|
Post by princesskibble on Oct 1, 2016 22:58:24 GMT
I haven't finished the campaign yet but the briefings and texts are consistently shocking! I know that was like intended, but seriously are humans in the far future back to being barbarians? I hated having to capture the mutineer astronaut knowing that he was going to be executed, without trial no less! And that the only reason you weren't about to vaporize the innocent people aboard was political corruption.
|
|
|
Post by argonbalt on Oct 1, 2016 23:48:50 GMT
I do think the nature of the civilisations in game are purposefully overplayed so as to enforce the necessity of war. Like i feel more and more like we are playing a very hypothetical what if situation between actual states. As most of us know, in real life militaries are more so a technology and money industry, actual combat between world powers is fundamentally limited to non existent. Like wise i do think the scale of destruction and fact that a war is outright had needed to be justified by a dark manipulative political world in order for it to occur at all. So in brief i think we are playing a very dark cold war gone hot kind of scenario were the typical financial and diplomatic trends are ignored so we can half a system to smash our spaceships around in.
|
|
|
Post by Rocket Witch on Nov 3, 2016 22:24:21 GMT
I wasn't shocked by any of the actions taken during the war. The blatancy with which command explicitly tells the protagonist "we'll just cover this up with our vast propaganda machine" on multiple occasions is just amusing and a bit surreal. I can already surmise that's what they'd be doing, and it's like they're saying it just come across as obviously evil to the person carrying out their wetwork. It seems a bit counterproductive in a "don't bite the hand that feeds" way, assuming the protagonist's military brilliance isn't replaceable. I don't get why USTA commanders seem to hate the protagonist on a personal level at the end; their own Celestina was just as aggressive and pragmatic. I don't remember being especially ruthless considering there's a war going on; the actions taken during the campaign seemed quite typical of real nations throughout history. There wasn't any 'blow up a civilian station/passenger liner' mission that I recall. I would've boarded Jessica's methane depot instead of nuking it, but only because vapourising all that fuel is wasteful. Also I wonder why the protagonist is explicitly female, but so what, is that supposed to surprise anyone when half of her opponents are female too? They probably prefer women in the space force because they eat and weigh less, and are more risk-averse. I hated having to capture the mutineer astronaut knowing that he was going to be executed, without trial no less! And that the only reason you weren't about to vaporize the innocent people aboard was political corruption. Since the rest of the crew didn't subsequently mutiny against the first officer in turn, I can only assume their compliance to his actions. The briefing implies that everyone on board would understand the implications of a mutiny by referencing that the consequences are written in the federation's law, which military personnel would presumably be made aware of in order to discourage mutinies in the first place. In all likelihood, they've accepted their fate of being hunted as traitors and remain in orbit to fight it rather than flee from it.
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 3, 2016 22:37:24 GMT
If anything, the casual admission in briefing materials that if the civilian population knew what was really going on they'd be clamoring for peace and coming for the heads of the people in charge, you can't help but admire the honesty and naivety of these guys.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff you only ever admit verbally off the record behind closed doors with white noise generators running and la li lu le lo protocols in full force, you don't write that shit down, particularly not for wireless transmission, no matter what encryption. That's shadow government 101.
|
|
|
Post by goduranus on Nov 3, 2016 23:13:32 GMT
If anything, the casual admission in briefing materials that if the civilian population knew what was really going on they'd be clamoring for peace and coming for the heads of the people in charge, you can't help but admire the honesty and naivety of these guys. I mean, that's the kind of stuff you only ever admit verbally off the record behind closed doors with white noise generators running and la li lu le lo protocols in full force, you don't write that shit down, particularly not for wireless transmission, no matter what encryption. That's shadow government 101. Be surprised what gets written into emails these day, if you follow the news. On the bright side, if your mom is the President, and you are the esteemed war heroine, who do you suppose will rule all of mankind after your mother retires?
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 3, 2016 23:47:38 GMT
On the bright side, if your mom is the President, and you are the esteemed war heroine, who do you suppose will rule all of mankind after your mother retires? Presuming that Nippon Prime won't be forced to hand over the secrets to their apparently immortal empress in exchange for not being next in line now that the USTA is gone? I wholly expect Admiral PC will have a good run as Fleet Commander, and if she doesn't die in the line of duty before her mother, I expect her to have an accident at some point shortly after or else end up facing an anti-spacecraft gun firing squad courtesy of whatever favored "niece" ends up taking the reins of power.
|
|
|
Post by goduranus on Nov 4, 2016 0:03:13 GMT
Not saying your scenario won't happen, but given the events that occured the player is the most probable for ruling mankind a few year's after the game.
