Feedback should be emailed directly to Failbetter - there’s no guarantee that anything posted here will even be seen by anyone from FBG. The forums are for discussions with fellow players. Also, no-one’s told me to draw the line - like I said, I just want to keep the conversation fresh and positive.
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It’s…been a while since Railway, but just so we’re clear are we talking about an ACTUAL opportunity to feed them a capital-M Magnificent capital-F Feast? As in, those items you get every Christmas (and some less important times) that (allegedly) constitute heaps and heaps of pretty much the closest the Neath can come to good British food?
Or like, just a particularly large selection of biscuits and excessively traumatising sausages? God forbid I be allowed to kill an actual pig to make sausage out of it’s meat in this game, and yes I WILL use heavy artillery if that’s what it takes to kill the semi-eldritch boars of the Neath
Because if it’s the latter, than to clarify my chief complaint is that I have many. MANY. Good wholesome food items that for whatever reason the game refuses to let me spend treating the workers and so in-universe I am standing there, delicious possibly-lamb chops in one hand and what might be onion soup if the onion didn’t keep waddling away, having a railway navvy turn his nose up at my perfectly good food and insisting that it’s not REAL work if he’s not being fed the nastiest rations in all of London.
Yes, my entire decision to not only become Anti-Liberationist but also go out of my way to ally with Fires is founded entirely on being implicitly ostracised as a posh food snob by the working class when I just wanted to share some of my spare feasts.
Huh? No I mean a feast at Station 8:
Also, even putting that aside, the Emancipationist track laying option is giving them delicious rubbery pies (and Solacefruit and wine sometimes).
They’re quite happy to get good food, and on the Solacefruit and wine option they’ll return your goodwill with a scintillack consignment they found. Just because the basic Displeasure reducing option is the sausages and biscuits doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they’ll accept.
No, that’s-I don’t remember if I did that or not, but that’s very much not what I meant. I meant dispensing with the actual feasts taking up space in my inventory.
Also hard disagree on those rubbery pies being good, and I take extreme issue with Solacefruit and wine not being valid options all the time. I’m just utterly, irrationally, obsessively annoyed with the fact that I have items labeled “magnificent feast” that the game just refused to let me feed them with.
Well, people apparently voluntarily buy the pies in such quantities you can finance the railroad with a market stall, so clearly they’ve got SOMETHING going for them.
And I don’t think FBG was ever going to give people the chance to ‘lose’ a holiday-exclusive item. Hell, we get a Devilbone Die every year and that only has one non-repeatable use. At least you can lose some Wounds with the feast.
Anyways, I agree that it’d be nice to always be able to give them Solacefruit, I just wanted to say that, canonically, the Tracklayers AREN’T refusing any and all food or payment except the sausages and biscuits.
Novelty, probably.
I’m half-joking, I’m mainly just being silly with the circumstances the game has presented me with and internalising that alongside my obsessive grinding and vake-riding. I just wish I had the chance to dump said holiday-exclusive items in a narrative event specifically revolving around the problem of keeping people fed. I mean with reference to the Devilbone Dice, you can actually sell them. At a pittance! But you can.
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Yeah, I get that.
Also, on another topic entirely: I still hope that sometime in the future, the Tracklayers’ City leader options will be expanded a little. Maybe a Hallowmas or Exceptional Rose companion from there, who we can then make leader? I feel disappointed that if you make Furnace the city, there’s no Emancipationist representative for the Union, and city-Furnace is stuck with the people either being led by Cornelius, by the Lackey, or by someone who’s not even IN the Union. But it seems like once you get to the City, the leader options only affect a small amount of flavor text, so maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to add some City-exclusive options?
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I’m a bit puzzled by the story. What do you think is happening here?
Do they lose the faith they had in their vision / city, reducing it to simply a functional environment (with the parricide metaphor being all the juicier considering that the city is borne from an actual being)?
And as a side not, I really don’t get Devils.
What are they trying to achieve here? Is it part of their soul ‘betterment’ program? They definitely feel alien though, despite their human skin and honeyed demeanor.
