You do realise I meant the one on the right, not the left, right? 
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By all mean go ahead, always nice to see what the author thinks, but remember in these kinds of games it won’t override my own headcanon, particularly when it comes to the appearance of the characters, anyway, unless I actually like it better of course.
Also a core tenet of our “new left”, managerial competence and the whomever could best ensure the continued growth of the economy (and all “good” managers would do what was best for economic growth with the same info anyway) would always be preferable to inefficient ideologically motivated politics. In true trickle-down fashion that growing economy would then float everybody’s boat. Needless to say embracing that bit of conservative leaning liberal dogma has hurt and to some extent is still hurting our left-wing.
We never did have a proper democratic socialist party in the Netherlands during my lifetime, our only one ever was the pacifist socialist party, but that disbanded long before my time, I did join its partial successor, the Greens in their social-democratic wing. The legacy of that is why our Green party is called GreenLeft.
Well my headcanon is of course based on the history of my own country here elementary school ran until age 12 and from 1917 onwards it was nominally “free” (except for books and uniforms and such, and the cost of potentially losing another cheap farmhand, but that was more a concern of the rural then the urban poor, since child labour in factories was effectively banned for those under age 12 since 1887 and effectively enforced since 1902) at the local level.
Attending elementary school was also technically mandatory up until age 12 since 1900, though unlike the factory labour laws poorly enforced in practice until the 1930’s, when the politicians made an even harder effort to push children out of the labour market entirely due to the Great Depression.
My mc’s time in elementary school would have been well before the era of effective enforcement, but assuming the family valued his education at least a little and could scrape up the books and a uniform somewhere he could likely have attended and finished elementary school at the very least (and learned to read quite well, which would be the basis for his further autodidact learning).
Better education will lead to more and better doctors and nurses in the long run though and it is not that my mc wouldn’t value a public healthcare system, just that with limited resources he would prioritise education, as a logical extension of his primary goals of labour, tax and welfare reform first.
True, I guess ultimately it is a question of priorities in the face of limited time and resources and for my mc education has a vital and necessary link to labour reform. I know that would put him a bit ahead of the times compared to some of his contemporaries, but it wasn’t a totally unique position to link education and labour even then.
Oh I will definitely play some not-so-wise mc’s as well but my main one has always been eager to learn and curious, so even if his knowledge of foreign/geo-politics comes mostly from the press and a couple of books he knows enough to know that going it alone with a socialist dictatorship no matter how benign would be tantamount to suicide.
It is also why he is accommodating towards a popular front and a coalition government eventually (so long as Solidarity comes out ahead as the senior coalition partner, since he doesn’t particularly relish a rerun of premier Kovak and he doesn’t fully trust Kant, even while working with her).
Heh, for me only the image of von Harzberg is really off, I imagined him smaller, a bit balder and with glasses for some reason. Also that picture of Anton doesn’t really give me a good impression of him, do you have any pictures of the same guy closer up and from the front @AlexClifford1994?
Also, while I haven’t cared enough at this point to even try to imagine him in detail prince Georg is a bit more handsome then I imagined.
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I Do! I meant that I imagined him to look more like the buff german guy stereotype with a smooth shaven jaw, square shoulders, blonde hairs and blue eyes. Basically I imagined him as if he was what the nazi wanted german mens to look like.
Basicaly less rough and more metrosexual and only now that I say it do I realise how nazi germany was really on its way to become a homonationalist dream world before the rest happenend.
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Haha, I’m only messing with you! I know what you mean though, that sounds like a pretty good description of Franz to me.
Shhh, don’t tell the fascists, they’d hate that
Ok, how about this?
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wow. Excellent pictures. Somehow they really fit my idea of the characters. Franz was more skinny in my head, Wolf a bit heavier, but just look at Vitori Kant! Gorgeous. Absolutel gorgeous. That photo is becoming my new head-canon. I am starting to fall in love with her. Excellent personality, and now those looks 
.[quote=“AlexClifford1994, post:434, topic:19177”]
You do realise I meant the one on the right, not the left, right?
[/quote]
My idea of him was exactly like the guy in the left 
I am pretty sure Alex will not give that chance. I am starting to see the game heading towards a tragic ending, where all solutions will be bad (at least from the perspective of someone between social-democracy and communism).
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Because I’m a) really shallow, b) have a free evening and c) haven’t talked about ROs very much recently, I decided to put together these nifty little RO tables.
