Unfortunately, that's true. I really don't like that. The superpowers are caricatures by now.
The Empire, The Federation and the Alliance: Thoughts on the Geopolitics of 3303
- Thread starter Verenti
- Start date
Unfortunately, that's true. I really don't like that. The superpowers are caricatures by now.
Alliance in my opinion are space LibDems - so cowards and traitors isn't far out.
Feds and Imps areas bad as each other too. They both have a form of slavery in the end, though the Feds' version is closer to the real world in the UK and USA, so it's not so obvious to our desensitised minds, whereas the Imps' version is obvious.
We'd probably be better off under AI rule, or even Thargoids.
Great story Decay!
And about history?
I am no history proff, but I would summarize it like this:
Old earth started for the stars, Federation was founded to govern new colonies. Empire broke free from the Federal rule and formed its own... empire. As humanity spread and many distant colonies were founded criminal activitys and piracy increased. Neither the Federation nor the Empire (inbetween in war with each other) could guarantee for security - so the Alliance was founded as democratic cooperative between all those remote farmer- and miner colonies.
From the war betwee Federals and Empire there rose Sirius Corporation with profits from the arms-race. Then came the Thargoids. The specialforce INRA dealt with them and drove them off with the Mycoid virus.
Centuries did pass. Empire, Federation, Alliance and the Independent Powers we know now did prosper. Then a Pirate Lord entered the stage and the Empire enterd the Pegasi Pirate Wars to drive those anarchic bandits away. At the same time the old Emperor died and succesion was "debated" and Federatios President was lost in space.
Oh look it' nearly 3303. The galaxy has been traveresed. Barnacles were found. Alien ruins and ship wrecks have been sighted. Arissa Lavigny-Duval became the new Emperor and Federal President Halsey was recovered with a psychic trauma, maybe abducted by aliens. And somehow an ex-admiral of the Feds managed to create his own empire in the pirate lords neighbourhood...
And about history?
I am no history proff, but I would summarize it like this:
Old earth started for the stars, Federation was founded to govern new colonies. Empire broke free from the Federal rule and formed its own... empire. As humanity spread and many distant colonies were founded criminal activitys and piracy increased. Neither the Federation nor the Empire (inbetween in war with each other) could guarantee for security - so the Alliance was founded as democratic cooperative between all those remote farmer- and miner colonies.
From the war betwee Federals and Empire there rose Sirius Corporation with profits from the arms-race. Then came the Thargoids. The specialforce INRA dealt with them and drove them off with the Mycoid virus.
Centuries did pass. Empire, Federation, Alliance and the Independent Powers we know now did prosper. Then a Pirate Lord entered the stage and the Empire enterd the Pegasi Pirate Wars to drive those anarchic bandits away. At the same time the old Emperor died and succesion was "debated" and Federatios President was lost in space.
Oh look it' nearly 3303. The galaxy has been traveresed. Barnacles were found. Alien ruins and ship wrecks have been sighted. Arissa Lavigny-Duval became the new Emperor and Federal President Halsey was recovered with a psychic trauma, maybe abducted by aliens. And somehow an ex-admiral of the Feds managed to create his own empire in the pirate lords neighbourhood...
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The Empire Remembers.
Good post OP. But the Imperials as bad guys? I disagree. There's plenty of shades of grey going around for all the superpowers.
The Federation and Empire were designed back in FE2 days as being equally "morally grey".
The Federation has a veneer of egalitarian democracy, but at heart, it remains an "imperialist power", in the sense of using its vast navy to impose its will on systems which may wish to secede from the Federation. It is, historically, less "expansionist" than the Empire in terms of annexation by conquest, and has always been more physically diffuse - it is more tolerant of having star systems "in Federation space" that are not under direct Federation control.
Socially, the FE2 Empire had three cultural distinctives which the Federation opposed:
- A slavery-based economy (ED slavery has advanced the concept; the original FE2 game had just one category of "Slaves", which the Empire supported)
- A culture of honourable single combat (duelling) with explicit individual gun rights (this seems to have been retconned out of the ED Empire, with personal weaponry now just as illegal in Imperial space as it is in Fed space)
- Genetic engineering, of both humans and of non-human plants and animals.
