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Report the poets. Sorry guys...
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Sep 18, 2022 05:52
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 22:41 |
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Recruit them. Boss wanted real revolutionaries, he's got 'em. Won't be our fault if he doesn't like the end result.
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Sep 18, 2022 08:38
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Black Robe posted:Recruit them. Boss wanted real revolutionaries, he's got 'em. Won't be our fault if he doesn't like the end result.
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Sep 18, 2022 11:49
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Good point about the stats, have some: House Brante:  Occupation:  Magra:  Our favourite failson:  One more bit: the cut-off for failure for Reputation and Wealth is 0, not 2. The Unity threshold is still 2.
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Sep 18, 2022 11:55
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Send them to dad e: My reasoning may be gamey, but we'll need the positive rep to offset all those times in the future when we'll (hopefully) treat Gloria and Mum like human beings. Let dad have his moment too RedSnapper fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Sep 18, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 19:31
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Give them to Dad it'll look good for getting our family ennobled by the Sword.
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Sep 19, 2022 00:08
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Which of the stats is the "main" one for each playthrough, the talky one or the fight one?
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Sep 19, 2022 10:14
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Josef bugman posted:Which of the stats is the "main" one for each playthrough, the talky one or the fight one? Both are important though for different things. Convincing people needs the talky Skill (Diplomacy, Eloquence, Manipulation), actually doing poo poo needs the stabby one (Valour, Theology, Scheming).
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Sep 19, 2022 12:24
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Kayten posted:Both are important though for different things. Convincing people needs the talky Skill (Diplomacy, Eloquence, Manipulation), actually doing poo poo needs the stabby one (Valour, Theology, Scheming). Fair. Been trying to play through as a priest and bugger me is it tricky.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:27
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1.20 - Feudalist Realism Alright, time to help Father out a little bit.     El Ferro works fast.  It's a shame about the kids, but at least Father's gonna be happy to get a career boost.    Ah.    "Oh, Robert..." is right.  We're helping!  At least El Ferro liked it?  Oh goody.  Once again, Sophia has a point.  Our Unrest is getting a bit low, better watch that.  But, uh, positives?  A year passes, we turn 21, and the transfer of power from one spoiled Arknian dipshit to another still hasn't happened.   Hahaha.   loving amazing. Good thing the entirety of the government apparatus relies on the whims of these inbreds.   As always with these conflicts, the ones that actually do the violence are the armed thugs of the state, and the ones that actually suffer are the people.  We may be a failson, but hey, we fit right in!  As the Archduke and the Overseer continue feuding, they start spreading influence among the noble families of Magra.      A gift, huh.    Leave it to Stephan to side with the most reactionary dipshit around.    Lydia and Gloria have a point. Gift or not, we'd owe the Archduke.   Thanks, Nathan.  God drat it, thread.  Can't do this.  Can't do that.  So time to flip those jewels!  We lost a noticeable amount of money investing into the print shop and sending Gloria to the seaside, so might as well recover some of that.   gently caress off, Stephan.    Guys, come on, there's nothing we could've done.  The money is nice, at least.  Remember what El Ferro told us about the Lesser Quorum.     Time to see a capitalist about funding some armed struggle.  I'll be upfront: I don't like Egmont. One, I don't like him being a capitalist whose only concern is to let rich assholes be on par with nobility, throwing the people who actually mine his silver (and all the other workers) to the wind. Two, I don't like how the game treats that approach as worth anything other than absolute contempt. We see other lovely groups we can side with in this and other Paths - El Ferro, Magister El Verman, Otton, etc. But unlike Egmont, they are always portrayed as self-centered power-hungry entitled assholes, and you side with them to make your life better at the expense of others. Egmont, however, is shown to be this respectable almost revolutionary, the adult in the room, a moderate voice of reason. This is despite the fact that his preferred outcome is everything remaining as is, except the """captains of industry""" in the Lesser Quorum get to eat nice food and wear jewels without shame. Life would not improve for people like Sophia, people like Tommas, or even people like Gloria. But let him tell you about it himself.    