The characters who you have not yet encountered in game and when you can expect to do so are as follows:
Anton Riviere - French diplomatic representative (Solidarity chapter 4)
Geoffrey Bowman - British photo-journalist (Solidarity chapter 4)
Alessandra Bianchi - Cultural & political attache to Italian embassy (New Order chapter 4)
General Rudolf Falk - c-in-c of the army (New Order chapter 3)
Prince Georg - queen’s younger brother, heir to the throne (New Order chapter 3)
EDIT: I know those tables make it look like i’ve put in loads more ROs for the left story than the right, but it’s merely a trick of the eye, there are 7 for left and 6 for right, which I think is pretty fair considering the left has to cover 2 extra sexual orientations…
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I came here because I knew I would enjoy the game by default but I must admit that your RO options got really good. Anton and Sash really seem interesting in particular. I see a lot of variety and thats really good for replayability.
That realisation I just had a few posts back up made me wonder if you planned any gay right wing RO choices. Not that I mind much since I only really planned a female (or gender neutral if that was ever a planned feature.) royalist playtrough for my new order character but even today there’s a surprisingly high number of radical right wing homosexuals. I think that adding at least one gay and lesbian right wing RO that wont end in a huge disaster could be a great way to distinguish new order from the nazi who used but killed their gays. Recent events and individual do show that the right is ready to accept openly homosexual members if they say the kind of stuff they like.
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Maybe not quite, I mean we will probably get overtaken by a German invasion during WWII, that much is pretty much inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make some positive changes to Moravian society before that happens. Also should we succeed in a plebiscite to abolish the monarchy then the allies probably won’t re-impose it as the Americans in particular weren’t very keen on restoring them in countries that didn’t have them before the war and expressly wanted them back.
Awww…poor young Franz. 
Ha! That might be even better our young Franz an insult to the Nazi’s except I’ve already kind of had that particular thing in mind for my main, working class mc, what can I say he cleans up nicely now that he’s in politics. 
Also that was a Nazi, not a general fascist ideal, so Riga is probably less concerned with it, still I did like my mc looking like the Fuhrer’s perfect Aryan poster-boy (except like that Wentworth Miller cutie he likely has some coloured perhaps even black ancestry in there not too long ago. In my headcanon one of his grandparents likely was one of those horribly offensive stereotype circus performer’s “cannibal woman” or something back in the day)
So while he’d look the part he’d actually be far from “pure”. and very much gay to boot! 
Then again I did base my main mc’s looks of off a blond(er) version of Wentworth Miller. A bit like this:
Broad shoulders and all, since like many lower and middle class gay men he’d do everything to look as masculine as possible, so in that he’s a bit like Franz only perhaps even more obsessive due to being fully gay.
I do however picture Franz to look a bit more rough compared to my mc, particularly given his actual love of fighting. Otherwise they could probably pass for brothers if they tried a bit. Which has always been another reason I won’t romance him with my main mc, they’re too similar both in background and looks.
Lastly I figured my mc here kind of had to look younger then he is and cute, despite his working-class background, since everybody’s favourite insult for him, from Kovak to the Americans seems to be “kid”. 
From many of the really old members in the gay rights movement I learned that you could certainly be gay in the 1930’s even when (originally) working class in the major cities (the countryside was far more dangerous however), so long as you weren’t effeminate or seen as a “queen”. Ironically one of the most safe places for masculine looking gay men to meet up in Amsterdam back in the day used to be amateur weightlifting and athletics at the Olympic stadium after hours and a side effect of doing that a lot was getting really, really fit.
Fun fact: the nickname for the gay hating Hitlerjugent was the Homo-jugend and a particular brand of homosexuality did play a vital role in influencing Nazism and of course there was Rohm and the sexy uniforms…
Anton does seem cute, plus he has the whole mysterious, sexy & sophisticated foreigner vibe, which my main mc digs. 
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In my canon that is not going to happen. Fascism will be defeated in Moravia and the Germans wiłl go like “well, if they aren’t good enough for Moravia, they aren’t good enough for us, and besides he isn’t even german, nor he looks like arian…”. And our government will endure
So, @AlexClifford1994, Kant, Lou and Sash for my MC? I guess I will obviously need to replay it 3 times just for the sake of the ROs, on top of the infinite times I will try every possible political decision and outcome.
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That will probably only happen if Anton could somehow convince the French Third Republic to put up a much stiffer and better thought out fight too and Hitler makes to mistake of wanting to take over the tiny fellow “German” country of Moravia simultaneously. Not impossible, Hitler made an awful lot of boneheaded military decisions historically after all.
