Ouroboros, Praetoria Contacts, Flashback, and Positron's comment during Coffee Talk

If I understand the tech correctly, a character's branching choices in the game are stored as souvenirs (visible or invisible) with the character. This is what allows future choices, dialog, events, and NPC phasing to vary based on your past actions (a la the Vanguard honor salute at the end of the Death of Statesman). This is similar -- if not the same -- as the tech used to award mission badges.

If so, the problem with putting branching tech arcs in Ouroboros is that you may well have conflicting souvenirs already. If I killed Cleopatra on my way through Praetoria, she won't be there for me in Flashback because I'm flagged not to see her any more. And if I started in the Rogue Isles, then after the first time I Flashback to that arc, my choices have been made, the data flagged in my character record, and the game reacts accordingly.

The only way I can think of around this is to use the mission leader tech, the "You are now experiencing events as Arcanaville's timeline," or whatever it says. Potentially you might be able to set an invisible leader who is choice-neutral, but man, I don't even like to think about the number of possible points of failure in that scenario.

Ironically, the only way I could see Praetorian Ouroboros missions working is to preclude them having any impact on the characters at all: no badges awarded, no souvenirs, no moral choices, nothing.

But this is all based on my interpretation of oblique remarks made by Dr Aeon and other mission designers. I could be completely full of pancakes.

Sounds like Praetoria was just designed in a way that totally stupidly didn't think about how non-functional it would be with Ouroborous.

Also, after trying it to muck through one of those all-contacts route guides to go through Praetoria without "missing anything" I realized any Praetorian character that went that route is even more of a schizo lunatic than Malaise is. Or maybe you just have multiple personality disorder where you're a destructive sociopath on some days and a caring human being on other days.