It's possible this is working as intended, but I just want confirmation of that. Here's a rundown of the problem

 

- I complete Clearing Out Crookspur. At this point, I don't have the Cruel Cargo quest or the Fruitful Alliance quest.

- I receive The Painted Masks from Aloth.

- I speak with Ruasare, exploring the dialogue options for The Painted Masks.

- Then, I explore the dialogue options which begin Cruel Cargo.

- During this dialogue, I give her Master Kua's head, explaining I already cleared out Crookspur and freed the slaves.

- I'm then given three options: tell her the Royal Deadfire Company has moved into Crookspur, tell her she couldn't have expected Crookspur to remain empty, or say nothing. (There are no other "unqualified" dialogue options shown.)

- Regardless of which option is selected, Cruel Cargo immediately fails and I can no longer speak with Ruasare.

- I then complete A Distant Light, and return to Onekaza as instructed.

- Before reporting on A Distant Light to Onekaza, I'm given Fruitful Alliance and have no choice but to tell her that the alliance has failed.

 

Is this working as intended? The quest journals for Cruel Cargo and Fruitful Alliance give little detail, but I don't understand why the alliance is broken if I cleared Crookspur and freed the slaves, regardless of RDC's occupation of Crookspur. And if this is working as intended, I think this could be handled better. Cruel Cargo and Fruitful Alliance are "out of the way," i.e. I didn't receive them until I was past the point where these quests have a chance to fail. I was given no indication to visit Onekaza to pick up Fruitful Alliance, as is typical of most faction quests, and only stumbled upon it while turning in A Distant Light. Meanwhile, I received Clearing Out Crookspur far earlier, after (I assume) turning in another faction quest to him.

Crookspur has a bunch of quests that are all simultaneous. The wiki has a chart near the end that explains the interactions, it seems like they expected you to only be doing one faction at a time. It should let you autocomplete quests that have the same outcome without failing, but they probably didn't test each possible combination, or there was a regression.
https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/A_Shrewd_Proposition

I have the same problem too on patch 5.0.

Regarding the Crookspur slavers, there are 4 groups involved.

1. Firstly, I received the quest from Vailain Trading Company director, saying that I should help Furrante.

2. I visited Furrante and he wanted me to help Slavers at Crookspur.

3. I talked to Atsura. He wanted me to purge Crookspur too. He also told me to talk to the Wahaki tribe before hand.

4. Aeldys sent me a missive informing that I should visit here before going to Crookspur.

5. I tried all these and cleared out all slavers at Crookspur. I helped everyone including the Wahaki. When I returned to them, they just did not like me calling me traitor or something. None of any given options pleased them. At this point, I was confused.

6. I talked to Onekaza and suddenly she wants me to talk to the Wahaki tribe. I got the quest Fruitful Alliance.

7. I have no way to convince the Wahaki to help Kahanga. The only thing I can do is telling Onekaza that the Wahaki will not help. I wonder why ?

8. What did I do wrong ??? How could I know that there will be a quest like Fruitful Alliance. How could I know that I need to talk to Onekaza before clearing Crookspur.

 

What is wrong with this quest ? Who designed this quest ? I helped the Wahaki tribe and why would they not want to help me and Kahanga ? Is this even reasonable at all ?

From my experience in gaming, I strongly believe that this is a bug. The developers do not cover all possibly related quests together.

Are we supposed to play your game by looking at wiki before hand, so that we do not mess up with uncovered consequence ???

This question had been asked since March 24, even before patch 5.0 was released, and yet still today there is no developer answering this question.

Is this intended by design ? I do not see this logical at all.

Edited October 28, 20196 yr by ekt0

Seems to be a bug, maybe you have an old save that went trough different patches. I’m sure I had several playtroughs where I clear crookspoor before going to Wahaki and they were happy enough to ally with the queen,unless maybe there is a dialogue option they don’t like or something like that.

 

P.s. just kill the queen she is too stupid to leave alive anyway.

To add, years later, this issue still exists in the game. It seems that if you turn in "Cruel Cargo" before receiving "Fruitful Alliance" then Ruasare provides only hostile responses, no matter what happened during the quest itself.

Note also that when the queen gives you the Fruitful Alliance quest, if you try one of the options other than telling her Ruasare is now hostile, the quest will become permanently stuck, as you can then neither talk to Ruasare or the Queen about it.

Sorry for double post but can't see an edit function:

A further indication that this whole questline is bugged comes after opening the burned book, where Woedica will mention their surprise that the Wahaki tribe agreed to serve the queen, despite this not happening.

Just fyi, the edit function is located under the three dots in the top right of each post.