Assuming enough former resistance fighters still keep some of their guns at home and particularly if we move towards a more Swiss style conscription “army of the people” (which might not be a bad thing for solidarity to try if in power, if only to break the stranglehold of general Falk and the old army), then, yes, Moravia could be even worse for the Germans then it was back in the alternate WWI.
If Moravia could give them about half the trouble Switzerland would probably have given them had they actually gone ahead and executed operation Tannenbaum as planned, then together with a stiffer French fight it might just be enough to end the Nazi regime early. Though that end would probably come by hardline, traditionalist military coup, so the Germany that is most likely going to replace it might not be all that much friendlier to even social democratic Moravia, let alone a (democratic) socialist one.
Of course should (socialist) Moravia “beat” the Germans and be sufficiently valuable to the other Great Powers, mainly the US and the Soviet Union both then an mc who manages to become the new hero of the Moravian resistance might be able to parlay that into a position not unlike that of Tito, but that would require a whole awful lot of things to go just right.
The way I see it for Moravia to stand a chance of repulsing the Germans outright most of these need to happen simultaneously:
First of all the Nazi’s have to invade Moravia either early (but not too early) or late in order for it to coincide with either the invasion of France if early or to coincide with the invasion of the Soviet-Union, if late. This will prevent them from just applying Zapp Branigan’s patented techniques and just overrunning us with limitless reserves. If early, which is rather more likely, unless Moravia manages to somehow become a Communist (Stalinist) republic firmly allied to Moscow, then France needs to fight better, smarter harder and longer then they did historically as well, since Moravia alone might delay them and bleed them but wouldn’t defeat them nor topple the Nazi regime outright on its own.
Secondly we’d need a large conscription or citizen’s army and a decent amount of guns to arm it with, both may not actually be all that easy to achieve with both reactionary and likely social-democrat opposition to any such plans.
Thirdly we need to be strategically valuable enough and have enough “teeth” to ensure the Brits and/or the Americans won’t just roll in for some regime change once the Germans have “softened us up a bit”.
Now it certainly doesn’t seem impossible, but neither does it seem terribly likely to achieve all of this.
However a Moravia that fights back hard and determined enough could certainly make the Nazi’s bleed enough to shorten the war by at least a bit.
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Wow, that is a perfect assessment of the situation. Consider yourself the newly appointed “Minister of Moravian resistance to foreign invasion”.
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I just wanted to say how awesome this looks, I have been hoping for a political game on this site as it makes perfect sense with the multiple choice game play.
One thing I also wanted to add was if New Order has been receiving aid from Nazi Germany?, or is that an actual plot point?.
Another thing, what was the major philosophical difference that Rosa has with the Soviet Union?, they seem similar with the whole advocating violence and so forth. Does she think they betrayed the workers after they came into power?. Last but by no means least (I only just thought of this because I am an idiot) is Rosa based on the real life Rosa Luxemburg?.
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Some typos that I noticed. Probably missed some more:
During the interview with the reporter:
responsible for several
Sharing your aristocratic backstory w/ Franz:
Skeptical
The encounter at Altstadt:
Gramophone? Or is it some new invention or something?
Talking to Franz in the soup kitchen:
Here
Scandal
At the film shoot:
Scandalous
Wulf’s special assignment:
Just “coffee” will do.
Voluntarily
Suspicion
Discussing the budget with Kant:
Also, I had to oppose her budget amendment twice in a row. First time, I got that response above. The next scene, she made me sit down and have a brandy, and she and I had the budget discussion again, as if we never talked about it a page ago. When I rejected the proposal a second time, she finally said my name.
I’ll try to replicate it with screenshots later , if you need it, when i’m not busy.
The voting:
“Means Test” was capitalized the last time Kant mentioned it.
That was confusing me, I had a look in the coding and realised that the conversation you have with her is based on your relationship score with her and that choosing not to support the amendment damages it, therefore making it possible to then trigger another conversation for a lower score. Long story short fixed now, although I don’t have time to do all the typos, thanks a lot for the detail!
Thanks!
No, in part due to Riga’s hostility to the Germans and vice versa. But New Order do have backing from Mussolini’s fascist party, which will come in to play when you meet Alessandra. Cultural attache is a good diplomatic cover for spy basically
Like quite a large part of the left in the 30s, Wulf rejects stalinism as a betrayal of the russian revolution. Although she believes in violence, their vision is to use violent revolution to create a socialist republic rather than a communist dictatorship.
Certainly the name was part of the inspiration, so not idiotic at all!