Whatever niece won't have the support of the military, much less the procedures that are in place to protect military personnel from assassination. Immortal empress, pfft, after a defeat as serious as this she's just gonna be a figurehead.
|
|
|
Post by thorneel on Nov 4, 2016 0:05:23 GMT
Also I wonder why the protagonist is explicitly female, but so what, is that supposed to surprise anyone when half of her opponents are female too? They probably prefer women in the space force because they eat and weigh less, and are more risk-averse. I took it as a reference to the Samus is a girl trope
|
|
|
Post by jonen on Nov 4, 2016 0:29:14 GMT
Not saying your scenario won't happen, but given the events that occured the player is the most probable for ruling mankind a few year's after the game. Whatever niece won't have the support of the military, much less the procedures that are in place to protect military personnel from assassination. Immortal empress, pfft, after a defeat as serious as this she's just gonna be a figurehead. I'm not saying the Immortal Empress or any of her Nippon Prime cronies are going to end up anywhere near the helm of the RFP victorious. I'm saying Madame President may decide to use whatever trick Nippon Prime is using to have an apparently Immortal Empress to ensure her rule of the RFP is long and prosperous. Like, say, maybe downloading a copy of her consciousness into a new body to take the helm, and disposing of any inconvenient loose ends (don't forget, the support of the military could be neutralized by unairing some of the dirt from the USTA war - just make sure there are no credible threats to the RFP that may require military force to suppress while you clean house). EDIT: ... Really, the only sane option for Admiral PC at this point would be to organize her friends and colleagues in high command (like, say, the Captain Chandra of the Martian Defense Fleet) and conducting a military coup while she's still the popular war hero.
|
|
|
Post by goduranus on Nov 4, 2016 0:37:05 GMT
I don't think there would be a power struggle between a daughter and her mother, the mother may have to step down soon due to term limits, but she could initially rule with the daughter as a puppet. It's not like this is a monarchy where relatives would engage in power struggles.
|
|
|
Post by bluuetechnic on Nov 4, 2016 1:11:57 GMT
Has anyone brought up that this should probably be in the general thread, not gameplay discussion?
|
|
|
Post by magusunion on Nov 6, 2016 21:59:40 GMT
I don't think there would be a power struggle between a daughter and her mother, the mother may have to step down soon due to term limits, but she could initially rule with the daughter as a puppet. It's not like this is a monarchy where relatives would engage in power struggles.
|
|
gato
New Member
Posts: 1
|
Post by gato on Mar 5, 2018 8:03:34 GMT
I really liked how the story was served. IMO Qswitched did that 'Alien' bit with 'space don't care and nobody will hear your scream' thing with s standard state vs state conflict. Given that their god and moral is already dead together with Earth, and almost nothing except laws of thermodynamics left of any constraints to warfare, what would you expect? One can not be less bothered about shared ecological consequences of WMD too - there is no ecology to speak of, just a bunch of underground colonies carved in already radiation bathed moons and asteroids! And it is not that UN backed with sole superpower willing to kick some genocidal ass will come after you in the end.
|
|
|
Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 5, 2018 18:47:17 GMT
While I think that the campaign hammers some nails that really do need to be hammered in - repeatedly, and while Earth being quickly rendered uninhabitable is not exactly what I would call an idyllic scenario - and this kind of circumstances does tend to bring out the worst in people - I would expect the actual conflicts to become much nicer in such circumstances for two reasons: - ecologies
- people (especially skilled ones)
Specifically, with Earth gone, both become seriously scarce vital resources that shouldn't be squandered.
Sure, not having all eggs in one basket is a bit of an improvement, but not as much as it could have been given that the biggest and by far most durable basket is irreversibly gone.
It took massive environmental see-saw played by global superpowers to send the planet down the drain - for an average planetside colony hab, the same would take a handful of explosives and a bit of know-how. Even considering the number of colonies scattered around the system, that's awfully precarious compared to sitting around on a big, durable planet (never mind having both colonies AND the planet, plus some long term projects like terraforming Mars). And that's before you even start considering the fragility of necessarily minimal ecologies in those colonies, compared to a massive, robust planetside ecosystem - without solid foothold on a long-term self-sufficient planet (or the kind of mastery and redundancy that only comes after a few My of galactic colonization) the humanity in CoADE is living on a thin sliver of borrowed time.
The bottom line is that in such circumstances you'd probably do everything to keep colonies safe and take as many PoWs as you physically can (don't worry, the old man Tsiolkovsky will probably force you to be more of an asshole than you'd want to be), treating them as humanely as possible and bribing them with booze and hookers (not to mention priority evacuation - see the old man Tsiolkovsky above) if they might want to come over to your side.
Of course the backstory is carefully constructed to justify slinging nukes at each other with reckless abandon as if they were slightly oblong snowballs in a friendly snowball fight as the game tries to model bare technicalities of space ship-to-ship battles, which are already a handful.
Still, limited conflicts are generally much more interesting (and less scary/depressing) as there is much more subtlety and interplay of various factors involved. Given that survival requirements generally stay the same, while power available to break them grows with technological advancement, after certain threshold an all out conflicts boils down to "X fall, everyone dies", where "X" can vary from nukes, to rocks (at orbital velocities) to RKVs.
|
|