Roottreemania - Missed the big smoking gun *Spoilers*

[Mr Freezed]

I missed the biggest smoking gun for the final part of Roottreemania look into the candy company flavor payments during Guy's tenure. and after doing so well otherwise it was tough to end on that note.

When I was investigating the final stage, I wasn't happy with the leap between Is a Roottree Blood Relative, Impossible to Prove, and Is NOT a Roottree. I understand that SpiderSearch everything and give everybody a controlled DNA test wouldn't make for much of a game, but I had trouble making absolute decisions without concrete evidence, probably because I did not see the biggest smoking gun.

Did anyone else find themselves in the same position or was I the outlier in missing it? I'm not sure what should have called my attention to question it further spoiler: Especially considering Caviar seemed to be a real flavor that was unpopular, it seemed reasonable to me that Guy would continue to invest in other flavors, with the international expansions and presumed industrial-scale flavor development, I don't know what should have made me more suspicious. I understood the women received life-changing money from Guy but were there specific figures mentioned that should have linked the payments? I guess stepping way back and considering what we know about the president's compensation tied to candy prices (is this only mentioned during the original campaign?), Guy may not have had the money and it would likely need to be embezzled but that still feels like a stretch without evidence of Guy's finances outside the president's compensation. I already missed the initials to flavors connection, I would need to already be looking suspiciously at the payments to consider Guy's finances and their true purpose, what should have clued me in?

Also no offense intended to the characters but with the absolute choices available I had to consider some tricky situations: women can be absolutely certain a child is their own regardless of infidelity of their partner, men cannot (without medical testing). Throw in a financial incentive to lie and the case where the man may even believe the child is theirs (and take every action to confirm that: see missing smoking gun) but they are wrong (you could come up with all sorts of wild switched-at-birth theories too but we have to draw the line somewhere). It still feels odd to me to choose between Is a Roottree Blood Relative, Impossible to Prove, and Is NOT a Roottree with this uncertainty.

Guidance for others without spoilers: If there is no direct evidence around questions of paternity, do not consider it in question.
Choices spoiler: The anonymom false paternity claim is reversed and looks to be real. However another character does appear to have a false paternity claim after first looking to be real. Fine drama and thankfully there is solid evidence here that I did not miss, so I was comfortable with these choices.

Overall I really enjoyed both the Roottrees are Dead and Roottreemania. Missing the big smoking gun in Roottreemania left me more uncertain than I should have been and I'm curious what should have clued me in. Anyone else in the same boat?

[deepFlaw]

Hmm. I forget how it initially jumped out to me, but it was fairly early on. I think there are a number of things that stick out, though.

First, Caviar is the only real flavor of the bunch and it is mentioned multiple times online; IIRC it said Guy didn’t really try more ideas after the Fancy flavors failed. None of the others are ever mentioned in comparison, even though most of them are more normal and would probably have done ok - and I believe Strawberry is actually one of the new flavors introduced by Carl later, come to think of it, so Strawberry already being there doesn’t make sense. The Chinese factory also just redistributes the candy, so making an exclusive flavor for it would be odd. Second, continuing research at a flat $10k/month cost for every new flavor individually for years and years would be pretty weird - and now that I’m typing it, I think this monthly payment aspect is what made me go “oh, they’re child support”. Third, Sugarplum being arbitrarily x2 the cost of the other flavors makes it being research less likely and lines up exactly with it being the payment for twins. That being said, I also 100% missed the initials aspect and only went over the years each payment started when figuring out who Anonymom could be.

Regarding the certainty of parentage… I did struggle a little over what the game wanted given the wording, but ultimately came to apparently correct conclusion that being unsure was for things that were for difficult to test (so Elias’s child who had already died). After thinking over it I felt confident enough with most of the kids - there was not any other possible father, the other possibility was very sure it couldn’t be them, or both parents openly knew who the father was but chose to hide it from the kid. Flavio was the one that I felt kinda unsure over - there’s the stuff about his mom being distant from her husband but that doesn’t make it impossible - but I decided that the game probably expected consistency on picking “yes”.

I guess the other important thing to bring up though is that I got all the Smoking Guns before I submitted the answer. When you can say “I know everything the game expects me to know”, it’s a lot easier to feel confident about your answers.

[Mr Freezed]

Good points on the flavors I'll have to look again and see if there's more background information out there.

Just to clarify, I did unlock all of the smoking gun entries on the dossiers and the achievement activated, I just didn't realize the big implication of the payment entries, I thought the smoking gun was referring to the mother's employments or related activities in the company records

[Rachelle]

What clued me in was twofold:
1) the list of reminders about the stuff revealed in the base game emphasized the fact that the 5Piece flavors were named following the kids' first initials. Why remind me of that, specifically, if it's not going to be relevant in some way?
And 2) the flavors included one that started with an X, and one of the potential affairs has a name that starts with X. That seemed like the biggest clue to sit up and pay attention, especially once I started looking over the other initials that matched.

[RobOda]

It was fairly obvious, which is why I missed it.

Sisely even clues you in; Guy wanted to be exactly like Elias, to the extent that he started wearing similar colour schemes (Green) and clothing, plus presenting himself as a family man.

Ergo, what did Elias do that he was famous for? 5 pieces, with each named after his kids. Therefore, what would Guy do to hide his kids? Duh!

The problem is, I didn't even register this until way after I finished the game, and as a result I completely missed it until it was revealed to me. In hindsight, it's so obvious I feel annoyed for missing it.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

I also missed this completely.