I second this appointment, @idonotlikeusernames you need to start drawing up contingency plans!
Only replaying it 3 times? 
Hmm, the only thing is I’ve already got to write a 2 sided game with 13 different ROs. Adding a 14th is pretty low down on the priority list…
For those of you wondering, my estimated release for New Order chapter 3 is next Friday
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Well since posting that I only have one little thought to add after basically getting beat up about it in a chat with one of my distant Swiss relatives over this and that is this: Does fictional Moravia share any land border with Switzerland? If so it would make commencement of the disaster that would have been Tannenbaum that much more likely, since Hitler barely tolerated “neutral” Switzerland being a “fellow German country” not under his control he probably won’t tolerate openly hostile Moravia existing as an independent. But if the two do share a border then the Nazi’s are likely going to want to deal with both at the same time to cut off even the possibility of passive aid from one to the other and this would be a huge tactical mistake, likely huge enough that, provided France holds up a bit better then it did historically, Nazism could be defeated on the continent alone.
Still the key to making sure Hitler gets deposed or perhaps even defeated outright and Nazism getting squashed early is always going to be France, for any of that too happen this alternate world France simply has to perform better and be more willing to fight then they were historically.
But again, Hitler deposed by coup is more likely to lead to either a different kind of fascist Germany or a deeply conservative traditionalist one, so it wouldn’t all be sunshine and roses.
It might also be that this is the kind of universe that leads to Stalin going on the offensive “Red Alert” style or something else happens to give us a different sort of WW2 altogether.
Well since I don’t have it in me to ever play “New Order” (no matter how cute the uniform is going to get). I’m currently planning on two Anton runs and one for Franz.
There is, but they’re fighting for a cause that will eventually swallow them and spit them out, just look at Rohm and the Nazi’s and Hitler while presiding over the most extreme version of it was far from the only Fascists dictator to “tolerate” some homosexuals, but only so long as they remained personally useful to them. Again look at Rohm.
Fascism is ultimately a dead end for gay people in the most literal sense of the word.
Hmmm…maybe a gay fascist could become the prince’s “dirty little secret”, but you’d pretty much have to get rid of Riga, before he decides to get rid of you.
Ultimately gay fascists are like lower class conservative people mostly voting and acting against their own self-interest, though for fascists gays this is a far more immediately lethal and dangerous proposition then it is for poor conservatives.
On the other hand my mc, much like Lenin himself was, is for scrapping crimes against “morality” out of Moravian legislation entirely and should the author’s plan still be to give us the interior ministry my mc would probably start by cutting off all funding for the actual law-enforcement part of the so-called crimes against morality.
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There are quite a lot of ifs, but I suppose I do agree with most of the points you raise (here and your earlier post), though I think you’re a bit too optimistic.
Moravia isn’t likely to put up nearly half as much the fight as Switzerland hypothetically would in that it didn’t sit out the First World War, nor does it have a strong arms industry or as strong a shooting culture. I’ll assume that the Moravian governments did not spend the Depression trying to build up defences with unemployed; by 1936 or-so it might take too long considering that when the Moravian Army surrendered in WWI, the Germans would have probably disarmed or destroyed Moravia’s border fortifications as well, for the sake of removing a barrier between Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Getting France to fight more than they did historically by the introduction of Moravia is going to be difficult, since France just came out of an era of unrest including multiple changes of governments from socialist to centrist and back, and I doubt French High Command would be that more interested in saving Moravia if it turned socialist
I’d put some more faith in the British, rather than the French, but not necessarily through any political overtures by the Brits. If OKW launched an invasion of Moravia at the same time as the invasion of Norway, that would plausibly pull troops and planes away from the invasion of Norway. Consequently if the RAF and the RN have better success up there, that could have butterflies in France. Perhaps the French decide to attack instead of stalling; perhaps the Fairey Battles could manage to take out the bridges over the Albert Canal; perhaps the Germans could be driven back at Arras due to a lack of support leading to a counter attack on the tiring German forces (France would be lost by Arras, but the allies could get more troops out as a result of smashing Rommel).
However, these require arms as you mention. The most likely candidate I’d see would be France or Czechoslovakia; but the latter stops being an option by 1938.