The Federation, on the other hand, had three cultural distinctives which the Empire has held in disdain:
- Protection of the right of existence of native ecosystems and lifeforms, especially those suspected of sentience or proto-sentience;
- An insistence that Federation-style democracy is the best and only legitimate form of planetary government;
- A sense of "divine right to rule" - that all Humans came from Earth and should therefore be ruled by Earth as a single galactic superpower.
This does make the Empire much more "geopolitically" similar to the Confederate States: in the US Civil War, the Confederacy weren't trying to conquer and take over the Union, they would have been content with the Union simply recognizing their secession. But, much to the Federation's surprise, the Empire defeated the fleets sent to reassert Federation rule over Achenar (called the "Birthright Wars" in the Empire) and forced the Federation to recognize their secession. So in that sense, the Empire "won".
The Alliance was not part of the original FE2 game. It was added in the next sequel, FFE, purely as a plot device in The Story, which asked The Player to choose between the noble, alien-loving Alliance against the evil, xenophobic INRA (the joint Empire-Federation Men-In-Black-style secret anti-alien taskforce). As such, the Alliance was never properly fleshed out as a political entity. It was always intended to be "small and mostly harmless", playing the be-a-small-target game so as not to attract the attention of the two much larger rival superpowers. So I've always considered them to be more "Space-Switzerland" rather than "Space-Europe", from a military standpoint.
Alliance politics has also undergone something of a shift from its original inception in FFE, which cast it as a paragon of Democracy in its best and truest form, compared to the corrupted, iron-fist-in-velvet-glove form seen in the Federation. But in ED, we see the Alliance as a "broad church", having numerous different government forms affiliated with it: democrats, corporates, communists, dictators, even criminal gangs/anarchies. So, to my mind, this more resembles the Space-British-Commonwealth or Space-United-Nations, rather than Space-Europe. The concept of "Alliance democracy" has moved up a level: individual planets may not be democratic, but the Alliance as a whole is, with one vote per planet in the Alliance Congress and no planet enshrined as extra-special.
The Federation has a veneer of egalitarian democracy, but at heart, it remains an "imperialist power", in the sense of using its vast navy to impose its will on systems which may wish to secede from the Federation. It is, historically, less "expansionist" than the Empire in terms of annexation by conquest, and has always been more physically diffuse - it is more tolerant of having star systems "in Federation space" that are not under direct Federation control.
Socially, the FE2 Empire had three cultural distinctives which the Federation opposed:
- A slavery-based economy (ED slavery has advanced the concept; the original FE2 game had just one category of "Slaves", which the Empire supported)
- A culture of honourable single combat (duelling) with explicit individual gun rights (this seems to have been retconned out of the ED Empire, with personal weaponry now just as illegal in Imperial space as it is in Fed space)
- Genetic engineering, of both humans and of non-human plants and animals.
The Federation, on the other hand, had three cultural distinctives which the Empire has held in disdain:
- Protection of the right of existence of native ecosystems and lifeforms, especially those suspected of sentience or proto-sentience;
- An insistence that Federation-style democracy is the best and only legitimate form of planetary government;
- A sense of "divine right to rule" - that all Humans came from Earth and should therefore be ruled by Earth as a single galactic superpower.
This does make the Empire much more "geopolitically" similar to the Confederate States: in the US Civil War, the Confederacy weren't trying to conquer and take over the Union, they would have been content with the Union simply recognizing their secession. But, much to the Federation's surprise, the Empire defeated the fleets sent to reassert Federation rule over Achenar (called the "Birthright Wars" in the Empire) and forced the Federation to recognize their secession. So in that sense, the Empire "won".
The Alliance was not part of the original FE2 game. It was added in the next sequel, FFE, purely as a plot device in The Story, which asked The Player to choose between the noble, alien-loving Alliance against the evil, xenophobic INRA (the joint Empire-Federation Men-In-Black-style secret anti-alien taskforce). As such, the Alliance was never properly fleshed out as a political entity. It was always intended to be "small and mostly harmless", playing the be-a-small-target game so as not to attract the attention of the two much larger rival superpowers. So I've always considered them to be more "Space-Switzerland" rather than "Space-Europe", from a military standpoint.
