Part of the challenge in creating lore for BE(RT) factions is the connection to Old Earth.
- Does this faction continue / extend its heritage from Old Earth? (using the Civ4 attributes: Creative, Financial, Expansionist, etc)
- Or does this faction consciously/deliberately move in a different direction? For example, militarism focus when its OE background was more trade-focused.
The challenge with the first option is the setting: whatever Old Earth (OE) country or group of countries that could afford to equip and launch a seed ship to send it off-world would tilt our choices to those 20th or 21st century nations-states, often in the G20, rather than historical predecessors. We would get Italy, not Rome; Iraq, not Babylon; Mexico, not Aztecs; Syria or Lebanon, not Hittites. It's harder to make a connection to cultures that disappeared / merged hundreds of years before the spaceships launch.
The second option could open the door for interesting story-telling. A group of Swedes or Norwegians trying to emulate the conquest of the Vikings; a group from Turkey or Greece trying to emulate the trade focus of the Phoenicians or the expansion of the Byzantines; the factions from the USA could go in multiple directions.
As a fan of BERT, I like Kavitha's spirituality and characterization. I like Samatar's attitudes and speeches; they strike me as similar to other present-day Africans I have met. As I wrote in an earlier posting in another thread, each of these leaders had to pursue this position, interviewed for it, and competed against other people who wanted the job. That should mean that a leader in BERT has an interesting story that led to their financial backers to choose them.