Pre-ChaNES: Into the Void
- Thread starter Chandrasekhar
- Start date
For what it's worth I agree with Chand. This "Pre"-NES has been more interesting than most "real" NESes, and its outcome no less so, but we have ended up in a state that does not lend itself to an interesting game. I seem to recall that I predicted just that when the SF was formed. Any attempts to artificially create an interesting scenario out of what we've achieved here (like bombing the earth to cinders) would only deter from that achievement. Let it lie and move on to other interesting scenarios.
North King
blech
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2004
- Messages
- 18,165
Really? I can imagine a few interesting scenarios out of this...
Personally I think the SF should be run by two players (USA and Russia) that dynamic makes a fun inside and outside dynamic for the large nation. The only sad part I had as the small nation was that I would never be able to colonize. But I had so much fun building up the background of the nation that I was always hoping it would continue. I felt once the SF came though that the mod and players would lose interest because the power was sooo overwhelming.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
It's Chandrasekhar's decision, obviously. The game was fun while it lasted.
a_propagandist
The Light Brigadier
I have to vote to continue. I believe that, in time, the consolidation of power generally collapses in a cyclical system. Perhaps we play on as entities in the SF, and build from that. After all, who knows, maybe the SF will turn autocratic, stagnate, so stumble in its imperial grandeur that it goes the way of all empire before it. If the patterns of human history repeat, then the SF is not a lasting entity. Most powers are in it to colonize. And, if their off-world colonies obtain the industry to help colonize without SF help, it's quite possible either for the colony to revolt or become a steppingstone for exclusive colonization. Surely, powers like India, Brazil and so on cannot be happy with only one or two colonies while other powers such as China have multitudes. There will come a time where war and self-serving foreign policy will trump international cooperation. There will come a time where the large powers will complain that nations like Panama add no industrial capacity to the SF and push for their ejection.
So, Chand, I respectfully disagree. This game has excellent potential as a NES and as a general concept prototype. This game has been one of the most interesting and immersive premises I've played. To a large degree, I've gotten attached to the colony I play. Therefore, I politely request that the game continue. There remains much more to do in this world. Even internal political maneuvering in the SF can be interesting. Ultimately the decision is yours, but, if feedback you will take into consideration, then I hope the above serves as valid persuasion.
So, Chand, I respectfully disagree. This game has excellent potential as a NES and as a general concept prototype. This game has been one of the most interesting and immersive premises I've played. To a large degree, I've gotten attached to the colony I play. Therefore, I politely request that the game continue. There remains much more to do in this world. Even internal political maneuvering in the SF can be interesting. Ultimately the decision is yours, but, if feedback you will take into consideration, then I hope the above serves as valid persuasion.
Symphony D.
Deity
Don't welcome me back. I don't want to hear it. I am here for one reason and one reason only, and that is because I cared and in many ways still care about this game. I have been disturbed by reports of those who apparently do not understand it to be dead, or the reasons why it died, and by the spectre of its revival by some opportunistic sort with no sense of propriety for such things. Since Chandrasekhar has steadfastly refused to do what is right and make it crystal clear why what happened did, I will do so myself.
Some of you won't listen because of who I am or what I have done, regardless of what I say. That's perfectly fine, as I don't give a damn about you. I'm here to protect the memory of this game from those who might usurp it or misunderstand its legacy. This will be the absolute last thing I ever do here, so I'm going to try and explain it from here forward as neutrally and as concretely as I can.
Allow me first to discuss my involvement, intentions, and position in the game before moving on to my perceptions of it.
I first became involved in this game when I was privately asked to play as an advanced alien race to be introduced at the end of the first BT by Chandrasekhar, to be designed by me. This was later pushed back to be the end of the second BT. This plan remained solid as of the ending of the game. I was asked to do so because, to paraphrase Chandrasekhar, I was in is judgment the person most capable of doing so rationally and competently. Despite being overwhelmingly powerful compared to humanity, conflict would have been extremely unlikely beyond police keeping duties due to their superiority and hubris, and there were to be a limited course of strategy through which humanity might triumph or breakeven if it ever came to conflict. The purpose of these aliens was to serve as a story and game foil to humanity and to produce more interesting situations than humans exopolitics could on its own.
As I watched the game develop, I became increasingly disinterested with the situation developing between the then four major powers. The actions of the PC nations, such as Europe and China arguing over extraterrestrial squid while world war loomed, were largely ludicrous. As I was also bored, I chose to enter the game as Russia, in full knowledge of the role I had been contracted to later play, and Chandrasekhar allowed it. In return for having a relatively weak (by comparison to the extant four) power, I supplied the details for a pure-fusion weapon orbital bombardment system which was conceivably developable by Russia, and was granted it. This weapon facilitated Russia's entry into World War III and virtually guaranteed victory in it.