Alliance politics has also undergone something of a shift from its original inception in FFE, which cast it as a paragon of Democracy in its best and truest form, compared to the corrupted, iron-fist-in-velvet-glove form seen in the Federation. But in ED, we see the Alliance as a "broad church", having numerous different government forms affiliated with it: democrats, corporates, communists, dictators, even criminal gangs/anarchies. So, to my mind, this more resembles the Space-British-Commonwealth or Space-United-Nations, rather than Space-Europe. The concept of "Alliance democracy" has moved up a level: individual planets may not be democratic, but the Alliance as a whole is, with one vote per planet in the Alliance Congress and no planet enshrined as extra-special.
no good guys here.
Alliance is entirely conditional on leaving petty OTT dictatorships, cults and REALLY soulless, Nestle grade corporate sleaze alone to get things done.
Feds are the definition of one government for sale only this week, 50% off. Also you might count jingoistic military posturing against them if you don't find Starship Troopers awesome.
Empire does not need introduction really - while imperial tradition surprisingly efficiently mitigates the worst excesses, only 1 of 4 influential imperial politicians uphold it. Some fail by ignorance, some allow loopholes through rigidity and some are out as an enemy of the tradition and look up to feds full stop. And i expect this proportion to remain true all the way down the chain of command.
Alliance is entirely conditional on leaving petty OTT dictatorships, cults and REALLY soulless, Nestle grade corporate sleaze alone to get things done.
Feds are the definition of one government for sale only this week, 50% off. Also you might count jingoistic military posturing against them if you don't find Starship Troopers awesome.
Empire does not need introduction really - while imperial tradition surprisingly efficiently mitigates the worst excesses, only 1 of 4 influential imperial politicians uphold it. Some fail by ignorance, some allow loopholes through rigidity and some are out as an enemy of the tradition and look up to feds full stop. And i expect this proportion to remain true all the way down the chain of command.
Wrong. Alliance is the smart choice. And onionhead
The thing that I really like is how distictive the player groups that follow each of the Powers is.
Their styles of organisation and heirachy and so on.
The Alliance is primarily a meritocracy and the groups tend to be interested in governance.
The only Alliance group I know that is serious about PvP is Independent Pilots Consortium - IPC.
That is very different to Empire groups like Achenar Immortals and The Imperial Inquisition which both have significant wings of PvP enthusiasts and friends among emergent content generators like SDC.
Although I have shared Sole Hunter's "Player Groups as Dungeons and Dragons Alignments" - I don't know that Empire CMDRs see themselves as 'Evil'. But there IS a definite tendency to heavy metal fonts, angry head avatars and cod latin.
Actually the Cod latin thing is worth investigating.
There is something to differentiate between the Cod Latin lovers of heirachy and aristocray - Role Play, PowerPlay and vast wealth.
with the other type of Empire player that just love to go weapons deployed on a hollow square.
The Feds are different. I think the Alliance used to feel quite an affinity with Winters and there was a treaty there for a long time that worked pretty well.
But in cycle 43 a Federation coordinated, covert merit snipe of unprecedented proportions caused the Alliance to tip into a turmoil in which stood to lose them a huge number of systems.
There was a monumental effort by the Alliance to fortify against the turmoil.
Later in cycle 56? there was a missed server cycle. As a consequence of this PowerPlay fell into dissarray, the existing Winters leadership disbanded, and powerPlay has become uh -even those who love it hate it kinda thing.
Meanwhile many groups have been working for years at the level of local government of systems. Of the 19,000 inhabited systems, the Feds and Empire have lost about 300 each and the Alliance have gained about 300 and the rest have gone to independent. But more than 40% of systems are no longer governed by their 'default' ruler as a direct result of CMDR intervention.
So the Rise To Power games were initiated to give groups that had been manipulating the BGS successfully the opportunity to become a Power.
One of the criteria that Frontier was looking for was a solid playerbase.
The manipulation of local government is a very different skill set t PowerPlay. BGS requires patience and record keeping and good organisation. PowerPlay requires weight of numbers. Sorry that's a disservice to the many highly organised leaders of the Powers, but a lot of PowerPlay is about how much raw work your team cn do. BGS manipulation, has very different opportunities and setbacks.
So Frontier - in trying to give a reward to the government changing groups, ended up running kind of a popularity contest. The Rise To Power games ended up being won by the Russian EG Pilots who were able to field some "50,000 boots on the ground" according to David Braben.
Unfortunately this seems to have lead to the defacto creation of yet another Empire Power as a credible treaty has been forged between the Imperial High Command (a player group of all Empire Powers) and Yuri Grom's new mob of Russians EG Piots. They also get a Op Sec bonus as their core playerbase is Russian, and uses Russian communications channels.
