Why need an explanation, when we can see that there are many super strong women? There's a principle in storytelling called "show, don't tell." I'm certain you've heard of it. Well, we've been shown that there's plenty of strong women, and plenty of smart women, who are just as capable, if not moreso, than many of the men. Not to mention that several societies are shown as biologically more disposed towards female leaders. The Hornets follow a queen, who birthed them. The Boreal Elves have two feminine sexes and one male sex, which shifts the proportions towards more women. The Marefolk can't have male leaders because males get rabies when becoming adults.
Why have lore? Why have a story? Why painstakingly build a world as a playground for the player to have fun in?
You're absolutely right to imply that women can be just as strong and smart as men. One hundred-percent. That's not my issue.
I like the game for more than the fantastic sex scenes. I love being immersed in a world and living vicariously through it. And
that's
why I want more. I want to be immersed more, I want to know more. I want to yell triumphantly when a foe is killed, or be very saddened when a friend leaves us.
To me, that is the beautiful power of games.
Khor'minos is fighting a war, the people of Hawkethorne have withdrawn from trade and forestry and are staying walled up in their village, and the kitsune have kept themselves sealed off from the outside for so long that most of them probably weren't able to notice it due to isolationism. It's pretty clear that the people are bothered.
When I close my eyes, I can almost see The Frost Marches. Civilization is relegated to isolated pockets of heat and flesh with very few "arms" of trade or communication holding them together. But I do not get the impression that these pockets of civilization are turned inwards - there is too much communication, too much travel, there is too much life living outside of these pockets for most everyone to simply ignore what's going on around them.
When I think of the average Frost Marcher, I think of vigilance, rugged individualism, and independence. I can compare this to small town America. If you've ever been to a small town in America, you'll know that most people in those small towns are so bored that they can't help but get involved with their neighbors and what's happening around them. To be busy bodies.
But, again, why? If you want an explanation on why a race has cocked females, then it's either "evolution found it advantageous" or "the god that made that race wanted them to have cocks". If you want an explanation for why many women chose to grow cocks, it's not socially unacceptable in any location and alchemy is a longstanding thing.
I really don't need to explain why I want to learn more of the world of Savarra. Many of the things within this world are unusual, and they haven't been explained.
If you're fine with what's been presented - fine, good for you. I want to learn more.
I don't know if we meet the Khor'minos king. Taldahs isn't replaced with Ahmri though, because in the timeline where Taldahs is killed, Ahmri is kidnapped, and you, the Champion, assume control of the tribe. We will meet the king of Tychris, eventually, when the region gets added to the game, though that's still a while off. The Marked Men Mercs are run by a man, and though it's temporarily being run by a woman, she's way less competent than the literally immortal man who actually runs the mercs, whenever he deigns to show up. How many female leaders are there? There's Alissa&Etheryn for the winter city, Komari, Atani, Nyzerrah, and Arona. I'm not counting Ahmri, because, again, she never rules, she just gets kidnapped in the timeline where Taldahs dies. There's not that many leaders in the game overall, so, discounting the king of Tychris, I still say that a sizable chunk of the leaders are male. If we had, say, 10 more region or group leaders around, and all of those were female or futa, I'd say there's a clear imbalance, but with this sample size, it's just a female lean. It is majority female, sure, but it's not an overwhelming female landslide.
Even discounting Ahmri, Kassyra, and Lady Evergreen, there's: The Baroness, Queen Alissa, Etheryn, Komari, Atani, Queen Nyzerah, Arona, Alraune, The Drider Queen, The Harpy Matron, The Kobold Queen.
VERSUS...
The King of Khor'minos, and the King of Tychris(?) I'll even throw in Taldahs since he's technically alive when you meet him.
I'm probably missing some, but that's 11 women, and 3 men.
So seventy-three percent of the leaders that you meet or are mentioned and you'll likely meet are women.
73%
Keep in mind that we haven't even met two of these kings yet! The percentage of representation gets even worse for men if you only count people that The Champion can meet. That's an overwhelming bias no matter how you slice it.
The fire, lightning, earth stuff would be really devastating, if it weren't for the fact that many of our foes treat it like foreplay. Most of the time, after a battle, enemies are just kinda battered, not even unconscious, just beaten up enough that they'd rather not fight more. You can blast a group of horny naked elves with an inferno and a lightning storm, and break their eardrums, and blind them, and poison them, and they say "wow, that was fun! Let's fuck now." Clearly, the people of Savarra are way more resilient than the people of earth. It's very rare for people to die, outside of the occasional dark spots.
This is one part of the lore that I'm completely fine with. It's exceedingly difficult to balance a game around realism rather than the rule of cool - because it gets boring and dry fast. I accept that the game mechanics are what they are.
In the people count, the individual settlements are spread out and isolated. If all of them got together, they'd be much stronger, but Khor'minos, the strongest power in the region, completely quarantined the mountain, the Winter City hasn't been in contact with Hawkthorne for decades, the Kitsune are feared and distrusted by everyone here, the Marefolk are too far south for help to go between it and Hawkethorne without getting kidnapped by centaurs, the centaurs got corrupted and started fighting, the Hornets got corrupted and started fighting, the Orcs are a bunch of raiders who got here and decided to start raiding because that's what they did (sidenote, there's a scene in the Khor'minos bathhouse if you bring Arona where it's shown that the Minotaurs are definitely racist against the orcs), the Marked Men Mercs fell into disarray when the leader took a vacation and as such started fighting and pillaging rather than being the defense force they were hired to be. There's enough people that they could unite, but the groups are all either isolated from each other or fighting each other, and the individual groups aren't large enough to push back and unite with each other despite the adversities, if they're even willing to reach out.