Sharing negative feedback with a creative company in the last 10~ years is an exercise in choosing where & how to be ignored.
My preference is to be ignored publicly, where at the very least some record of the complaint will exist for posterity.
(Again, you said stop, I heard you, and I have dropped the topic since. But I have no illusions anything I said has or would be taken to heart regardless of where it was said. Glad I had the opportunity to vent though.)
If there was something like that acted, I suspect one of the bigger hurdles would be how to make the Lackey comparable to the other leaders in terms of interacting with the various city-types. I mean…let’s be honest, it’s very clear the Lackey was never meant to be as developed a character as Cornelius or Furnace.
I’ve always had the impression that FB’s opinion about what devils actually want out of humans-other than souls, obviously-has changed a bit over the years. Early on there’s some odd dialogue from your Brass Embassy lodging social events where some of the devils seem to imply that humans might be able to become one? Then Skies clarifies that devils are actually sort of living chrysalises/hives for the King of Choirs’ Chorister Bees and/or gained their voices from him divesting himself of his own whatever that means, and that those renewing their devotion proceed to stuff one of the dog-sized Chorister Bees down their throat and lose all passion, all drive, just singing to the trapped King of Choirs. Puzzzzzzling behaviour for a species that otherwise seems to have fully rebelled against their old nobility, especially considering they don’t otherwise seem particularly involved with the Brazen Brigade/Brimstone Convention who are the actual pro-devil prince faction. And of course there’s the Iron Republic, which is supposedly some kind of devil experiment.
I don’t think it’s part of the ‘soul betterment’ program because the effects resemble one of the flaws identified at Carilion actually. Though the ‘soul betterment’ program was originally developed as just a series of techniques to make souls taste really, really good to Judgements so the original inventor and most of the current soul-curating devils seem to disagree on what the proper state of a soul actually should be, throwing yet more ambiguity into the whole thing.
My best guess in the context of FL’s known lore and all things being equal is that the devils are, to the extent it’s possible, trying to “terraform” (ex-)Londoners to be more compatible with the culture of Hell by releasing some sort of curse (ritual? Law-furnace edict?) on it. It’s known that exposure to Hell makes things more hellish and that various factions of Hell have an interest in humanity beyond just taking one soul one time (if only for repeat business), and of course there’s the Iron Republic.
My preferred guess in the context of my character and what a city built out of him would be like, is that the devils took one look at Steward’s Dawn and were too horrified by how bleak and sociopathic it already was to actually step foot within like originally planned. So horrified, in fact, that just like Flukes can apparently excrete a sufficiently powerful regret as a living thing, their collective fear and disgust pushed my city as far away from Hell as they could.
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Yeah, he really is there just to rubber stamp the PC’s ideas and have very few opinions or principles of his own. Which is the whole point of him, but does make him rather boring. Maybe he could get a hobby?
Honestly I’m shocked that his one redeeming character trait appears to be that he periodically visits his mother, and doesn’t want her to work a day shift for that visit. Apparently this only happens if you secure his loyalty away from Mr. Fires, which makes no sense as a redemption trait when I am doing everything in my power to be a more terrifying employer than Mr. Fires.
Maybe constant reminders of his own mortality is causing some sort of crisis of conscience in my Lackey. I mean, I guess it’s at least fair play that my character doesn’t particularly care about him seeing his mother since it doesn’t interfere with the hunt and him slacking off is probably a net detriment to the inhabitants anyway.
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Is he? Because he still talks like he’s just waiting for Mr Fires’ go ahead to shank you.
Theory: The “Magnificent Feast” is a magnificent feast for you, because you are only a single person. It would not satisfy a throng of disgruntled tracklayers.
…Although I suppose neither would a single sausage, regardless of how few complaints it engenders.
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there just to rubber stamp the PC’s ideas and have very few opinions or principles of his own
That’s the Rubbery Yes-Man, surely?
Correct.
The Lackey is there to remind you that even the one person in the TLU who answers to you directly still won’t act like it. Ever.
Aww, farewell to Emily? But i just got back here! Nothing but best wishes, her writing’s incredible.