So I’m hoping to mod the game so that you’ll be able to give vital intelligence to anyone. Right now it seems a bit weird that you can give strategic information to the Khanate but not vital intelligence. In any case, I’d like to make lore-friendly changes, so I need some help with that. For example, from the saint-beau blog, I’ve read that the Anarchists and the Dawn Machine cultists (or whatever) are in conflict. So giving vital intelligence to the Anarchists should have a chance of decreasing Dawn Machine Supremacy.
Things get more hazy for the Khanate. I guess they should reduce London’s Supremacy, but should it reduce that of the Dawn? I’m not even exactly sure of London’s relationship with the Dawn. They appear to be in some kind of alliance for now, instead of being seperate warring factions. Also not sure of the Khanate’s relationship with the Anarchists. There’s even the aboriginal choice for port carnelian, but I think i’ll give that a miss for now.
London and the Khanate are clear rival empires - both want to get control of the Neath’s valuable colonies, and what helps one, hurts the other. The Anarchists and the New Sequence (the Dawn Machine cultists) are most certainly in conflict - they’re both conspirators against the Bazaar and the Fallen London status quo, but their politics and goals are complete opposites.
The New Sequence think of themselves as London’s true patriots, hoping to oust the Masters and return control of London to its citizens, but their methods have gotten out of hand - aside from anything else, they’ve subverted a lot of the Navy’s power to their own ends, leaving the city underprotected. If the Sequence gain control of London, they’ll be able to protect it, but they’ll also be imposing their own extreme ideology on its citizens. The Khanate’s expansion might hinder their economic base, but it might also make Londoners more receptive to their influence - I’d say you could get away with balancing that out by having Khanate supremacy not directly affect Dawn Machine supremacy.
The relationship between the Anarchists and the Khanate is a tricky one, because the Khanate is strictly speaking two different powers - the Khan and his loyalists in Khan’s Heart and Khan’s Glory, and the exiles and rebels of Khan’s Shadow. The Shadow isn’t formally connected to the Anarchists of the Calendar Council - their centres of power are in London, in the Iron Republic and on the Surface - but it’s a melting pot of all sorts of anti-authoritarians, pirates and rabble-rousers, so there’s almost certainly some contact between the two going on. At the same time, some of the exiles are simply traditionalists, loyal to the old warrior code, who the Khan could probably call upon if he wished to return to the old ways. So, there’d be complications for the Anarchists whether the Khanate expanded or receded - again, it probably balances out in the end.
I think it’s safe to say Khanate Supremacy represents the ascendancy of its Houses, not of its banished pirate flotilla. But I haven’t contributed to Khanate Supremacy, so favored eyot Tanah-Chook may know something I don’t.
[quote=the truthseeker]Personally stinking at the mechanics of it, is it simple to mod to give whatever faction Vital Intelligence, or is it a difficult thing to mod?
I’ll ask the political/ethical discussion continue (great stuff so far.)[/quote]
I’m quite the amateur modder, so what I’m doing may not be optimal (but hey it works). What I did was I took the event "Give Vital Intelligence" from the Diplomat in London and just pasted it into the event list for the Iron Republic, HAH. Then I went ahead to change the rewards accordingly. Haven’t changed the dialogue yet, but that should be easy. There is a UI issue (the event screen doesn’t close when you click ‘continue’) but I’m able to just exit it entirely with the X.
So I would say it’s pretty easy.
While we’re on the modding topic, anyone knows the lines of code that I have to keep for events.json so thatmods continue working? Currently I’ve just copied the entire events file to the addons folder and started changing the events there. I pasted only the event once, but it didn’t work (the game gave me a blank for all events). This means that when an update comes out I’ll either have to sacrifice that update or sacrifice my mods (feels like I’m worshipping Salt already) and that would be…undesirable. edited by Salt on 1/19/2016