I spent a lot of time discussing game events with Chandrasekhar and we both felt that a game centered on national conflicts--Earth--was not conductive toward the overall aim of a space-based game. The financial and industrial challenges of interstellar colonization, let alone defense, are virtually incalcuable. It became obvious to both of us that in its current state, the game would continue to focus around national conflicts and would have an extremely limited number of either colonies or warships, rather than being an actual space game. The homeworld of mankind being torn by feuding nation states is not conductive to a space-based game, because it does not have the resources to effectively colonize or to remain economically or militarilly competitive post-colonization--a country cannot stand up to a planet or star system. It was then that I moved to create ASTRIS, to begin centralizing power for the as-yet neglected states of Earth (whose hitherto absence was also highly dubious and absurd). It was only with the success of ASTRIS that I thought of and embarked upon creating the Solar Federation, and was allowed to do so with Chandrasekhar's consent, although it was not handed to me on a silver platter.
Its important to identify what the SF was, and wasnt, since there seem to be a surprisingly large number of misconceptions on the issue. The SF may be understood in character to be like a non-imperialist version of the UNSC from the Halo universe. It was not, as some would conjecture, an empire, and had no ambitions to be. I said several times in this thread that its chief game-function was the creation of colonies in order to eventually create trading partners. It had no need and no desire to hold on to them indefinitely. They were in fact considered to be drains and burdens both on economic and military resources until they reached such a point of self-sufficiency. The situation at Carmenta only served to demonstrate that needlessly violent separation (to the detriment of the colony) in defiance of law was, in light of this publicly stated agenda (I said it at least twice), utterly foolish and would not be tolerated, just as actual governments do not lightly negotiate with terrorists or secessionists who wantonly kill their soldiers.
The government of the SF is also a widely misunderstood concept. If the game-function of the SF was creating colonies, its story-function was maintaining security. The SF may best be understood as the execution of a mental exercise of the question "How far would you go to protect individual liberty?" The chief reason for the SF ambition to encompass all of Earth and Sol was security oriented. The entire character of the SFs government was security oriented. Earth was the most visible aspect of humanity, containing as it did over 99.9% of the population and economic and industrial capacity of mankind. Despite being incredibly powerful, this centralization also made it incredibly vulnerable, and so the SF took every step it could to protect it. That involved the long-term aim of securing all independent territory both on the ground and in space within Earth Sphere, and throughout Sol System at large, as anything not under the SFs far superior protection and defense measures was viewed as a point of entry for threats. For that reason, you would never have seen say, Panama, cast off as useless. Such "useless" territory was also receiving enormous quantities of development funds to bring it to a uniformly modern level, and this was in fact the overwhelming expenditure of SF funds at the time, with defense second (playing catch-up and overtake with the PRC) and colonies third. Over time this balance would have reversed.
This security focus led to the most notable aspect of the SF government, which no other power or their respective players caught on to, which was that it held a dual system of power. The publicly elected face of government was the official government and dutifully fulfilled its obligations to the people, and directed short term policy. However, there was a shadow government behind the scenes composed from system-wide sources, including many of the same elected officials, as well as from within the bureaucracy, the military, and the private sector, inclusion into which was based on merit, and which directed long-term policy. This was strongly alluded to in several stories. This shadow government was broken up into 24 discrete units, each given a different focus and identified with a letter of the Greek alphabet. It was pervasive. It was designed to ensure that Earth, humanity's crown jewel, could be protected at all costs, and as such it was routinely tasked with considering the unthinkable to do so--and sometimes did. Being meritocratic, distributed, largely anonymous (members did not know the personal identities of any great number of other members) it was designed to prevent any centralization of power beyond itself and to encourage clear, long-term thinking without the impositions of politics--good or bad.
It was this same focus on security that lead to the SF decision to spin-off colonies as fast as possible, as each given one only served to dilute and thin its military power, which it wished to (and did) concentrate in Sol. The SF invested heavily into defensive military projects. It had established a greater antimatter production industry in close orbit around the Sun than Sonty ever had, or than Universal ever planned, and had achieved a militarily useful stockpile in the final update. It had mated this with the localized jump drive acquired from Sonty, miniaturized Stigma transmitters and receivers, and advances in artificial intelligence to create a robotic fighter of unparalleled combat prowess, which was to enter mass production shortly after the BT. It was secretly turning multiple Oort cloud objects into stealthed, superluminal Interstellar Ballistic Missiles for use in a retaliatory strike against any power which tried to use weapons of mass destruction on Earth. It was installing unmatched sensor and pervasive systems throughout Sol, and during the last update would have fielded at least four ships of almost one kilometer in length, in addition to several dozen smaller ships and almost a thousand fighters, in addition to inducting whatever of the Chinese fleet did not defect.
It was also committing increasing resources to fields such as human longevity (the program was to be kept secret until such time as it was affordable to the majority of the population, thus keeping in line with democratic values and swelling the population, thus assisting colonization) and artificial intelligence (Iapetus was being surveyed for conversion into a micro-Jupiter Brain to function as a system-wide network hub, intelligence gathering facility, AI research station, and future control center military crews for roboticization of the Fleet into UMCVs) as the resource drain of building up Earths infrastructure tapered off. It was essentially unassailable militarily, and dominant technologically.