Then there groups like Cannon and Mobius and the Fuel Rats, who have only a small interest in governance and politics. They have other good reasons for existance.
Their styles of organisation and heirachy and so on.
The Alliance is primarily a meritocracy and the groups tend to be interested in governance.
The only Alliance group I know that is serious about PvP is Independent Pilots Consortium - IPC.
That is very different to Empire groups like Achenar Immortals and The Imperial Inquisition which both have significant wings of PvP enthusiasts and friends among emergent content generators like SDC.
Although I have shared Sole Hunter's "Player Groups as Dungeons and Dragons Alignments" - I don't know that Empire CMDRs see themselves as 'Evil'. But there IS a definite tendency to heavy metal fonts, angry head avatars and cod latin.
Actually the Cod latin thing is worth investigating.
There is something to differentiate between the Cod Latin lovers of heirachy and aristocray - Role Play, PowerPlay and vast wealth.
with the other type of Empire player that just love to go weapons deployed on a hollow square.
The Feds are different. I think the Alliance used to feel quite an affinity with Winters and there was a treaty there for a long time that worked pretty well.
But in cycle 43 a Federation coordinated, covert merit snipe of unprecedented proportions caused the Alliance to tip into a turmoil in which stood to lose them a huge number of systems.
There was a monumental effort by the Alliance to fortify against the turmoil.
Later in cycle 56? there was a missed server cycle. As a consequence of this PowerPlay fell into dissarray, the existing Winters leadership disbanded, and powerPlay has become uh -even those who love it hate it kinda thing.
Meanwhile many groups have been working for years at the level of local government of systems. Of the 19,000 inhabited systems, the Feds and Empire have lost about 300 each and the Alliance have gained about 300 and the rest have gone to independent. But more than 40% of systems are no longer governed by their 'default' ruler as a direct result of CMDR intervention.
So the Rise To Power games were initiated to give groups that had been manipulating the BGS successfully the opportunity to become a Power.
One of the criteria that Frontier was looking for was a solid playerbase.
The manipulation of local government is a very different skill set t PowerPlay. BGS requires patience and record keeping and good organisation. PowerPlay requires weight of numbers. Sorry that's a disservice to the many highly organised leaders of the Powers, but a lot of PowerPlay is about how much raw work your team cn do. BGS manipulation, has very different opportunities and setbacks.
So Frontier - in trying to give a reward to the government changing groups, ended up running kind of a popularity contest. The Rise To Power games ended up being won by the Russian EG Pilots who were able to field some "50,000 boots on the ground" according to David Braben.
Unfortunately this seems to have lead to the defacto creation of yet another Empire Power as a credible treaty has been forged between the Imperial High Command (a player group of all Empire Powers) and Yuri Grom's new mob of Russians EG Piots. They also get a Op Sec bonus as their core playerbase is Russian, and uses Russian communications channels.
Then there groups like Cannon and Mobius and the Fuel Rats, who have only a small interest in governance and politics. They have other good reasons for existance.
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Yeah, producer Michael Brookes has said that in a couple of streamed Q&As. "Traitors to the Independents". I guess all the Powers are his project so we have to take that seriously, but I think Frontier have noted how Alliance leadership have dealt with Player Groups wanting to be independent within the Alliance PowerPlay sphere. There have been a number of occasions where the Alliance Office of Statistics (the guys who run Mahon PowerPlay) have pulled out of an expansion or in the case of [NULL] helped fight off another Power's expansion.
There's a kind of base decency around that. It can only work because it is a meritocracy and not a democracy. Leadership listen, but a lot of decisions are made behind closed doors. Old Winters on the other hand seemed to be much more democratic, but oddly that can cause some bad outcomes. A group can very quickly become a mob baying for blood.
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Rogue One did a great job of introducing some of the less-than-savory elements of the Rebellion. One character, in particular, jumps out as a prime example of the Rebellion's own tenuous relationship with "goodness."
Definitely joining the Empire.
I just enjoy that there are the 3 major powers (and a host of minor powers+ the player factions)
Why?
Because I earn my cash , not by exploiting sothis, or mission stacking or by spending days in a CZ, but by taking goods from one system to another..... and if they are legal to buy in one system, they must be legal to sell in the other
If ED had only one power ruling all of humanity, I would'nt be able to do my job and I'd be stuck in a sidey somewhere.