Quick introductions.      Sure, buddy.    Let's talk about Capitalist Realism (or, in this case, Feudalist Realism). You may have heard the quote "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", sometimes attributed to the sniff-master himself, Slavoj Žižek. The jist of this approach, expanded on by Mark Fisher in his 2009 book is thus: capitalism (specifically neoliberalism) maintains itself partially through a "pervasive atmosphere" of thought. From birth, everywhere you are, you are bombarded by capitalist propaganda: it's every advertisement, most of the music that gets widespread play, most television, most movies, most books. You grow up assuming that capitalism is an inescapable thing, something as natural as the mountains and rivers, it's always existed and always will exist. Eventually, there's just so much of it that you stop noticing it. After all, we don't notice the air around us, nor do we fish notice the water they're in. This has implications on all sorts of thought. The continuation of capitalism becomes an unspoken assumption in, well, everything. Every """serious""" solution proposed by """serious""" people to any actual societal problem - homelessness, climate change, income inequality, what have you - tries to deal with it within a capitalist framework. Tax breaks, investment incentives, means-tested bullshit for the bare minimum of social programs - all of these assume that neoliberalism just is and that there's nothing you can do about it. You can't seriously talk even about nationalizing the energy industry or housing any more than you can seriously talk about moving the Appalachians. The most you can do is beg for scraps. It's a very harsh limit on imagination, or at least on acceptable imagination. This is what's happening with Egmont, but with Feudalism instead. The man is completely incapable of seeing the end of the Empire and the nobility. They are natural and eternal, like the mountains. At best you can bargain for a few crumbs. "Who will we negotiate with"? "What will our relationship with the Empire be like"? It will be nonexistent. Because there will be no Empire. It's a monstrocity we will destroy.     A lot more working commoners than capitalists stealing their labour, too.    What do you need the nobles for? What do they actually do?        This is the limit of Egmont's imagination. He is willing to let thousands die in an uprising for the bare minimum of autonomy, all of it taken by the """captains of industry""". We come back to that Anatole France quote: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." This is Egmont's ideal society. This is what he's willing to spill other people's blood for.  It's also an incredibly naive viewpoint. Tradition will have no choice but to step aside once they see how great our society is! Pay no attention to how the forces of reaction are personally invested in things continuing as they are, and how they're perfectly willing to kill for it. What a complete lack of power analysis does to a motherfucker. gently caress Egmont, the game is worse for seeing him as a positive character who has good ideas.     At the moment, however, Egmont is useful to both us and El Ferro, so we tell him what he wants to hear.  Shake hands on it and everything.   Weak poo poo, game. -- What do we do with this conversation? Note that not telling El Ferro about this conversation doesn't lock us in with Egmont. We can still betray him in the future. Nor does reporting this lock us into siding with El Ferro, we can also stab him in the back later on.  A. What El Ferro doesn't know can't hurt him. Let's keep our options open and keep the conversation secret.  B. Who gives a poo poo about Egmont? We can get into El Ferro's good graces and lose nothing of value. Report him to El Ferro.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:58
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Keep it secret for now. Our decisions have been so poor that we probably want to avoid locking ourselves into anything permanent unless we have to, because odds are we'll pick wrong.
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Sep 19, 2022 18:09
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A I've got a hunch that El Filipe will know either way, so gently caress him gimme that wealth
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Sep 19, 2022 18:25
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keep it secret Also, I think it's silly to rag on the game for presenting siding with the capitalists against the nobility as the pragmatic approach. The society we see in the game isn't at the stage of ideological or material development where a socialist revolution could happen. Framing things in the context of proletariat struggle wouldn't really make any sense or be appropriate for the era. The game's ideological framing fits the story just fine I think.
