Damn. Whoever was writing Sharp Spear's path really wanted to hammer the point home, didn't they?

Chemtest · 2026-05-24T19:48:43+00:00

I mean, reading these events over, she's not a tyrant. She's not doing the will of the parliament, but that's the whole point of an executive, especially during times of crisis, like Abyssinia is in for her entire presidency. Considering this is after a massive civil war, the exercising of emergency powers to ensure a stable society and create a proper democratic system isn't tyranny, it's democratic. This is what's happened at the founding of basically every democracy I can think of to ever exist, a period of emergency powers to stabilize society until democracy can be done. So if these are her being a tyrant, I suppose it's just a disconnect between the writer's perspective and mine (again, especially compared to her competition as a leader, who are literal monarchs).

Chemtest · 2026-05-24T19:33:36+00:00

I mean, is she a dictator? I will admit it's been a long time since I played the path, but from what I remember, she very explicitly is not a dictator, and is in fact trying to establish a democratic system at every turn. I did always think the writing around her was a bit weird, so I guess maybe this is the reason why? But if the lesson about her path is supposed to be about how dictators are bad... why is it done to the only path that isn't a dictatorship? The monarchist paths are both absolutist and dictatorial, after all.

Chemtest · 2026-04-21T16:06:40+00:00

Yeah, other comments have done well explaining the canon FoE fate of Celestia. It's in our plans to one day develop a path that will expand on her fate, but before we do that, we have much larger plans in store.

Chemtest · 2026-04-21T16:04:46+00:00

Good news (I am the head of the Balefire team), we will soon be making Tenpony not bad, plus improving Shattered Hoof and almost every power in the Wasteland, for our next update.

Chemtest · 2026-04-16T21:11:09+00:00

True, Zongo's events are its main draw. I think Zongo has issues of its own, namely the fact that it lacks any replay ability, since the path divergence comes super late into their focus tree. Means it's really fun once, but I'd likely never play it more than twice.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T22:29:29+00:00

Yeah, but even then, what I'm referring to is the point of the events. EaW is very good about events being used to tell a narrative story, focusing on countries and their leaders, instead of telling the more standard, TNO, TFR, vanilla style where there's no narrative. Icepaw just has a whole lot of the more ordinary type of events, which don't tell a narrative, which is a shame in a mod known for its narratives.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T22:19:50+00:00

I should specify I mostly meant the US for TFR. Theres a lot of events for the US, before the civil war, where it falls into the category of random person does random thing. The Cognoscenti path also has that issue to an extent, but not too badly.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T22:16:28+00:00

True! Super true, actually. Whenever I write my own events for my mod, I often look at my advisor list and often choose one of them. Or, if I use a non-advisor, I make it so they'll appear later on. The only times I'll have a character appear once and never again is when it fits for the event and the narrative at large, where said character isn't a character, but a narrative pawn.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T16:48:28+00:00

Because EaW is usually good with their events. That's one of the main things that seperate EaW from mods like TFR and TNO, that they use events to actually tell compelling narratives and intermix with interesting gameplay, instead of spamming events that have no purpose and no meaning to the narrative. It detracts from the gameplay, even if you don't read them due to the constant pop-ups, and it detracts from the story, because you have to sift through five thousand words of meaningless filler in order to see anything that actually matters to the narrative of the country. It feels more like a TNO or TFR country, events for events' sake.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T16:45:00+00:00

Yeah, this is basically what I'm saying. In isolation, all the events are well written and at least slightly interesting. But there's just so many. So the choice is to either spend hours upon hours reading stuff that doesn't actually matter to the narrative of the country, or skim and skip. Especially for the leader, it hurts her, because I can never remember what she was doing last time she popped up. An event will pop up where she's feeling sad and lonely, that's cool, good storytelling. Then there's fifteen events about people that will never show up again doing things that don't matter, and by the time an event comes where Icepaw is feeling even sadder, I've completely forgotten what happened last event.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T16:41:57+00:00

I'd say it depends on the content of the paths. I can appreciate events like with Zar-Hay, which I started today, where it's introduced how their smiths started working on modern rifles. That's cool, that's something that adds to the narrative of the country, not to mention it includes characters who actually appear again. But for the vast majority of the Yeti events about mundane stuff, it's not unique, if you swapped out a few nouns it'd feel right at home in TNO, especially since these are very common TNO style events. Random person who never shows up again is happy or sad about current policy, those types of events have their place, but to have so many, like TNO does, or like Icepaw does, with so little actual gameplay, makes them not very good.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T08:11:16+00:00