The SFs foreign policy was similarly security-based. It endeavored to weaken or remove what it viewed as threats.
The PRC was likely to have been inducted sometime around 2160 after secret negotiations. It was expected that its colonies would declare independence or otherwise resist joining and that a substantial portion of offworld Chinese military power would defect to these colonies--the SF was not privy to knowledge of how handling of Chinese possessions would occur and had no interest in attempting to reclaim any colonies so declaring independence.
The European Union was viewed as a threat primarily due to its continued existence on Earth's surface. The Interstellar Commonwealth it headed was also viewed as a sham, given the EU overwhelmingly dominated that assembly due to population, but the IC itself was viewed as merely an obstacle to absorption of the EU. To split the two, the Solar Office of Intelligence began a campaign of guerilla attrition. Although the source of the nuclear detonation over Carmenta remains unknown, it provided useful cover for the detonations in Soyuz and Valhalla, where the weapons were provided to pirate forces by the SOI, along with numerous commercially available weapons systems from Sonty and Bacchus, via an extremely complex system of shell companies. The SF had not previously had involvement with the pirates. Subsequently, to force ever greater EU/IC military expenditures and increase public weariness, the SOI began arming pirates with low-grade nuclear weapons to draw the Interstellar Commonwealth into an attrition-based battle while simultaneously engaging in surreptitious propaganda campaigns to force the ICs dissolution. Aside from the in-game reasoning for dismantling the IC, I continue to believe that a United Federation of Planets-style organization seeking to be all-encompassing of human worlds would cause a game to stagnate to death immediately and with do so with infinitely greater certainty than an organization such as the SF. "NESers" love war.
Sonty Corporation and Universal were viewed as threats due to their pursuit of antimatter and the former's (largely unworkable) schemes for attempting to destroy Earth, as revealed to me by Dachs and my own investigations. In the final turn a plot would have been undertaken in which civilian antimatter production, storage, and use would have been banned, likely after the SOI's destruction of Sonty's main antimatter storage facility in Ra using an SF antimatter warhead. This would have appeared to have been a horrible accident which would have guaranteed the success of such a matter. In the event Sonty's storage facility or facilities could not be located, after the measure was passed, evidence would have been presented of their activities and the immediate opening of their facilities to international inspectors demanded. Had they refused, the aforementioned prototype antimatter-powered weapons would have been deployed along with conventional military assets to disable Sonty's military capabilities and forcibly seize the materials. Universal's pilot program on a remote SF colony was also commercially unproductive compared to the SF generation method and was also to be seized or destroyed. Both companies would likely have de facto ceased to exist in their current forms.
The endeavor to begin uplift of the sapients of Liberty was genuine and planning had begun on how to achieve such an endeavor with as few missteps as possible.
In summation, the SF was paranoid over its own security, but otherwise apathetic. It did not move to ruthlessly take over Human Space, and had no plans to do so. It was concerned with establishing and maintaining the security of Sol System. Provided nothing threatened it, it had no interest in the enormously wasteful enterprise of militaristic expansion. There was nothing of real value to gain from doing so. It was defense and deterrent oriented.
Everything I have told you can be verified by Chandrasekhar, either based on my orders or my extensive conversations with him.
---
That is the situation from the SF's perspective, as of the end of the game. Despite all this, the SF did not cause the game to become stagnant, as many of you allege. It was largely self-interested in Sol. Given I remained contracted to play the alien race, my goal was to create an economic and technological "anchor" and "engine" for humanity which would allow it to prosper and grow while keeping a hands-off approach. That was my out of character rationale for designing its government and attitude as I did--to produce an environment in which colonies might eventually become self-sufficient and could squabble freely with one another and have skirmishes and intrigue in the backdrop of a greater, space opera style universe. I did not want to control everything, and was in fact prepared to give up everything I had built for something else.
I wanted the game to work as intended when it was no longer a "pre" game, and so did Chandrasekhar. Again, he did not give me a free ride, but our discussions and continual retreading of certain premises made the game what it was when it ended. I wasn't a co-moderator of this game, and I wouldn't lay claim to be, but I was a large part of its muse. If anyone wanted it to succeed aside from Chandrasekhar, it was me.
The game ultimately stagnated and would not have worked because there was no logical reason for competition between star systems. Each possessed nearly endless resources and expansion room, nullifying the need for resource wars and largely buffering any ideological, religious, racial, or philosophical conflict that might develop. Although the SF was a mostly neutral and apathetic entity, it would not have permitted genocide by bombardment (which would also have ruined the ecology and infrastructure of any planet worth taking over anyway, making it useless to the conqueror), and planetary occupation is incredibly resource intensive, so any non-willing conquest was implausible, and raiding served little purpose as there were no known resources so rare as to warrant such hostility. There was virtually no situation in which war was within a light year of being an easier or more acceptable option than diplomacy. As I said before, you like war. You weren't going to really get it. Maybe some skirmishes here or there, but not Star Wars or Star Trek. And it wasn't the SF's fault.
