire Royal Tierran Army at wartime strength like a small puppy in the hands of a very large and highly-trained animal control expert.
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Yeah, it was a pretty silly question. I suppose I had some sort of hypothetical matchup in mind set 75 years into Tierra’s future and 75 years into Teran’s past, give or take, so that it might come down to their respective culture and morale rather than who has better technology.
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I don’t even think it’s a matter of technology.
A liberal(ish) democracy with strong enough legitimacy and national identity to maintain a reliable form of universal conscription like Teran is always going to be able to mobilise more of its human and material resources than a bastard feudal clusterfuck like Tierra. Even if their populations and technology levels were the same, Teran would be able to field more trained and motivated soldiers than the Tierran system ever could.
And that’s not even accounting for the fact that Tierra is a far more unequal society in terms of class and gender than Teran is.
One thing which I think a lot of “retvrn to tradition” types forget is that the reason why almost all of our world’s great powers are either some form of liberal democracy or some form of populist autocracy is because those forms of society are more efficient at mobilising force for both economic development and military conflict than the systems that preceded them.
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@Cataphrak I’m overjoyed that you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts - with the military detail side of things, I didn’t want to attempt simulation or dig into a ton of detail in various ways (in a similar way to the education establishments/system in the other games) but I totally get what you mean.
I’m so happy to hear this - I put a lot of effort into giving a lot of variation in how the romances could be structured (with different pacing and tone depending on the PC’s personality/behaviour/actions) and I’m really pleased it paid off. The spicy content… yeah, it was a lot of work! When I got to those scenes I realised I’d developed a lot of opinions about my preferences in how I like scenes with that level of detail to be written, and then was like “…oh well, if I know what I like seeing in other games, I’m going to have to do this myself aren’t I”.
And I’m absolutely thrilled that this came across - it’s exactly what I was going for!
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In other news! On my blog, I’ve started a retrospective series about what it was like writing Honor Bound and the process I went through.
In Part 1, I wrote about the very start of my process in writing Honor Bound, going into how and why I made the decisions that I did before I started writing, and what worked and didn’t work about some of the ideas I had before settling on the one I did.
Enjoy!
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Here’s Part 2 of the retrospective, in which I share how I wrote Chapters 1-6, juggled a lot of different responsibilities, encountered some burnout, and changed things up as I was writing.
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This is brilliant! I had no idea you have to plan THIS much and had to focus so much on things like evening out the stats. (I thought it was more of a ‘do what feels right and leave it up to the gods’ sort of thing.) I am never taking a CoG/Hg author’s skill and talent for granted ever again.
And I’m so glad you took the time out to ensure you didn’t get burnt out! The world will always need more Harris PS games, but not at this cost. 
Alsooo the stats were soo good at not overlapping! I was able to play equally perfect games with a cautious/emotional PC and a cautious/objective PC, while switching between humane/callous and rebellious/dutiful PC, so you can really mix and match and aren’t forced into these weird tropes. And that’s just all the permutations and combinations featuring the cautious attitude!
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Haha, I do try my best with the stat balancing - I started doing it because of various experiences with earlier games where it was all over the place! I don’t always do it as sensibly as I did at the start of writing HB - the best way of doing it is at the end of each chapter and I always regret it when I just go onto the next chapter without doing it…
And I’m so very pleased the stats worked well for you - the personality writing was something I really wanted to work on for this one 
Managing my work/life balance is definitely a work-in-progress, but looking at what I wrote about the early stages of HB has reminded me to be careful as I go into the new project 
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I mentioned in the release thread but I had a really good time with this! I enjoyed that there were high-stakes stuff with the earthquake earlier on as well as the climax; that felt like it scratched an itch of serious things happening a bit earlier than the final act.
Once again I’m enjoying the ROs a lot, and I have to admit to some flustered moments when I realised the sex scenes were a lil spicier than those I’d encountered before.
I love the kid characters too. Can’t believe how protective I got of all of them, especially Catarina. (this is a lie. that is completely believable of me)
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I’m so pleased! Thank you 
I had a lot of fun writing the kids - I like to picture the parallel story they’re going through that the PC intersects with every so often but in which there are a ton of interpersonal twists and turns.
And yes the spice is ramped up a lot compared to most of the others (and a bit more than Noblesse Oblige which was the spiciest one before), I just kind of went for it in a way I wasn’t necessarily expecting when I first started outlining!
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Here’s the third and final* part of my Honor Bound retrospective, in which I wrote the latter half of the game, and went through beta testing! Hope you enjoy!
*I may do another one once I have a wider sense of player reviews/feedback and how it’s doing commercially, but will see how that goes - historically I have not been fantastic at doing such things in good time.
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What’s the best romance,
That depends what kind of thing you like. All the romance routes I’ve played were excellent.
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Is there like any plot route
Not sure what you mean there I’m afraid! There are a lot of different ways of playing through the game if that’s what you’re asking?
I finally found time to start playing, and realized I’ve read Catarina’s name wrong this whole time. 
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I wrote it wrong, i meant like polygamy route,like t have 1r 2 lovers, or in this game u can only have single romance
Oh I see! Yes, there are polyamorous romances in the game:
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Mild continuity error with an imported save. Max shows up to the art show, but was to my knowledge, still in the gallatin mines by the end of cdlc.