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Sep 19, 2022 18:41
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ed.: oops, posted too soon
Kayten fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 19, 2022 19:08
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AFancyQuestionMark fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 19, 2022 19:18
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I am increasingly finding that the game has a very weird outline of the worlds existence within it. It's all very fraught.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:23
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AFancyQuestionMark posted:Also, I think it's silly to rag on the game for presenting siding with the capitalists against the nobility as the pragmatic approach. The society we see in the game isn't at the stage of ideological or material development where a socialist revolution could happen. Framing things in the context of proletariat struggle wouldn't really make any sense or be appropriate for the era. Oh, I strongly disagree. For starters, the game isn't presenting the option of "side with the capitalists to overthrow the nobility", it's giving us the option of "side with the capitalists to get a bunch of people killed for getting a small amount of autonomy from the capital, also the nobility remains for some reason". That isn't the French Revolution, that's just a local elite fighting for primacy. Like the American Revolution, but even weaker. Secondly, there was ideological development that pushed beyond "give capitalists rights" around the time of the French Revolution. Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals in Paris itself, of course, but also the Diggers in England the century prior, not to mention radically egalitarian communities focused around religion that kept popping up throughout the ages: the Quakers in England and its colonies, Mazdakites in Sassanid Persia, etc. With many such historical communities leaning on religion, having a radical movement within the New Faith would absolutely fit in. AFancyQuestionMark posted:The game's ideological framing fits the story just fine I think. That's the source of my criticism, though. The story fits the ideological framing of the narrative, I just strongly disagree with that framing.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:28
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Sep 19, 2022 19:37
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Egmont fits the environment well, and is definitely the better alternative compared to what the people are suffering at this time. The problem with him as a character and his portrayal is that he doesn't come across well when you may be part of the growing audience of people who've been screwed over by capitalism in one form or another.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:41
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I hate hate the Sunday friend so drat much, and yeah.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:46
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Oh, one more thing about Egmont's plan being presented as rational. We saw issues with Magran soil already in this Path, though I think specifics only show up in the Noble and Priest Paths. Magra was the center of a rebellion led by the Archduke's great-...-grandpa, which saw him use a shitload of mages against the Empire. As a final "gently caress you", they drew all they could from Magran soil to use for combat purposes against the Legion. The rebellion failed, and the direct result of this particular event, aside from permanent persecution of the mages, was that nothing naturally grows in Magra (outside an event in the Priest Path). All topsoil has to be imported from other provinces. Magra, let alone Anizotte, cannot feed itself. The second Egmont's Free City of Anizotte gets established, it will be embargoed by every landowner in the Empire. Egmont himself points out that all land is owned by the nobles, and they're certainly interested in making sure this experiment fails. As soon as the topsoil already present gets used up, Anizotte will starve.
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Sep 19, 2022 20:00
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I think you'll find that market forces would never allow for such an inefficiency to exist when the free city creates so much surplus value due to the creative energies becoming unshackled
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Sep 19, 2022 20:05
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The fact that Egmont thinks it'll work is entirely in character. The framing is p. dumb though.
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Sep 19, 2022 20:37
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how is the framing supposed to be objective? this is what brante is hearing, and brante has had a fairly limited range of options presented to him so far. sophia hasn't even gone as far as "dismantle the government" just "dismantle the lots"
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Sep 19, 2022 20:42
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Keep the secret, take the cash We'll probably get the chance to turn on him later
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Sep 19, 2022 22:01
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It honestly doesn't shock me that Sir Brante's not about standing up for the miners because we're playing as an elite who can see the top. Our father is a nobleman who can see a path to becoming hereditary nobility, he has the money to give us a quality education, and we had the untaken option to become nobility and screw the Archdeke's daughter. OP critcizes the game for being a power struggle between the elite but that's exactly what this is.
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Sep 19, 2022 23:48
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Keep the secret.
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Sep 20, 2022 00:08
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Keep the secret
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Sep 20, 2022 00:41
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Kayten posted:Oh, I strongly disagree. For starters, the game isn't presenting the option of "side with the capitalists to overthrow the nobility", it's giving us the option of "side with the capitalists to get a bunch of people killed for getting a small amount of autonomy from the capital, also the nobility remains for some reason". That isn't the French Revolution, that's just a local elite fighting for primacy. Like the American Revolution, but even weaker. If we were playing a game that modeled after the French Revolution or about 1848 Springtime of Nations, I think you would have a very convincing argument. However, despite you referring to the French Revolution as an inspiration to the game, I'm not really seeing it. Most of the dynamics we see (commoner vs noble, great houses vying for power, cities vs Imperial Authority, lay vs church power, etc.) all seems more pertinent to the Protestant Reformation and the transition from late Medieval to the early modern period. In that case, there are far fewer historical inspirations to draw from for what we would today consider a truly egalitarian revolution. Whether or not the game designers are trying to capture that time's dynamics and avoid anachronisms is unknown to me. But arguments can be made against your second point. If we remove your second point, and we instead go by a late medieval framework, Egmont's perspective is more representative of what upsets in power were successful. Yes there were populist peasant revolts, but all we're crushed with no lasting impact on the key power players. Historically for that period, shifts in the power dynamics that endured were always gradual in the aggregate. The closest "populist" revolt in that era I can think of is Oliver Cromwell, and he was probably closer to Egmont than Babeuf. That said Egmont's plan is still retarded, since you can never rely on a noble to choose a path that reduces his relative power even if it increases prosperity across the board. Most free cities in the HRE relied more on a more assertive defensive of their rights, not noble good will. That said, Keep the secret because right now we want to get out from under the thumb of our employer. And murder Sophia.
