Spoilers?

I have been playing the Horatio and while is a very interesting story, I found it very confusing. I will share my gameplay experience so anyone can help me understand:

• At first I have no idea who am I as the leader, clearly not Five since he is the first antagonist nor Prime. May be Four? They gather and the character convince the Horatio society that he is THE Horatio and not Five or the other one.
• Then you have to compete for loyalty or against piracy, being Five the opponent. Do Five and Prime escape from the home planet? They were free to do so or the leader keep a close eye on them? I would keep track on my enemies, idk if Horatio would.
• After you compete, you either get Five on the empire or kill him. If you kill him, only then is revealed that Prime killed other numbers (Two and Three if I remember correctly). The other 2 early choices make him an allied hero, but give no insight of the past. I followed the "get Five" option
• If you get Five in your system, then you start building power to conquer the galaxy, but there is a discovery after that: Five is dead. So, if Five is long dead, is your Five really Prime posing as Five? Is another Five?
• After that discovery, the leader start speaking in plural form as Horatios against the Prime Horatio (that's pretty cool btw) and reveals that he knows now his plan. What plan? Why is that plan so amazingly complex as the leader said? No answer there if I understand
• If you get a lot of fertile planets (called teeming in the quest if I remember) then the leader start speaking in singular form again and says something on the lines "A good wine and my comfortable seat again, it's been a while". I honestly don't know from getting planets the results get there.

So, I'm a bit confused, can someone help me understand:

• Who is the leader the player roleplay?
• Who is Five? How is he dead? Who is our Five?
• Did Five and Prime escaped? Can you describe the setting in the Horatio's empire at the beginning of the game?
• What did Prime do before the quest timeline?
• What is the plan that the player discover?

I've been playing the Horatio a lot lately, so I think I have a decent grip of things at this point. I'll explain as best I can, since we only have the questline to really work with here and some things were left deliberately vague.

• The player fills the role of Four, an allegedly "perfect" clone of Horatio himself (Prime, presumably). 
• Five is another "perfect" clone of Horatio, as are (presumably, though this is never stated) Two and Three.
• We don't know much about the Horatio society or how Five and Prime came to escape. Unfortunately, Four seems to be an unreliable narrator, being very self-centric and paranoid.
• If we presume that Prime is/was the leader of the Horatio, as the quest seems to imply, then we can presume he was busy doing leader stuff.
• We don't know what plan Four discovers, or if there even is a plan at all.

Though the Horatio questline can take different turns and angles based on the player's chosen path, it always seems to hone in on traits like paranoia, self-centricity, and a severe lask of empathy. Four doesn't know as much as he thinks he does, and he often projects himself onto the other Horatio characters (within reason; they are all clones, after all). We don't even know whether or not this power squabble has happened before, or whether Prime is truly the original Horatio (or just another clone who took the original's place, like Four; similar to what happens to Five being allegedly killed and replaced).

As for things like the pluralisation, it may be unintentional, but I can't tell. And Two and Three might be dead regardless of what you do, but you only find out about their deaths through one branch of the story.

Unfortunately my save was corrupted, so I can't go back and check the quests, but I definitely got the impression that the player is Prime. The implication I found was that the final piece of text from the last quest sounds a lot like it is from Prime's perspective (talking about "my palace" and "my wine," as opposed to the voice of "Four" who always sounded desperately aware he was a usurper) and also mentioned something about overcoming some madness or insanity.

How I read the plot is that Prime initially decided to go into hiding to let his perfect clones fight to expand the empire as some sort of social darwinist experiment. However, he decided to kill Four (the body the player finds) and take his place in order to manipulate things from the inside. However, Prime, being already at least a little mad, began to believe he actually was Four, which is where the questline starts.

Disclaimer: I might be completely remembering the text wrong. I wasn't paying too much attention (waiting for full release to really dive in) and as I mentioned my save was corrupted so I can't go back and check. So don't laugh too hard if I'm just talking bollocks.

I found it a bit confusing myself, but then again, Horatio (the first) was always paranoid, ego maniacal and mentally deranged. 

I don't trust anything a Horatio would say because they could simply be crazy. They could all be thinking they are Prime, and not be him, while also masquerading as someone else.

Hey all--

Thanks for the interest in Horatio!

Some of the confusion here is due to backstory elements that were going to be presented and explained before the quest started. But then that disappeared, so the quest begins assuming that the player has information that, in fact, they don't have. Sorry about that--one of the side-effects of Early Access is that sometimes the lore bits aren't totally fixed! Still, you guys have done a great job at piecing it all together. 

The narrator is Four, one of two survivors (with Five) of Horatio Prime's experiment to make the perfect, 100% identical clone. Of course, the problem is that Horatio ended up making five beings who were every bit as brilliant, ambitious, self-centered, and megalomaniac as he is. He manages to kill off three of them in the lab, but Four and Five escape and join together to drive him out of power.

But Four has two problems--one is that Five is as ambitious as he is, and the other is that it's hard to lock up a ruler in their own palace. So Prime manages to escape, and Four gets paranoid about Five.

I have done some editing to clarify bits of the text, so in the next update some things should be a bit clearer  :)  But the ending is supposed to be a bit ambiguous: Who is it that finally controls the empire? Does Four get back to an even mental state once all of his enemies are gone, or does Prime manage to kill off the last clone and reclaim power? I could still tweak the wording to push it one way or another, but I sort of like leaving it this way so that each player can decide for themselves. After all, they're identical clones so how would we know...?

While I think the current wording for the final quest step does imply that Prime has once again taken control, it's vague enough to work otherwise.

As-is, I love the Horatio questline and look forward to the edits.