So heres to the 3 powers.... and me being able to get rich off all of them
Bill
'but Officer..... I haven't got a cargo of battleweapons.. this 500 cr bill says so....'
Why?
Because I earn my cash , not by exploiting sothis, or mission stacking or by spending days in a CZ, but by taking goods from one system to another..... and if they are legal to buy in one system, they must be legal to sell in the other
If ED had only one power ruling all of humanity, I would'nt be able to do my job and I'd be stuck in a sidey somewhere.
So heres to the 3 powers.... and me being able to get rich off all of them
Bill
'but Officer..... I haven't got a cargo of battleweapons.. this 500 cr bill says so....'
DNA I'm ashamed to admit that I've only just seen your videos - they're brill
Yeah, but incomplete - Vimeo has this thing where it lets you upload a new version, so I tend to upload with the intention of fixing up the mistakes later (and then months go by). A keen eye would have spotted that Crimson State Limited is not actually the player group Crimson State Group.
Tye next video I really want to finish is the "Leesti Unauthourized" history of Leesti and all the playrgroups that have a claim to the Old Worlds and why they are important. The Old Worlds are kind of a classic example of how the different layers of politics interact. Some local government gets pushed just by the Rares Trade, which brings a lot of CMDR traffic. The traffic brings pirates - The Code still call the Old Worlds "The New Caribbean". They have their home world in uh Orrere(?), but AEDC pushed them out of Reorte years ago and I don't think they have another expansion. Not that AEDC are the sole custodians of The Old Worlds - ARC (Alliance Rapid reaction Corp) are based in the area and have like ten or so expansions.
The point I am making to OP Verenti is that the different scales of politics are all driven by people. There's a fairly good match between the in-game figureheads and the type of players they attract, but there's a lot of variance and uh - stuff that is a certain way because of undocumented player history.
If player groups had direct access to the newspapers in the systems they rule, then more of this stuff would be in the game. It would be full of wild innacuracies but it would be really amazing. Imagine going to [Dark Armada's homeworld] and reading their take on the war with Border Coalition. The Diamond Frogs do great PR or go to [Cannon home world] to get their latest breaking news. Currently the in-game system papers only discuss the what is happening (states, traffic etc) not why.
After GalNet closed its doors, there is nowhere that you can see what the Players wanted to say at all.
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ED does a fairly bad job at presenting the player the moral decisions and making those decisions count, but in some way this makes those decisions more interesting.
At first glance your assumption of Empire=bad, Federation=neutral and Alliance=good might be true, but digging a bit deeper and all three superpowers are equally "bad".
The Empire supports slavery and is based on "legalized and formalized corruption".
The Federation is controlled by military-industrial corporations and politicians are often nothing more than employees of those corporations.
The Alliance is a military state in disguise (the true power is held by the Admiralty). Trade is the main method of suppression.
In the end in all three superpowers the power and wealth is in the hands of a few and the masses are poor and without that much rights and perspective. The main difference is the carrot used to get the masses to work for the powerful.
Politics aside, the player is constantly forced to make moral decisions.
Maybe it's lack of gameplay or - if you want to be cynic - it's intentional that there are no real consequences for un-moral behavior.
Slave trading for high profit vs. other trading for less profit.
Quickly get engineer materials by killing civilians vs. time consuming other methods.
Drug smuggling
Piracy
Mass murder
There are a lot of things that are - based on current moral standards - really bad and nobody cares about it or if you care about it you are basically limiting yourself.
Obviously this is not a movie or novel where the narrative is used to highlight moral topics. ED throws the player into the cold water and it's up to the player to decide if moral questions are something to think about.
The result is that the players have to identify the moral questions and have to answer them for themselves without help from the game.
Without moral guidance from a "higher authority" the player has to make own moral decisions.
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This is a fantastic post, Zadian!
Wow, this has been a lively and on topic conversation. I'm grateful for everyone's contributions to a few scribblings and shower thoughts I wrote up here.
I acknowledge, with an uncharacteristic humility, that my thoughts are not the end all and be all pronouncement on the subject. I also would like to acknowledge I appreciate that some places where I went wrong in my thinking that those who contributed shared their knowledge to further round out my own. While I might not have replied to everything to date, I appreciate the intelligence and thoughtfulness with which the comments were composed.