Personally I just immediately dismissed the flavor research the first time as being irrelevant, and never bothered to look at it again as a result - never occurred to me that it could be relevant, even when I was looking through the books again to figure out why this page was a smoking gun.

Plus, I think it would have changed little for me anyway (except maybe the case of Xinyu). Most of these people I knew had been receiving/had received money from Guy. The flavor research wouldn't have told me anything new. Guy wanted to hush them up, sure, but to me that didn't prove that the children were his.

You are right about what the game wanted us to do in terms of confidence in guessing the certainty of parentage. The ending made that clear. I was much more conservative in making my claims, though. I think only Anonymom's daughter and Christine's older son I entered as definite yeses? And the others I said "impossible to prove" (bar DNA testing of course). In many cases it seemed like the child could quite possibly have come from an affair, but there was no certainty of it - hush money could have just been from the affair and there was usually no real proof that somebody else couldn't have been the father (especially in the case of Mark Clementine). It did feel like the game expected me to be more certain in these cases than I was, or could be with the evidence I had. Which wouldn't have been such a problem if I just had to enter "yes/no" for each person. But with "can't prove it" as an option... that was a bit of an issue personally.

There were two other major hangups I had that made me misfire at the end. First, the way everything was written about Lang Xinyu's IVF procedure and her nephew led me to assume that he was indeed the product of the IVF and thus her trip to the States had been perfectly legitimate. Her sister/brother-in-law's interview didn't make it at all clear that they had their son normally. That led me astray in the case of Lucy, as it made me think she couldn't be a blood relative - since if Xinyu actually did the IVF, that would have left no opportunity for Guy to be responsible for the second pregnancy. Here's where the hush money payment could have made the difference, though as I mentioned earlier to me it was not definitive proof of parentage.

Second, I didn't like the way the case of Ron Roottree was presented. With the smoking guns listed, the game obviously was trying to suggest that he was Gwynn's co-star's child. But to me it needed extra details to corroborate this! There was never any hint that she had a child. Or that Ron was not Gwynn's biological child. The ONLY hint was the Huntington's, and to me that was confusing as yeah, it covered how it's passed from parents to children and can't skip a generation... but then where did it come from? Has literally everybody in that line of the family had Huntington's for generations? To me that didn't seem as likely as it just newly manifesting in some family lines sometimes, so I didn't see it as definitive proof. Without any further evidence that he wasn't Gwynn's child, I left him as confirmed.

Most of the time with the base game, it made sense to guess at some of the more obscure details to fill out the family tree. But with these endgame verification steps the game thought I should be content with less proof than I was, so that was a little disatisfying. Certainly didn't ruin the entire experience though, and on the whole trying to figure this whole tangled mess out was a highly engaging time.

[vukodlak]

About Mark Clementine I was reasonably certain that he was a Roottree, since Miracle paid for his bail through one of the Jacobson girls.

[SL128]

i also didn't think the probability of parentage part was executed well. while i recognized potential payoffs, they merely indicated guy thought the kids were plausibly his -- there was no indication of actual parentage in most cases.

i think a better approach would have been asking us to rule out plausible roottrees without needing to guess between yeses and maybes.

also i missed how you find out about ron roottree's huntington's, and evidence he wasn't gwynn's. where did those come up?

[ftoaster]

Messaggio originale di SL128:

also i missed how you find out about ron roottree's huntington's, and evidence he wasn't gwynn's. where did those come up?

you have to start looking into the people related to ron and gwynn. the guys like us remake search talks about it being postponed due to illness, then looking up rons wife talks about a huntington's disease benefit. gwynn died a few weeks before roottreemania starts and wild bill is still alive, so neither of them have/had huntington's, but another actress she worked with did, and rumors were always flying around about wild bill cheating on gwynn with another actress. then the parts about wild bill and gwynn arguing while gwynn was both visibly pregnant and holding another baby.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Messaggio originale di SL128:

i think a better approach would have been asking us to rule out plausible roottrees without needing to guess between yeses and maybes.

Agreed.

Messaggio originale di author:

About Mark Clementine I was reasonably certain that he was a Roottree, since Miracle paid for his bail through one of the Jacobson girls.

This certainly indicates that conclusion. But to me at least, we can't actually prove anything with it. That's my hangup with this whole section.

[gg.nadrewod]

Messaggio originale di deepFlaw:

Regarding the certainty of parentage… I did struggle a little over what the game wanted given the wording, but ultimately came to apparently correct conclusion that being unsure was for things that were for difficult to test (so Elias’s child who had already died). After thinking over it I felt confident enough with most of the kids - there was not any other possible father, the other possibility was very sure it couldn’t be them, or both parents openly knew who the father was but chose to hide it from the kid. Flavio was the one that I felt kinda unsure over - there’s the stuff about his mom being distant from her husband but that doesn’t make it impossible - but I decided that the game probably expected consistency on picking “yes”.

I feel like there are enough clues with the first affair to be certain: Gwyneth's lisp, the "Who is Beth?" evidence compared to the author name, the author being single all the way up until her death shortly after the birth of her son, the son working on the library expansion around the author's statue after becoming a war hero and starting his own construction company, etc. They wouldn't be descendants of BOTH Elias AND Gwyneth, so their family would be more likely to be "trimmed off" like all of Elias' and Gwyneth's siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, or parents rather than gaining access to the "6Pieces fortune", but they would still have the "Roottree blood" that Elias was obsessed with.