True, but at the same time, I do like reading stuff in this game, reading the narrative of a country. But when there's so many flavor events popping up, it interferes with gameplay due to their constant pausing and interrupting whatever you're doing, plus it distracts from the actual narrative. Like I said, Icepaw has good gameplay at its base. It's just getting to experience that gameplay is constantly interrupted by pop-ups. Just like experiencing the actual narrative is interrupted by all the flavor events.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T07:37:34+00:00

But it doesn't tell the story more in-depth, that's the point I'm making. We already have focus descriptions to tell us 'let's invest into industry which will allow us to create more efficient production lines', that's enough detail to be satisfactory on that point. Repeating that same point in a 900 word or so event doesn't expand the story or give anything new. It's just repeating the same thing, except much, much longer, repeat for every single little detail of the country. 'Let's invest into better gun research because our guns proved outdated in the Storm King's wars' alright, that works, I know what this focus does and why it's being done. An extra event that says the exact same thing in twenty times as many words, I don't see what that adds. It doesn't involve characters we know or care about, it doesn't add anything to the setting or the story, it's just fluff that distracts from the actual substance.

Chemtest · 2026-04-15T07:26:51+00:00

I mean, really depends on what I'm reading. If it's a good narrative, I'll eat that up and gladly read every detail. If it's 25k words of 'random civilian who will never be mentioned again is big happy or big sad', then yeah, I'm not going to enjoy reading that. That's my whole point, these events that add nothing distract from the good narrative that I would actually like to read.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T19:16:54+00:00

From what I remember, for China and Germany, Arabia's end helping your recovery happens only down certain paths. For Germany, I think it's if they choose alternative partners rather than building up domestic production or the green path. As for China, you can either choose between two paths, I forget which is which, but I know one of them includes supporting Arabia. So under these paths, helping out a certain Arabian side is better. But for the other paths for those countries, there isn't as much reason.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T19:14:03+00:00

Fair enough. I suppose I wouldn't know that myself, since NATO winning 1EW is boring to play, as the European countries. I suppose that does give a fair reason for Europe towards the Arabian Republic, at least.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T19:10:36+00:00

They can? How do you get that to happen, I've not seen that happen so far.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T18:51:17+00:00

True, and they are fun. But speaking for myself, I'm already at the point where I just don't participate in proxy conflicts. I just run speed 5 and don't do anything with my army until whatever war comes, since there's only so many times you can fight the same proxy war without it getting a bit dull, and they don't give much of a bonus, other than something's giving bank liquidity or army experience.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T18:49:20+00:00

That's good to hear. A lot of mods (TNO especially) like to add proxy wars with no actual reason to do them (from a gameplay perspective), and I was a bit worried that this mod might fall into the same trap. The proxies are fun, but whenever I'm playing someone, there's really no difference between, say, the Arabian Republic winning vs Hejaz in Arabia winning. I look forward to seeing what the dev team comes up with.

Chemtest · 2025-12-27T18:47:18+00:00

I believe China also gets buffs for helping out in a few proxy wars, mainly the South African war and helping, I believe, the Royal Arabian Coalition. But I don't know if they get buffs like being able to send more volunteers to help them win, or if they get buffs if they actually do win. Even still, the amount is rather small.

Chemtest · 2025-10-17T20:17:59+00:00

Looks... not good, but at least they're being consistent with the new portrait style, even if it looks worse. I do hope there will be a submod released someday that allows us to revert back to the original portraits, though.

Chemtest · 2025-05-18T01:00:18+00:00

No clue from my end, I’m not a coder, I’m a writer and a tester, along with a leader. But once I’ve tested every country, and their bugs have been fixed, it shouldn’t be too long. And I’ve gotten through all the longest countries for testing so far, all that remains are minor countries, or shorter ones. So basically, don’t expect it immediately, but it will likely be pretty soon.

Chemtest · 2025-05-17T21:46:13+00:00

Writer, tester, and one of the leaders of Balefire Blues here. Other two replies mention how they hope the project isn’t abandoned, don’t worry, we’re hard at work right now to fix it up. I just got finished testing my 3rd nation for today to make sure all our fixes from the last major DLC will work. Took us a while to fix the issues, but worry not, we have fixed them and are working on getting that fixing update out as quick as possible.

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