Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180114010136/@comment-31763506-20180114214741

In other news, while doing another serious playthrough concurrent with what I refer to as my "derp" playthrough (the attempt to see just how badly I can make the war events go, plus experiencing Dominated Varia and Cockwhore Altina, whom I've consistently refused to use owing to my foolish moral standards), I've noted that there was a very minor dialogue point that throws the Timeline into disarray between the beginning of the game and Orcent's transformation.

The putz in the House of Petitions soliciting donations for the Midautumn Ball in Aka's Route and the Midsummer Ball at the start of Chapter 2 is asking for donations to the Midwinter Ball in Chapter 1, NOT the Midsummer Ball, as I had previously assumed.

It's going to require a massive edit, and I think through the consequences below.

That effectively means that there's a time skip of close to six months between the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2, and the game starts some time in the late summer or early autumn of 1153 AE, the Ardford Summit happened in the autumn of 1154 AE, not 1153 AE, the Battle of Yhilin took place in Spring or Summer of 1155 AE, the events of Chapter 3 prior to the transformation of Orcent are much more compressed in time (and those of chapter 2 are correspondingly less so), the Zirantia trip was significantly later in the year 1155 AE (and the birth dates assumed for characters introduced in Zirantia is correspondingly later), Eustrin could be as late as the winter of 1155/1156 AE (although that clashes with the Maranite negotiations scene in which Megail complains about having to stay out in the heat, but Aram's climate is insane).

Recontextualizing a lot of the incidental dialogue in Chapter 1 and 2 on Simon's age and the passage of time shores up that hypothesis fairly well (the coming winter in  Feroholm   is much more impending at game start, Simon has way more time to turn 56, Simon says they will stay in Yhilin for a few months between chapters, etc.).

That leaves the beginning and end of the 3rd Arclent War a bit more up in the air. If we assume the seasonal cycle during which the bidding for pillars in the merchant camp is annual instead of biannual or even more frequent (it's the on season in Ch 1 but the off season in Ch 2, hence you could get a pillar for a discount if you had 200,000 ProN lying around, but it's the on season again in Ch 4) then we can assume that Ch 4 begins either three or four years after the start of the game, give or take a few months. That produces either a long or short chronology for the 3rd Arclent War.

If the Eustrin trip was closer to the end of summer and beginning of Autumn in 1155 AE, then the entirety of the war would likely have taken place in autumn of 1155 AE, with Chapter 4 opening in Autumn of 1156 AE. If there were more of a passage of time between Orcent's transformation, the Eustrin trip and the outbreak of the war, then it would have begun in Spring of 1156 AE, lasted through the Autumn of 1156 AE, making the outset of Ch 4 begin in the Autumn of 1157 AE.

That's assuming Iris followed the standard real world military playbook of not launching major offensive operations in winter, and that the observation of New Years in Arclent corresponds to the modern Gregorian Calendar. (There's a reason no sane database software supports a date prior to 1753 CE .)  And of course that SierraLee is paying as close attention to this stuff as I am trying to.

I'm more inclined to think that the 3rd Arclent War was a few weeks rather than a few months, since this makes the ingame dialogue make a bit more sense.