I was reluctant to reply in any volume because I usually like to let the conversation play out without interfering with its progression, however, I think that came off as ignoring people who wrote significant posts directly responding to my own.
I think, to reply to Zadian, that determining how bad each super power actually is should be up to the individual and we should arrive at different conclusions based on our own values. I'm not mistaking this for an rpg by Obsidian or inXile, however, good written games should act, somewhat, as a conversation with the player: not dictating what the player must do, but debating what they chose to do. You are absolutely right to point out that there are a variety of minor choices that make up our gaming experience that, most definitely, are being tracked by FDev, including those you mentioned.
I think the super powers could contrast more and I think, more importantly, that such a contrast could be brought out without disrupting what has gone before. The goal shouldn't be to make them all "equally bad", but rather each present a philosophic outlook that could be considered to be right. Everyone views themselves as a protagonist of their own story, and few people see themselves as a bad guy.
To give an example, I support the Empire. I don't think of them as the bad guys at all. I think they are written to come off as antagonistic to many of our values and therefore, at face value they seem as the default bad guy. Especially, since players are introduced to the game via federal space. However, in my "head cannon", I see them as much more of an Enlightened Aristocracy: a bastion of civilisation beset by pirates and other men for which life is cheap and everything is for sale. The Federation almost eschews the dignity of the Imperial way of life and they contemptuously sacrifice the spiritual (vis-a-vis Hegel. Not ghosts, but not material aspects of life) that makes up a good life for materialistic gains: the Alliance I don't think much of at all. I take pride in my small fleet of Gutamaya ships and often accompany my flights with Mozart or Mahler. I see the Empire not in terms of Roman empire, but in terms of a resplendent Austria. That's a personal choice, but I enjoy it more to think of my character taking coffee during a meeting with local big wigs in high ceilinged rococo offices with giant windows looking out into space. However, no one explicitly told me the empire is like this. There was a quote about being a bastion of civilisation and the elegance of Imperial designed that captured my imagination and wrote, for me, a narrative.
In my opinion, all three should prominently argue why their way of life is the best way of life and Elite, I argue, fails to do this: if not in the failure to make such an argument, at least failing do so prominently. If one goes by the wiki, the Empire seems horrid, the Federation seems bad and the Alliance seems like the only good choice (I think somewhere it literally says on the wiki that the Empire is totalitarian, the Federation is authoritarian and the Alliance is democratic. It's impossible to read something like this without coming away with a value judgement.) I think that's problematic, because the game doesn't openly make arguments otherwise. It should, because even at the height of the cold war, we knew (supposedly. I didn't exist until the end of the Cold War.) why the Soviets thought of themselves as the good guy and the US surely made the rest of the world know about the virtue of its "blue jeans and rock and roll". Say what you want about Soviet living conditions, but they weren't evil. I'm not denying the existence of gulags or their monstrosity, but they, on some level, had a moral philosophy that refuted Western values and norms based on a hierarchy of principles. So should we understand the major places of this galaxy.
As to DNA's posts, I'm not denying there exists several levels of player interaction and likely the levels you discussed are likely more relevant for the world because those ultimately will drive FDevs choices in crafting a narrative moving forward. However, I'm more interested in level of organisation which one hardly sees in the game at all. I would love to get a look at the constitutions of each of these governments and really get into the political structures that make up their system of governance. For me, the power play characters are not the upper level, but the lowest level of my system. This might be divorced from useful analysis for Elite, as a game, but I think the depth of the lore is a selling point for this game. As such, the indefinable upper level of political constitution and political ideology of the super powers inform how we interact at the lower levels-- I'm not sure the reverse is true. I don't know. Clearly, you've done a lot of work in the field of politics in Elite and I'm sure your work has been and will be more useful to the player base than my mad ramblings here. So I thank you for your contributions.
I would continue, but this daylight savings time snuck up on me. I look forward to read the thought others have on these topics.
I acknowledge, with an uncharacteristic humility, that my thoughts are not the end all and be all pronouncement on the subject. I also would like to acknowledge I appreciate that some places where I went wrong in my thinking that those who contributed shared their knowledge to further round out my own. While I might not have replied to everything to date, I appreciate the intelligence and thoughtfulness with which the comments were composed.
