Don’t believe their cheap misinformed lies.
The Alliance as written by frontier, is pretty good, but the Alliance As embodied by the player Groups is much richer.
If you’re into PowePlay, join the AOS Alliance Office of Statistics
If you’re German join AID (the Allies),
if you’re French join TCF Terran Colonial Forces, or Remlock Industries
if you’re into the BGS join the AEDC The Alliance Elite Diplomatic Corps,
if you're based on XBOX join Sap Core Legion, or their strange religeous offshoot AOE The Allied Order of Exemplars out in the California Nebula.
if you’re into exploring the deep join SMAC the Spinward Marches Alliance Concern, they have had a bunch of CGs to help develop the Alliance project in the California Nebula.
The IPHY (Independent Pilots If Hyel Yeh) are another small group.
And then there’s the FGS Flat Galaxy Society who are basically [NULL] but Frontier wouldn’t change their Allegiance from Indy, so they founded a new group.
Who else? Ther's more.
Uh - don’t join 160th SOAR. That guy ticked the “Alliance” box when he founded the group, but they’re basically a side project of some senior Empire uh, “PvP Enthusiasts”.
Also think twice about joining ARC - Alliance Rapid reaction Corps. They’re nice guys, but they got in bed with Lave Radio and the LRN Supporters are are a virulent anti-Alliance group. ARC don’t see it that way, but they’ve leaked internal stuff from the Alliance Assembly discord to the LRN Suppporters.
They’re still Alliance but a lot of us uh - it’s not that we don’t like them or trust them, but we are careful about what information we give them.
If I were you, I’d start with the AOS. Alliance PowerPlay has been facing some uh, “Automated Opposition” and they have to coordinate their goals to tight margins. If you just pledge to Fat Eddie and start fortifying you can end up damaging the strategy, so being part of that is important.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteMahon/
The big Alliance groups like AOS and AEDC are under heavy attack, and we are both seeing “foreign agents” in our new recruits. So joining is immediate but being welcomed inside to where the real information flow is happening, takes a while to build trust.
If you’re into the lore and history, I maintain a thread on the Mahon PowerPlay sub furum here.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/365538-A-history-of-the-Alliance-from-in-game-sources
If you want a briefing on the type of opposition we are facing at the moment, try
Episode 216 of the Lave Radio podcast (skip the first 58 minutes, you only need to hear JTrinity of the AOS give her Briefing)
Friend me in game or twitter or Facebook or here or Reddit, I’ll hook you up with some good resources and direct you to a group that you might feel most at home with. As Mangal says if you're German talk to The Allies - AID:
https://inara.cz/squadron/39/
http://theallies.de/
[video=youtube;oqZOfbCHTCA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqZOfbCHTCA[/video]
If you really become a part of the Alliance, you end up with like twenty Alliance Servers in your discord.
As well as the specific group servers, there are inter group servers like the "Alliance Assembly" and various BGS project co-ordination servers.
One interesting bit of Lore from 2014 when Michael Brookes was updating the elite universe, he compares the Alliance to the European Union with all the concomitant beaurocracy and difficulty in moving forward in a system where everything has to reach consensus.
And without really meaning to the Player Groups of The Alliance are really like that.
One of the key divisive issues is The Alliance relationship with "Indepedents".
So our name comes from "The Alliance of Independent Systems" and a lot of people feel that we should support Indys.
For the PowerPlay focused groups like the AOS, they don't mind if systems within their influence flip to indy, as long as their over-all PowerPlay mechanic is not affected.
BGS focused groups like the AEDC take a more hard-line attitude. Indy is NOT Alliance. If you want to be part of the mutual protection that is the Alliance, then you can't be a go it alone indy.
And this leads to tensions within the Alliance.
