The first promotion is possible at the end of Chapter 1, if you complete your objectives using your own stats, found Gabriella AND had the foresight to arrest the ‘middle management’ rebels in the clocktower.
Is it a bit convoluted? Absolutely. But getting promoted should feel like an actual achievement, rather than the story handing you a shiny badge. It is also entirely intended that MC can get promoted past their peers later in the story (Assuming you take the vanilla CIRS route)
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What’re the other routes?
There are the infiltrator and rebel routes, as well as a secret 4th route… which means that IPS should end up being rather large in terms of replayability
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What he means is essentially “yes, if you want it to be so.” 
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Dont worry, I’m holding him at gunpoint regarding scope creep… or trying to 
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Infiltrating the Rebels I assume?
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Correct! You can actually start the infiltration route in chapter three, but there isn’t much to it yet and you have to meet the prerequisites 
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Also vanilla as in this is the default route or vanilla as in there’s an alternate CIRS route?
CIRS kinda reminds me of UNATCO from Deus Ex. Though they’re openly controlled by a one-world government rather than being run by a conspiracy trying to found one. I guess we don’t know for certain what sort of organization originally founded the UG. Hopefully they didn’t have a full-blown global genocide of the poor to facilitate it.
Makes me wonder if the group of rebels we encountered were a particularly malevolent cell of the group and the rest are more grey like in DE or if this is a genuinely evil group.
Building on an earlier comment I made it’s also possible this is the inverse of the DE situation too. We don’t actually know if the UG is an oppressive regime. CIRS definitely has a sinister MIB style vibe to it and I THINK the word dystopian appeared in an early version of the description or maybe an old comment but at least last time I played, we didn’t know all that much about the actual…government of the United Government. It could be a communist vanguard, a traditional democratic republic, an autocracy, an oligarchy (Roman Senate style), it could have a secret shadow dictator, it remains to be seen. For all we know, this is the beginning of the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek and the rebels are a bunch of chumps who watch too many scifi thrillers.
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This. I love the thought being put into this, because I promise you, the IPS iceberg is not a small one. Perhaps if you keep digging, you may uncover the secret I have buried into the plot I am yet to write. If you do, I also have a special role for people like yourself who manage it!
to answer your original question, the vanilla route refers to the default ‘you are CIRS and thus you do CIRS things’ route.
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I assume there’s gonna be at least one RO that tempts us to join the rebels?
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Ehhh. Theres going to be rebel ROs you can only romance if you’re a rebel, if that counts? Gabriella is a huge CIRS fan despite being a civilian, and everyone in CIRS is a bit too conditioned not to be anti-rebel even if Chris expresses doubts of the UGs methods.
Now, we’re still exploring if you can tempt an RO to the rebels side…
And the forum is being the forum. Answered this. Thank you for the question!
Wow, time really flies! Today was the day the interest check was posted, so to celebrate I thought we could do a little poll on your favourite background (heh) for the MC!
- Military: Soldier/Sergeant/Officer
- Police: Good cop/Bad cop
- Medical: EMT/Combat medic
- Hacker: White hat/Black hat
- Civilian: The cover job
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voters
Also, tommorow is a special day, so we’ll be releasing something short and not-so-sweet to celebrate! Whatever could it be? 
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Hello everyone!
A year ago, IPS was released onto the forums as a fun little project of mine. I never expected it to receive as much support as it has, and for that, thank you so much.
On our first anniversary, I wish to release this short story of a familiar name, as well as take this time to appreciate you all for your kind words thus far.
With that being said, I plan release a playable verson of C4 very soon, so stay tuned!
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… @GrayCipher , don’t vote in a poll about your own game smh.
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