Colonial populations were also inconsequentially small, and would have taken hundreds of years to grow into anything notable, even with generous child growth estimates or heavy immigration. The costs of launching a war against another system, or indeed any notable military actions beyond raids, would have been immense, and beyond the capability of any colony for a similar amount of timelet alone the industrial capacity necessary to produce such forces in the first place. All the colonies were essentially dependent on Earth for manufactured goods, population influx, or monetary capital, and would have remained so for a long time.
It wasn't in anybody's interest to fight each other, or Earth, on any grounds. Given most "NES" are, de facto, war games (deny it all you want, it's the truth), this would have left a large part of the player-base or potential player-base disaffected in the long-run, and many would have resisted against these plainly obvious facts simply to resist them. Neither I nor Chandrasekhar, based on my conversations with him, envied the idea of a game in which the primary motivator for action was stubborn, ignorant, selfish foolishness. It exceeds suspension of disbelief rapidly and ruins the experience.
The backdrop would work well for an entirely story-based game, or as the setting for an individual-based RPG. As a story of nations though, it was essentially over before it began, and would have been so regardless of my involvement or actions due to the sheer preponderance of Earth.
---
I'm going to take a moment to address a few issues that I feel weren't fully addressed by my testimony.
So, to answer your question: nothing would happen of interest to running a game. This is, coincidentally, the same reason why the plans vaguely alluded to by TerrisH and Matt0088, in addition to being virtually impossible to execute due to the fact I was prepared for them and, indeed much farther along in making them a reality as precautionary measures, would have failed: because they would have produced exactly that third result.
---
Now, helping you is one of the last things I would want to do, but because I liked this game, I'm going to go ahead and share my thoughts. To get another one that won't work out of the way first: having everyone start exactly equal also fails because due to the vagaries of chance, ability, and events, eventually a hegemon of some form or another will arise and lord it over the others anyway (ex: NINES), even if it's less powerful over all. Two blocs of powers will probably form up, one centered on it and one opposed, and all hell will break loose, as is the way of most "NES". On how one would make a space game that works in such a typical mold of "NESing", in decreasing levels of plausibility:
Combinations of these might work even better than any one alone. But ChaNES cannot be plausibly modified into any of these scenarios. Based on my discussions with Chandrasekhar, neither he, nor I, nor in fact anyone else I conversed with on the subject can find a way for it to continue than the other aforementioned non-"NES" type situations. In short, ChaNES is dead. It's unfortunate, but it was the only real choice to make. You should let it sink in and accept it, because the idea of the game in its present form is irrevocably flawed and unworkable. You should enjoy the memories and move on.
If for some reason you have further questions or misconceptions, you should probably direct them to Chandrasekhar so he can answer or correct them for you, respectively. Having made my case, I leave.
Some of you won't listen because of who I am or what I have done, regardless of what I say. That's perfectly fine, as I don't give a damn about you. I'm here to protect the memory of this game from those who might usurp it or misunderstand its legacy. This will be the absolute last thing I ever do here, so I'm going to try and explain it from here forward as neutrally and as concretely as I can.
Allow me first to discuss my involvement, intentions, and position in the game before moving on to my perceptions of it.
I first became involved in this game when I was privately asked to play as an advanced alien race to be introduced at the end of the first BT by Chandrasekhar, to be designed by me. This was later pushed back to be the end of the second BT. This plan remained solid as of the ending of the game. I was asked to do so because, to paraphrase Chandrasekhar, I was in is judgment the person most capable of doing so rationally and competently. Despite being overwhelmingly powerful compared to humanity, conflict would have been extremely unlikely beyond police keeping duties due to their superiority and hubris, and there were to be a limited course of strategy through which humanity might triumph or breakeven if it ever came to conflict. The purpose of these aliens was to serve as a story and game foil to humanity and to produce more interesting situations than humans exopolitics could on its own.
As I watched the game develop, I became increasingly disinterested with the situation developing between the then four major powers. The actions of the PC nations, such as Europe and China arguing over extraterrestrial squid while world war loomed, were largely ludicrous. As I was also bored, I chose to enter the game as Russia, in full knowledge of the role I had been contracted to later play, and Chandrasekhar allowed it. In return for having a relatively weak (by comparison to the extant four) power, I supplied the details for a pure-fusion weapon orbital bombardment system which was conceivably developable by Russia, and was granted it. This weapon facilitated Russia's entry into World War III and virtually guaranteed victory in it.
I spent a lot of time discussing game events with Chandrasekhar and we both felt that a game centered on national conflicts--Earth--was not conductive toward the overall aim of a space-based game. The financial and industrial challenges of interstellar colonization, let alone defense, are virtually incalcuable. It became obvious to both of us that in its current state, the game would continue to focus around national conflicts and would have an extremely limited number of either colonies or warships, rather than being an actual space game. The homeworld of mankind being torn by feuding nation states is not conductive to a space-based game, because it does not have the resources to effectively colonize or to remain economically or militarilly competitive post-colonization--a country cannot stand up to a planet or star system. It was then that I moved to create ASTRIS, to begin centralizing power for the as-yet neglected states of Earth (whose hitherto absence was also highly dubious and absurd). It was only with the success of ASTRIS that I thought of and embarked upon creating the Solar Federation, and was allowed to do so with Chandrasekhar's consent, although it was not handed to me on a silver platter.
