Speaking of a spymaster MC, are we able to privately keeping track of that potential “loose end” Julia will have our heads for? Personally I am kind of torn on this, as doing so could leave a hot trail, but not doing so would put the MC at the mercy of fate.
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All part of the drama, works never end.
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Okay, before any other thoughts about this chapter, I have to say this
NO.MORE.TEARS.
It was a belief against all reason; some might consider it madness. But lo and behold, it happened!!! Hahahahahahahahahahaha! I’m so happy. Tristitia can live! Personal consequences be damned.
Julia finds out? I don’t care. All that matters is that the poor girl has a chance at happiness.
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Is having a high warfare statistic the only way to save Tristitia? My moral bureaucrat Prefect is planning to write a strongly worded statement of disapproval to that. The pen is mightier than the sword, or so he says.
This was such a broad chapter. I’ll wait for the morrow to write more on it, but the amount of branching possible here, from murdering Titus, becoming Imperial Consort, implanting Darius with cybernetics (?) and whatever else I haven’t gotten to yet is incredible.
And at last we come to the point where the will of the Empress and the good of the Empire conflict. Julia is leading Iudia into a two-front war in dense forest for the sole purpose of weakening one enemy, while making another. Her plan is absurd. It’s a strong (if almost certainly unintentional) parallel to the US using Agent Orange as a herbicide to weaken the North Vietnamese Army. She’s just using Greek fire instead. She will alienate the people of the region and be too bogged down by low morale in her legions to defeat the Witch King. Her cruelty has finally surpassed her reason here.
Augusta has the right idea here; bolstering our strength with that of the Gruthrungians would serve us well. As a result of siding with Augusta on this one, albeit only to a point, my imperial favor stat has decreased tremendously. I don’t know that I can bring myself to be disappointed, because this is a real moral dilemma.
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It’s really funny how the meeting goes. Julia makes some seemingly loony idea, the Mother of Sorcery goes “yep, yep” while the others are basically going “?”. Rufinia really describes it well when she says that this is folly. “Okay, let’s send a legion with most of our magic fire to blow up a site we believe to be the holy city, and also find a Key that can cure my lung cancer.”
We did theorise that Julia was in cahoots with the sorceresses and hiding it from the Prefect, and now it seems that it was indeed the case. And, as expected, the Mother of Sorcery is a huge 
. She couldn’t be any less obvious even if she tried.
And I’m happy to say that we were right on the money @Aeternitas. It is an Arthur C. Clarke situation! Possibly even a Bene Gesserit’s Missionaria Protectiva one.
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Fixed.
The MC can certainly try. Even if Tristitia reached her destination, Ynde is too far for any spies to report back on anything with, except perhaps over the span of years.
Correct, you need Warfare 4 in order to do it.
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Not sure if a bug, but:
ch2den.txt
#"I'm in. Let's make the matricians pay." I can't help but smirk.
*set sided_ceto +1
*if ceto_opinion < 50
*set ceto_opinion 50
*else
*set ceto_opinion +15
*goto deal_made
#"For now. Let's see how this goes." I'll go along with it, but I'm still wary of Ceto.
*set sided_ceto +1
*if ceto_opinion < 50
*set ceto_opinion 50
*else
*set ceto_opinion +15
*set ceto_opinion +5
*goto wary_deal
If ceto_opinion < 50 is true at this point, picking the wary option nets you 55 opinion with her (set to 50, then +5) while being fully accepting sets it at “just” 50. Dunno if Ceto just appreciates MC not being a fool, or it’s a mistake and that +5 should replace +15 in the conditional above.
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I was so disappointed when Julia decided she couldn’t drink any wine on the job. My Prefect thought she was about to save this whole show from the Empress’s crackpot plan, but I guess that would be too easy.
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Got it, adjusted the variables around so that doesn’t happen.
There might be more than meets the eye there.
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The “spitting image of her mother” is text variant for scenario where MC isn’t Augusta’s father. Either you’ve run in some sort of bug or mixed up your playthroughs, perhaps…?
To be exact, the condition is
*if ((augusta_parentage = true) and (bastardry_suspicion >= 2))
for a more detailed check/text, so if eye color is the only visual difference maybe it sneaks under the game’s radar, especially if you’ve acted cold enough towards Augusta to appear unrelated.
Ah, that’d explain it. I guess technically it is a bug, because the game should be checking Augusta’s appearance rather than suspicion here, otherwise you can get what you’ve witnessed, wrong description of her features.
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I really was her father but suspicion was zero so maybe it’s not a bug
Yeah that’s an oversight on my part, I’ll put in a conditional to distinguish that. Augusta can only have her mother’s eyes if she’s not the MC’s child, if she has the other traits + blue eyes that feature would make people think of Titus more.
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Whoops, that slipped by me when I was fixing the issue above ^. Should be a quick fix.
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*choice
#I will divert scribes from across the capitol's civil service to comb through the records. [-5 Resources]
*set investigative_clues +1
*goto comb
Scholar favoritism: getting investigation clue in this branch doesn’t actually cost any resources :v
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Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll fix that.
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Do we have any appearance description of the emperor besides her grey eyes?
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Is this an error? Raising Augusta seems like it was intended to make the check easier, but it makes it harder. For that reason, the second condition (raise Augusta and rel > 90) will never be used.
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My intention was that if Augusta was close enough to the MC they would want to spend time with them over Titus, thus causing the ‘failure’ of that option should the relationship be high enough/and if you raised her, but I’ll see if I can clean that up for clarity.
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