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Sep 20, 2022 15:27
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Keep it a secret
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Sep 20, 2022 18:54
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I am absolutely with the folks who would say that framing this in proletarian struggle terms is silly. This game is modelled after the French Revolution and the number one reason why the French Revolution failed is that it was not a French Revolution, it was a Parisian Revolution. It utterly failed to form a narrative that resonated with the vast majority of the country. What’s more, the Parisian proponents of the Revolution still resembled Egmont way more than they resembled Sophia. And that would continue to be a stumbling block for liberalizing reforms for the better part of the century to come. Changing narratives at a societal level takes time. Force only goes so far. You need to tell a better story than the other guy. Nations and communities are stories. They hold power as long as people are invested in them. Also I don’t really agree that the game sees Egmont in a positive light at all. Killing him is the winning play in basically every path On an unrelated note thanks for introducing me to this game, it’s pretty stellar. And if you ever want to know what the Shadow from the opening is I can answer that 
Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 08:29
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Griffen posted:That said Egmont's plan is still retarded, since you can never rely on a noble to choose a path that reduces his relative power even if it increases prosperity across the board. Most free cities in the HRE relied more on a more assertive defensive of their rights, not noble good will. To a degree. Gaius Tempest is a True Believer in the Empire so he could realistically be counted upon to take a reduction to his personal power if he earnestly believed it was integral to the survival of the Empire. Either way though, this still means Egmont’s plan isn’t sufficient.
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Sep 21, 2022 08:38
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I'd at least wait to see if someone invents firearms before trying for a proletarian revolution. They've got all the ingredients, and what's the 30 years war without musketeers?
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Sep 22, 2022 03:02
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Decoy Badger posted:I'd at least wait to see if someone invents firearms before trying for a proletarian revolution. They've got all the ingredients, and what's the 30 years war without musketeers? Pretty sure firearms are a thing considering some of the achievements/goals for this section are 'acquire a large amount of gunpowder' and 'give arms to a selection of people loyal to you alone' with images of flintlock muskets
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Sep 22, 2022 03:11
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And there is absolutely no way, zip zilch and zero, that a popular revolution is even worth mentioning without firearms. Pre-gunpowder peasants tried revolting more than once, and afaik they met absolutely no success against the professional armored cavalry of the medieval aristocracy.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:29
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God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:33
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Firearms already exist. The problem is that, at the end of the day, most people still believe in the Empire and the Emperor much like the majority of France still believed in King-As-Patriarch and fundamentally believed that that was a right and good way to organize society. They may want change, but that change does not include the downfall of the Empire (yet).
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Sep 22, 2022 08:05
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Zore posted:Pretty sure firearms are a thing considering some of the achievements/goals for this section are 'acquire a large amount of gunpowder' and 'give arms to a selection of people loyal to you alone' with images of flintlock muskets It's weird then how so much of the text revolves around swords, knives and armoured knights, without a single firearm peasant levy in sight, nor the evolution in armour in response to firearms. The Fotis assassination and dueling in general certainly would have been easier with a pistol. Maybe it's Elf Bushido or magic bullshit?
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Sep 22, 2022 11:55
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Decoy Badger posted:It's weird then how so much of the text revolves around swords, knives and armoured knights, without a single firearm peasant levy in sight, nor the evolution in armour in response to firearms. The Fotis assassination and dueling in general certainly would have been easier with a pistol. Maybe it's Elf Bushido or magic bullshit? They're pretty rare and tightly controlled at this point. And up until now we've mostly been dealing with noble bullshit which is still ritualized and heavily centered on swordplay and/or poor people without connections who would not have the opportunity to get guns.
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Sep 22, 2022 12:10
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 22:41 |
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Zore posted:They're pretty rare and tightly controlled at this point. And up until now we've mostly been dealing with noble bullshit which is still ritualized and heavily centered on swordplay and/or poor people without connections who would not have the opportunity to get guns. Yeah, from the event back in childhood it sounds like it's barely been a decade since gunpowder itself was first used at all - I'm not surprised there's not a proliferation of firearms yet, especially given how resistant to change the Arkanian Empire seems to be.
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Sep 22, 2022 13:07
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