With Moravia being so far from the west and so small I can’t see Moravia managing to survive in its pre-war state for long. Instead, I’d bring in Czechoslovakia, rather than comparisons with Switzerland: The greatest likelihood I see of Moravia surviving would be the allies fighting in 1938 due to a failed Munich Agreement. Chamberlain was already considering and in the process of rearming the UK, so if he and Daladier choose to fight it out with Hitler, and the Germans decide to attack both Moravia and the Czechs simultaneously, then the German High Command and Intelligence might launch a coup in 1938. In the event of a failed coup/a longer war starting in 1938 with the Czechs on side the allies have a better chance at winning before the US intervention. Of course post-war Moravia will probably end up as part of the Czechoslovakian sphere and there’s the possibility of a war with the USSR in the future.
Getting Chamberlain to fight might not be that difficult: the guy, despite the “Peace in Our Time” stuff, was willing to rearm and only really did so (sign the Munich Agreement) because he felt the UK was unprepared for a war while being unaware that the Germans were equally unprepared. A confident, but more importantly well armed Moravia alongside Czechoslovakia could well be the thing to change his mind. More importantly, Moravia must be seen as being able to cooperate with the allies and being very opposed to Moscow.
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Oh I wasn’t necessarily talking about France fighting for Moravia, I was just talking about having the invasion of Moravia coincide with that of France/Switzerland in one of Hitler’s boneheaded moves, and then as long as France holds out they cannot completely overrun Moravia, particularly if they go for triple folly like my distant relative suggested and try to invade Switzerland too.
I had thought to get the weapons from Belgium myself, high quality small arms and what we’d be ordering for a citizen’s army would be mostly small-arms anyway and if we start early then Czechoslovakia would be another good source too.
As you say the trouble with the Brits is that we’re the Solidarity party and the Brits would probably rather like the idea of a Moravian regime change themselves at that point. 
The Brits are far more reactionary then the French Third Republic though, which is why I put less faith in them, I’m well-aware of the shortcomings and potential strengths of Chamberlain.
For further geopolitical considerations that would depend on Moravia’s exact location along the Danube:
Now the two best point would be in part of what is Germany itself in our timeline, which would make sense given Moravia’s mostly German population, which means it would border Austria, Germany Switzerland (and that would be the crucial border in the scenario my relative proposed) and perhaps even France and/or Italy itself. In this case getting our weapons from either Belgium or France itself would make the most sense.
The other good possibility would be all the way on the other side of Austria, occupying parts of what are now Hungary and Slovakia to us. In this case we’d be in the Czech sphere of influence and what is worse, apart from Czechoslovakia itself, which will fall in a few years if things proceed more or less as we know them, surrounded by regressive and hostile states on all of our borders (at least when playing Solidarity).
Considering who and what is present in the game we judged the first location (consisting of territory that in our world is part of Germany and/or Austria) to be more likely considering who are present and playing a large role in Moravia on the foreign side, where the most prominent foreign actors seem to be the French, the Germans (though the one thing that unites all parts of the country at the moment is dislike of them) and the Italians, probably also the Swiss…but well they’d be (mostly) “neutral”.
In the second location you’d expect to see more Poles, Czechs, Romanians and Maygar play larger roles in Moravian affairs. Plus, much like us over here in the Netherlands, the ethnic makeup of Moravia seems overwhelmingly German, which would be less likely on that other side of Austria.
Still either location could plausibly work for a small kingdom along the Danube, it is just that given what is presented in-game thus far I think the first location would work better.
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Notice that I said 3 times just for the sake of the ROs. I am planning an infinite amount of times for politics. Until now, the game I played the most was the Sabres/Guns of Infinity series. More than 40+ times each game. This one is probably going to beat that 
I just played the demo version and quite frankly I loved it. I’ve always appreciated a good story about political intrigue especially without the action or excessive drama associated with the genre.
Considering Frances opinion on Communism at the time (banning the party in 1939) it is probably safe to assume a Socialist Moravia would be little more to France than a mini Soviet Union, only useful in so far as they can fight Nazi Germany.
Moravia is literally in the WORST position possible for a Socialist state being surrounded by Fascist Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. No matter what was to happen Moravia would HAVE to be conquered for Germany to feel secure, especially after Barbarossa. Even then if Moravia was to limp on after the war remaining independent they would almost certainly be forced into the Warsaw Pact if not outright invaded by the Soviets when they are pushing into Germany.
The only thing I can consider for them to survive is a revolution would have to happen NOW with a Socialist Republic being formed, links to the Union would have to be brokered out of mutual hatred of Germany and the build up of Moravia’s military forces would have to be accelerated 10 fold so that when war comes in 1939 they can strike Germany from the soft underbelly perhaps giving France more time to organise and MAYBE giving the Soviet Union a bit more confidence so that they keep going west after Poland.
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