Its important to identify what the SF was, and wasnt, since there seem to be a surprisingly large number of misconceptions on the issue. The SF may be understood in character to be like a non-imperialist version of the UNSC from the Halo universe. It was not, as some would conjecture, an empire, and had no ambitions to be. I said several times in this thread that its chief game-function was the creation of colonies in order to eventually create trading partners. It had no need and no desire to hold on to them indefinitely. They were in fact considered to be drains and burdens both on economic and military resources until they reached such a point of self-sufficiency. The situation at Carmenta only served to demonstrate that needlessly violent separation (to the detriment of the colony) in defiance of law was, in light of this publicly stated agenda (I said it at least twice), utterly foolish and would not be tolerated, just as actual governments do not lightly negotiate with terrorists or secessionists who wantonly kill their soldiers.
The government of the SF is also a widely misunderstood concept. If the game-function of the SF was creating colonies, its story-function was maintaining security. The SF may best be understood as the execution of a mental exercise of the question "How far would you go to protect individual liberty?" The chief reason for the SF ambition to encompass all of Earth and Sol was security oriented. The entire character of the SFs government was security oriented. Earth was the most visible aspect of humanity, containing as it did over 99.9% of the population and economic and industrial capacity of mankind. Despite being incredibly powerful, this centralization also made it incredibly vulnerable, and so the SF took every step it could to protect it. That involved the long-term aim of securing all independent territory both on the ground and in space within Earth Sphere, and throughout Sol System at large, as anything not under the SFs far superior protection and defense measures was viewed as a point of entry for threats. For that reason, you would never have seen say, Panama, cast off as useless. Such "useless" territory was also receiving enormous quantities of development funds to bring it to a uniformly modern level, and this was in fact the overwhelming expenditure of SF funds at the time, with defense second (playing catch-up and overtake with the PRC) and colonies third. Over time this balance would have reversed.
This security focus led to the most notable aspect of the SF government, which no other power or their respective players caught on to, which was that it held a dual system of power. The publicly elected face of government was the official government and dutifully fulfilled its obligations to the people, and directed short term policy. However, there was a shadow government behind the scenes composed from system-wide sources, including many of the same elected officials, as well as from within the bureaucracy, the military, and the private sector, inclusion into which was based on merit, and which directed long-term policy. This was strongly alluded to in several stories. This shadow government was broken up into 24 discrete units, each given a different focus and identified with a letter of the Greek alphabet. It was pervasive. It was designed to ensure that Earth, humanity's crown jewel, could be protected at all costs, and as such it was routinely tasked with considering the unthinkable to do so--and sometimes did. Being meritocratic, distributed, largely anonymous (members did not know the personal identities of any great number of other members) it was designed to prevent any centralization of power beyond itself and to encourage clear, long-term thinking without the impositions of politics--good or bad.
It was this same focus on security that lead to the SF decision to spin-off colonies as fast as possible, as each given one only served to dilute and thin its military power, which it wished to (and did) concentrate in Sol. The SF invested heavily into defensive military projects. It had established a greater antimatter production industry in close orbit around the Sun than Sonty ever had, or than Universal ever planned, and had achieved a militarily useful stockpile in the final update. It had mated this with the localized jump drive acquired from Sonty, miniaturized Stigma transmitters and receivers, and advances in artificial intelligence to create a robotic fighter of unparalleled combat prowess, which was to enter mass production shortly after the BT. It was secretly turning multiple Oort cloud objects into stealthed, superluminal Interstellar Ballistic Missiles for use in a retaliatory strike against any power which tried to use weapons of mass destruction on Earth. It was installing unmatched sensor and pervasive systems throughout Sol, and during the last update would have fielded at least four ships of almost one kilometer in length, in addition to several dozen smaller ships and almost a thousand fighters, in addition to inducting whatever of the Chinese fleet did not defect.
It was also committing increasing resources to fields such as human longevity (the program was to be kept secret until such time as it was affordable to the majority of the population, thus keeping in line with democratic values and swelling the population, thus assisting colonization) and artificial intelligence (Iapetus was being surveyed for conversion into a micro-Jupiter Brain to function as a system-wide network hub, intelligence gathering facility, AI research station, and future control center military crews for roboticization of the Fleet into UMCVs) as the resource drain of building up Earths infrastructure tapered off. It was essentially unassailable militarily, and dominant technologically.
The SFs foreign policy was similarly security-based. It endeavored to weaken or remove what it viewed as threats.
The PRC was likely to have been inducted sometime around 2160 after secret negotiations. It was expected that its colonies would declare independence or otherwise resist joining and that a substantial portion of offworld Chinese military power would defect to these colonies--the SF was not privy to knowledge of how handling of Chinese possessions would occur and had no interest in attempting to reclaim any colonies so declaring independence.