Nothing that you've said here proves your point that there isn't enough people to resist. As I've just discussed, there are seemingly
many, many kingdoms in The Frost Marches. And when I think of kingdoms, I think of thousands of individual people bound together under the rule of one person. That's a lot of manpower. There's nothing in the lore that would seem to imply that an alliance of kingdoms and fiefs
wouldn't be able to handedly take care of Kassyra and her cult.
As for the Ways Between, there are a few instances when characters were talking about the Ways Between, which should probably have let you know why. The old system of idols fell into disrepair after the Godswar, and almost nobody had the knowledge or resources to fix them up and use them, aside from a few isolated individuals (and the kitsune, but they have a modified version which is its own private network, connected only to other Kitsune torii gates). The Way Walker title tells you, travel in the Ways Between was a closely kept secret of the Estelore mages, and as you've done the Convocation, you know that Estelore was annihilated first by the Wraiths. The Champion can't use it to go to major far off cities, because the pathways and idols simply are not connected. It's like taking a train to a location when the rails and stations have completely fallen apart.
Right. So why isn't The Ways being used to shuffle soldiers around? The Champion can use The Ways, and bring their companions along just fine. What's the cutoff to how many people someone can bring with them in The Ways? It's implied that any strong enough mage can enter The Ways, so what's stopping The Champion from recruiting soldiers from Hawkethorne, the hornet hive, The Winter City, etc. To help somewhere else? Like Khor'minos?
Dude. Pursang. This is a fetish porn game primarily targeted at people who want to have sex with women.
The writers who contribute here put a lot of effort into building their world, creating great characters and giving it a sense of history, but it is all orbiting around a central directive of "make our target audience horny and create situations for sex to occur."
Why are there so many woman leaders? Because this is a fetish porn game primarily targeted at people who want to have sex with women. Why are the ingame communities relatively functional and accessible from a player perspective? Why is the war effort not given more in-depth strategic focus? Because this is a fetish porn game and not Pathologic or Civ.
Horniness is one of the least logical parts of the human experience. CoC2 is a big, horny theme park with a story that takes you from one horny attraction to the next. I like it a lot and have never really wanted or needed it to be explained beyond that.
Allow me to repeat myself again:
Why have lore? Why have a story? Why painstakingly build a world as a playground for the player to have fun in?
I like the game for more than the fantastic sex scenes. I love being immersed in a world and living vicariously through it. And
that's
why I want more. I want to be immersed more, I want to know more. I want to yell triumphantly when a foe is killed, or be very saddened when a friend leaves us.
To me, that is the beautiful power of games.
So just because you're happy with the way things are, that doesn't mean that things can't or shouldn't be better. I'm sure that having a tiny bit more lore in this game won't hurt you.
Yes, and Savarra does just that. It also draws on various well-established fantasy tropes, mixes them with historical models and the output is a very interesting world. And just as the game does not require an explanation for why there are orcs and dragons and catfolk and elves (none of which exist in the real world outside of stories) it does not require an explanation for why any given percentage of women have penises, or why any given state has a female in charge instead of a male, or why Hawkthorne has a racially mixed population that's getting along. Reason: BECAUSE.
Wow, that explanation really changed my mind. Reading that was such a good use of my valuable time.
In case it wasn't painfully obvious, I'm being sarcastic.
Actually no, that is the stock response from the devs whenever someone talks about wanting specific content in the game which they don't have any plans to write and hence what others of us will suggest as well. If you think you have something to contribute, submissions are open.
Oh, I am
quite aware that this was the stock response from certain developers in the past. It's one of the reasons why I (and likely many others) have thought twice about contributing. Because instead of being nurturing and helpful, the environment and the people within it come off as hostile and combative.
The 'real world' is, by definition, 100% maximally realistic. Any world we create in fiction is going to be less real and thus not match it. I see no reason to waste time getting hung up on a fictional world not matching it.
I'm not asking for a fictional world to match our world. I'm simply asking it to be coherent and adhere to an internal logic it itself has established.
I said same world by which I meant
planet, not same universe. And the devs
could not be more clear on the whole 'CoC2 is not CoC1' thing.
And my original post was talking about the Corruption of Champions
universe,
not an individual planet. Nowhere did I imply that Mareth is Savarra or vice-versa.
In that link that you sent, The Observer was quite clearly talking about the game itself and its systems being different from CoC1. Nowhere does he say or imply anything to prove your point.
So you agree with me that CoC2 is set in the same universe as CoC1?
Great!
Strawman arguments do not make you look cool.
Perhaps not, but they
do make me feel better when I'm arguing with someone who's being obtuse on purpose.
Because they wrote it to be different. If you must have a Watsonian explanation, 'because the world has things ours does not like gods and magic and things evolved differently'. There you go.
Y'know, for something that you defend so ardently - you don't seem to care much about Corruption of Champions 2 to learn more of it.
That seems strange to me.
Really? I haven't heard someone use 'I'll tell on you!' since I was twelve. This is a forum for adults and a lot of people here are snarky. Trying to act 'tough' like this does not impress.
I really don't care, WolframL.
I neither have the time nor patience to care what strangers on the internet think.
I'm not here to impress anybody.
-----
I apologize if you've replied to me and I don't reply back, I'm a bit tired right now so I might miss a few things.