I was reluctant to reply in any volume because I usually like to let the conversation play out without interfering with its progression, however, I think that came off as ignoring people who wrote significant posts directly responding to my own.
I think, to reply to Zadian, that determining how bad each super power actually is should be up to the individual and we should arrive at different conclusions based on our own values. I'm not mistaking this for an rpg by Obsidian or inXile, however, good written games should act, somewhat, as a conversation with the player: not dictating what the player must do, but debating what they chose to do. You are absolutely right to point out that there are a variety of minor choices that make up our gaming experience that, most definitely, are being tracked by FDev, including those you mentioned.
I think the super powers could contrast more and I think, more importantly, that such a contrast could be brought out without disrupting what has gone before. The goal shouldn't be to make them all "equally bad", but rather each present a philosophic outlook that could be considered to be right. Everyone views themselves as a protagonist of their own story, and few people see themselves as a bad guy.
To give an example, I support the Empire. I don't think of them as the bad guys at all. I think they are written to come off as antagonistic to many of our values and therefore, at face value they seem as the default bad guy. Especially, since players are introduced to the game via federal space. However, in my "head cannon", I see them as much more of an Enlightened Aristocracy: a bastion of civilisation beset by pirates and other men for which life is cheap and everything is for sale. The Federation almost eschews the dignity of the Imperial way of life and they contemptuously sacrifice the spiritual (vis-a-vis Hegel. Not ghosts, but not material aspects of life) that makes up a good life for materialistic gains: the Alliance I don't think much of at all. I take pride in my small fleet of Gutamaya ships and often accompany my flights with Mozart or Mahler. I see the Empire not in terms of Roman empire, but in terms of a resplendent Austria. That's a personal choice, but I enjoy it more to think of my character taking coffee during a meeting with local big wigs in high ceilinged rococo offices with giant windows looking out into space. However, no one explicitly told me the empire is like this. There was a quote about being a bastion of civilisation and the elegance of Imperial designed that captured my imagination and wrote, for me, a narrative.
In my opinion, all three should prominently argue why their way of life is the best way of life and Elite, I argue, fails to do this: if not in the failure to make such an argument, at least failing do so prominently. If one goes by the wiki, the Empire seems horrid, the Federation seems bad and the Alliance seems like the only good choice (I think somewhere it literally says on the wiki that the Empire is totalitarian, the Federation is authoritarian and the Alliance is democratic. It's impossible to read something like this without coming away with a value judgement.) I think that's problematic, because the game doesn't openly make arguments otherwise. It should, because even at the height of the cold war, we knew (supposedly. I didn't exist until the end of the Cold War.) why the Soviets thought of themselves as the good guy and the US surely made the rest of the world know about the virtue of its "blue jeans and rock and roll". Say what you want about Soviet living conditions, but they weren't evil. I'm not denying the existence of gulags or their monstrosity, but they, on some level, had a moral philosophy that refuted Western values and norms based on a hierarchy of principles. So should we understand the major places of this galaxy.
As to DNA's posts, I'm not denying there exists several levels of player interaction and likely the levels you discussed are likely more relevant for the world because those ultimately will drive FDevs choices in crafting a narrative moving forward. However, I'm more interested in level of organisation which one hardly sees in the game at all. I would love to get a look at the constitutions of each of these governments and really get into the political structures that make up their system of governance. For me, the power play characters are not the upper level, but the lowest level of my system. This might be divorced from useful analysis for Elite, as a game, but I think the depth of the lore is a selling point for this game. As such, the indefinable upper level of political constitution and political ideology of the super powers inform how we interact at the lower levels-- I'm not sure the reverse is true. I don't know. Clearly, you've done a lot of work in the field of politics in Elite and I'm sure your work has been and will be more useful to the player base than my mad ramblings here. So I thank you for your contributions.
I would continue, but this daylight savings time snuck up on me. I look forward to read the thought others have on these topics.
Pretty much my take on it. The most obvious clue is that there is in fact no peacetime model of Rebellion. Think about it. All I could get from that is that the de facto struggle is between the Empire and the Cartel, civilisation vs natural self-organisation, Rebel Alliance being a Cartel-funded group of militants not unlike CIA brand of 'rebels'. Additionally force users are just that, force users - and the difference is more Joanne D'Arc vs Miyamoto Musashi, passion/rage vs zen - rather than inherent good vs inherent evil.