The European Union was viewed as a threat primarily due to its continued existence on Earth's surface. The Interstellar Commonwealth it headed was also viewed as a sham, given the EU overwhelmingly dominated that assembly due to population, but the IC itself was viewed as merely an obstacle to absorption of the EU. To split the two, the Solar Office of Intelligence began a campaign of guerilla attrition. Although the source of the nuclear detonation over Carmenta remains unknown, it provided useful cover for the detonations in Soyuz and Valhalla, where the weapons were provided to pirate forces by the SOI, along with numerous commercially available weapons systems from Sonty and Bacchus, via an extremely complex system of shell companies. The SF had not previously had involvement with the pirates. Subsequently, to force ever greater EU/IC military expenditures and increase public weariness, the SOI began arming pirates with low-grade nuclear weapons to draw the Interstellar Commonwealth into an attrition-based battle while simultaneously engaging in surreptitious propaganda campaigns to force the ICs dissolution. Aside from the in-game reasoning for dismantling the IC, I continue to believe that a United Federation of Planets-style organization seeking to be all-encompassing of human worlds would cause a game to stagnate to death immediately and with do so with infinitely greater certainty than an organization such as the SF. "NESers" love war.
Sonty Corporation and Universal were viewed as threats due to their pursuit of antimatter and the former's (largely unworkable) schemes for attempting to destroy Earth, as revealed to me by Dachs and my own investigations. In the final turn a plot would have been undertaken in which civilian antimatter production, storage, and use would have been banned, likely after the SOI's destruction of Sonty's main antimatter storage facility in Ra using an SF antimatter warhead. This would have appeared to have been a horrible accident which would have guaranteed the success of such a matter. In the event Sonty's storage facility or facilities could not be located, after the measure was passed, evidence would have been presented of their activities and the immediate opening of their facilities to international inspectors demanded. Had they refused, the aforementioned prototype antimatter-powered weapons would have been deployed along with conventional military assets to disable Sonty's military capabilities and forcibly seize the materials. Universal's pilot program on a remote SF colony was also commercially unproductive compared to the SF generation method and was also to be seized or destroyed. Both companies would likely have de facto ceased to exist in their current forms.
The endeavor to begin uplift of the sapients of Liberty was genuine and planning had begun on how to achieve such an endeavor with as few missteps as possible.
In summation, the SF was paranoid over its own security, but otherwise apathetic. It did not move to ruthlessly take over Human Space, and had no plans to do so. It was concerned with establishing and maintaining the security of Sol System. Provided nothing threatened it, it had no interest in the enormously wasteful enterprise of militaristic expansion. There was nothing of real value to gain from doing so. It was defense and deterrent oriented.
Everything I have told you can be verified by Chandrasekhar, either based on my orders or my extensive conversations with him.
---
That is the situation from the SF's perspective, as of the end of the game. Despite all this, the SF did not cause the game to become stagnant, as many of you allege. It was largely self-interested in Sol. Given I remained contracted to play the alien race, my goal was to create an economic and technological "anchor" and "engine" for humanity which would allow it to prosper and grow while keeping a hands-off approach. That was my out of character rationale for designing its government and attitude as I did--to produce an environment in which colonies might eventually become self-sufficient and could squabble freely with one another and have skirmishes and intrigue in the backdrop of a greater, space opera style universe. I did not want to control everything, and was in fact prepared to give up everything I had built for something else.
I wanted the game to work as intended when it was no longer a "pre" game, and so did Chandrasekhar. Again, he did not give me a free ride, but our discussions and continual retreading of certain premises made the game what it was when it ended. I wasn't a co-moderator of this game, and I wouldn't lay claim to be, but I was a large part of its muse. If anyone wanted it to succeed aside from Chandrasekhar, it was me.
The game ultimately stagnated and would not have worked because there was no logical reason for competition between star systems. Each possessed nearly endless resources and expansion room, nullifying the need for resource wars and largely buffering any ideological, religious, racial, or philosophical conflict that might develop. Although the SF was a mostly neutral and apathetic entity, it would not have permitted genocide by bombardment (which would also have ruined the ecology and infrastructure of any planet worth taking over anyway, making it useless to the conqueror), and planetary occupation is incredibly resource intensive, so any non-willing conquest was implausible, and raiding served little purpose as there were no known resources so rare as to warrant such hostility. There was virtually no situation in which war was within a light year of being an easier or more acceptable option than diplomacy. As I said before, you like war. You weren't going to really get it. Maybe some skirmishes here or there, but not Star Wars or Star Trek. And it wasn't the SF's fault.
Colonial populations were also inconsequentially small, and would have taken hundreds of years to grow into anything notable, even with generous child growth estimates or heavy immigration. The costs of launching a war against another system, or indeed any notable military actions beyond raids, would have been immense, and beyond the capability of any colony for a similar amount of timelet alone the industrial capacity necessary to produce such forces in the first place. All the colonies were essentially dependent on Earth for manufactured goods, population influx, or monetary capital, and would have remained so for a long time.
