I mean, the only reason to back down from war was to free the hostages, and then we robbed Queen Eira, our ally who we neglected to protect in the first place, of her kingdom. We ended up picking two non-matching options, strategy-wise.
Apparently it was all RNG.
This... Ignores a ton of other factors and presumes whatever we're doing is the only thing that's going on, though. They were busy with their own stuff.
If we had kept fighting and took the city, it would've been better. If we had sued for peace and given her the city, it would've been better. We gave the dice gods the chance to screw us over, and the dice gods are vindictive gods.
Urth decided to do her ascencion before the war even became a thing. Sure, she could have waited for the war to be over before ascending, but why would she? And the rest of her civ is not morally responsible for her actions, and they were kinda lost because, you know, their whole government system literally vanished into thin air.
Urth is responsible for the consequences of her actions. That includes perfectly predictable consequences such as her dissappearance collapsing civilization, or said collapse triggering the war, and said collapse preventing help.
Except if we'd given the city back, we'd have earned a lot of goodwill to cushion the blow and temp Diplo to help solve it. If we'd gone all-out war we'd have taken a diplomatic blow as the cost of elliminating the Forluc and whatever bonus to prestige would've come of that. The events would still have happened, but our ability to react would be improved.
One of them did send us help, we just decided not to use it for anything and go back home instead. The other two didn't fulfill the troops.
Have you considered that it took one of them (the other two were completely useless) years to get their house in order enough to send troops?
Point. I'm talking more about long-term recovery, but you do have a point that rolling high would have made this a non-issue.
The RNG IS the narrative. The mechanics inform the narrative.
You do remember how Oshha specifically asked us not to share any details about the update until it dropped, right?
Since the relationship effects were mentioned for 1 option, I went with the assumption that the relationship effects were consistently mentioned. This results in the conclusion that since no relationship effects are mentioned for any of the other options, that it's actually a fairly minor thing.
The twists and turns in the story is based on the RNG, how well battles go? RNG, discoveries, improvements, heroes? RNG. The vast majority of things that change the world are RNG, meaning and impact decided by QM, but the RNG informs nearly everything.