It wasn't in anybody's interest to fight each other, or Earth, on any grounds. Given most "NES" are, de facto, war games (deny it all you want, it's the truth), this would have left a large part of the player-base or potential player-base disaffected in the long-run, and many would have resisted against these plainly obvious facts simply to resist them. Neither I nor Chandrasekhar, based on my conversations with him, envied the idea of a game in which the primary motivator for action was stubborn, ignorant, selfish foolishness. It exceeds suspension of disbelief rapidly and ruins the experience.
The backdrop would work well for an entirely story-based game, or as the setting for an individual-based RPG. As a story of nations though, it was essentially over before it began, and would have been so regardless of my involvement or actions due to the sheer preponderance of Earth.
---
I'm going to take a moment to address a few issues that I feel weren't fully addressed by my testimony.
As Yogi Berra said, "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." While I was de facto Russia, and flyingchicken had been America (up until his departure, at which point he had no further role), and the other nations were all NPCs, in practice I had default command. Although the legislative bodies of the SF were set up in a similar fashion to the U.S. Senate, with each former country being the equivalent of a state, over the last two turns I was being allowed by Chandrasekhar to operate as both the executive branch and shadow government rather than a sub-national entity. To answer the question, somebody could, if there was a game to play
ASTRIS no longer existed as of the creation of the SF in any shape or form, as all of its duties were wholly subsumed by the latter.
Nations have easy lasted 250, 500 and 1000 years. Your statement was also made in the absence of any knowledge of the true operation of SF government, which was revealed to you just now. The constituent states have been stripped of largely all national military power, were becoming economically beneficiaries of and dependent on the free-trade zone facilitated by the SF, and were granted colonies as and when it became feasible for them do so. The SF had actually run out of countries asking for direct administration over a colony, and most of them that had them could barely develop them without federal assistance. The notion that they would abandon it over such prospects is an argument made from ignorance.
This is sufficiently vague that a number of interpretations exist. I will address a few of them:BananaLee said:
- If you mean Stigma communication spontaneously failed (without impacting travel for some reason), then ships would become the primary form of communication and the SF, with a virtual monopoly on antimatter production and thus having the easiest and most portable source of jumping without nuclear pulse detonators or electrotethers, would cement its hegemony further.
- If you mean Stigma communication and travel both failed, the colonies would, with a few exceptions, wither, suffer horribly, and likely die. Earth and Sol would be just fine.
- If you mean an Attack Vector: Tactical or Final Frontier type scenario, wherein Earth just spontaneously disappears one day, Chandrasekhar and I discussed that when I had resolved to quit. We batted around the idea of it being abducted by whatever (whoever?) had created the Stigma particle emissions (not even I know) and perhaps returning far down the line as highly advanced, or it being consumed by a black hole. Other than being rather laughable scenarios for what was ostensibly a serious game, the aforementioned total lack of the colonies of population, economic, and manufacturing bases would reduce pretty much all of them to a dark age lasting centuries to millennia. You might get some fighting over manufacturing resources (ex: factories) but they'd be done using small-scale raiding parties, not fleets, and it would involve an extremely long BT. Not terribly exciting, in my opinion--or Chandrasekhar's apparently, since he didn't do it.
So, to answer your question: nothing would happen of interest to running a game. This is, coincidentally, the same reason why the plans vaguely alluded to by TerrisH and Matt0088, in addition to being virtually impossible to execute due to the fact I was prepared for them and, indeed much farther along in making them a reality as precautionary measures, would have failed: because they would have produced exactly that third result.
---
Now, helping you is one of the last things I would want to do, but because I liked this game, I'm going to go ahead and share my thoughts. To get another one that won't work out of the way first: having everyone start exactly equal also fails because due to the vagaries of chance, ability, and events, eventually a hegemon of some form or another will arise and lord it over the others anyway (ex: NINES), even if it's less powerful over all. Two blocs of powers will probably form up, one centered on it and one opposed, and all hell will break loose, as is the way of most "NES". On how one would make a space game that works in such a typical mold of "NESing", in decreasing levels of plausibility:
- A situation in which some resource is critical to the galactic economy and social structure and so species or states compete over its control
- A situation in which many species or states of wildly conflicting agendas fail to communicate or negotiate and thus war is common (one of the reasons "truly alien" aliens fail as a concept in most Sci-Fi is they have no common ground with humanity--there is nothing to discuss, nothing to trade, no common ground for diplomacy, and no frame of reference for understanding one another; if they share common needs war is virtually inevitable and sure to be pitiless and protracted, but that's just fine for a "NES")
- A situation in which terraforming proves to be inordinately expensive, overpopulation is rampant, high quality planets are rare, and so living space is at a premium, promoting conflict over Earth-grade territory
Combinations of these might work even better than any one alone. But ChaNES cannot be plausibly modified into any of these scenarios. Based on my discussions with Chandrasekhar, neither he, nor I, nor in fact anyone else I conversed with on the subject can find a way for it to continue than the other aforementioned non-"NES" type situations. In short, ChaNES is dead. It's unfortunate, but it was the only real choice to make. You should let it sink in and accept it, because the idea of the game in its present form is irrevocably flawed and unworkable. You should enjoy the memories and move on.
If for some reason you have further questions or misconceptions, you should probably direct them to Chandrasekhar so he can answer or correct them for you, respectively. Having made my case, I leave.
Well, that's interesting.
Regarding my response to the threat of nuclear war, and the 'tears shed over alien squid'- my response was not immediate because I had to deliberate on what to do with such a situation, while I could make an easy, principled stand against Chinese colonization techniques.
To be honest, I was probably ready to join the Solar Federation in the event of any sort of dramatic collapse or critical situation.
I must say, I'm very curious about what the aliens would have been like.
Regarding my response to the threat of nuclear war, and the 'tears shed over alien squid'- my response was not immediate because I had to deliberate on what to do with such a situation, while I could make an easy, principled stand against Chinese colonization techniques.
To be honest, I was probably ready to join the Solar Federation in the event of any sort of dramatic collapse or critical situation.
I must say, I'm very curious about what the aliens would have been like.
Any plan attempted by me would have failed simply because I started too late in the game, besides, I wasn't going to bomb earth immediately, just in the extreme long term.
Anyways, if Cha was willing, could this continue on with a extremely long BT in which colonies develop to the point of not relying on Earth, and to the point where several other powers arise, whether from the SF fragmenting or the discovery of other alien empires? Just a thought....
Anyways, if Cha was willing, could this continue on with a extremely long BT in which colonies develop to the point of not relying on Earth, and to the point where several other powers arise, whether from the SF fragmenting or the discovery of other alien empires? Just a thought....
das
Regeneration In Process
Shame. Methinks it was quite promising still.
Anyway, Chandrasekhar is ofcourse aware of how the situation with China is/would have been different from what Symphony D. suggested; I would really appreciate it if he were to make a full disclosure of the various parties' plans, or at least if he were to say what he thinks the outcome of the (IMHO) rather amusing maneuverings would have been, provided that the other interested parties do not mind ofcourse.
Anyway, Chandrasekhar is ofcourse aware of how the situation with China is/would have been different from what Symphony D. suggested; I would really appreciate it if he were to make a full disclosure of the various parties' plans, or at least if he were to say what he thinks the outcome of the (IMHO) rather amusing maneuverings would have been, provided that the other interested parties do not mind ofcourse.
das
Regeneration In Process
Ah. Somehow I missed that part.
I don't think it was such a foregone conclusion yet, though. Then again, I was not principally opposed to joining SolFed at a significantly later point even if I had succeeded.
I don't think it was such a foregone conclusion yet, though. Then again, I was not principally opposed to joining SolFed at a significantly later point even if I had succeeded.
TerrisH
Mischief?
just want to say a few things off the record.
A. I kicked around the Idea ofde stroying earth early on, but that was strictly off the record with chad, and was never intended to be part of sounty. I did have a few things that might have be turned into potential world enders, but meh, I was never serious. If my corp did have such plots, I am surprised myself, as I don't remember putting any in my orders. might have placed a few things that might have been turned to such with some effort, but no official plans to do so that I rember.
B: meh, the sicurity forces and the AM production were side projects to me. main plan was to create a mobile and self replicating industral base. sell our services to devloping colonies and build them an industral base to grow into. the second one was to devlop a form of artificial life by letting it evolve on the surface of Ra. that seems to have been ignored and petered out. third was to improve the sigma drive down to a few day's trip.
C: nice plans. better then mine.
A. I kicked around the Idea ofde stroying earth early on, but that was strictly off the record with chad, and was never intended to be part of sounty. I did have a few things that might have be turned into potential world enders, but meh, I was never serious. If my corp did have such plots, I am surprised myself, as I don't remember putting any in my orders. might have placed a few things that might have been turned to such with some effort, but no official plans to do so that I rember.
B: meh, the sicurity forces and the AM production were side projects to me. main plan was to create a mobile and self replicating industral base. sell our services to devloping colonies and build them an industral base to grow into. the second one was to devlop a form of artificial life by letting it evolve on the surface of Ra. that seems to have been ignored and petered out. third was to improve the sigma drive down to a few day's trip.
C: nice plans. better then mine.
das
Regeneration In Process
Masada - I was not just talking about the colonies (or, for that matter, just about China-on-Earth). I was in fact quite keen on keeping the interstellar Chinese empire united and intact, whether within SolFed (but on firm enough ground to separate if it becomes more trouble than it is worth) or outside of it.
Based on discussions with Symphony, I think you aren't aware of the full magnitude of power the SF divested from members--mandatory colonial independence track, confiscation of NBCI weaponry, limitation of State to relatively small Guard forces, control over interstellar military movements, etc. It's kind of like the Mafia. You don't leave.
P.S. shadow government
P.S. shadow government
das
Regeneration In Process
Which is why I wanted to make sure I had a way out if need be.
Similar threads
