Ari Rahikkala
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2007
- Messages
- 98
(whoa, that title actually fit in the title field, let's hope it doesn't get cut off in posting)
The art of crafting SMAC factions seems to be one that people take on far too easily, as I'm sure that anyone who remembers networknode.org (fondly, or less so) can attest. Being that it's, uh, been a while, and the audience for any new faction designs is going to be smaller than it would have been ten years ago, I decided that I'm not going to craft these faction ideas into real, playable, actually balanced ones... unless enough people (for a very arbitrary definition of "enough") turn up and say they're actually interested in trying them out in-game.
So here's the ideas I had in my mind. Note that these factions are not designed to be played by the AI at all. Some of them have to use very specific strategies or run non-favoured SE options to really make the best of their boons on Planet.
The Hyperboreans
A culture of just about the right size to be made into a SMAC faction, from a roleplaying forum I frequent. It's difficult to boil down Hyperborea to a sentence, but if I had to try, I'd say that they go to any length to be collectively sane. That includes things that seem patently insane on the face of it, from institutionalised LSD treatments (because they take the mind-opening effect seriously) to having the entire society effectively led by a weird priesthood obsessed with Truth and Beauty. Decisions are based not on politics or identity culture, but detailed statistical projections, and tend to have little simple ideological consistency: Sometimes even big conveniences are rejected because actually having them would end up making people less happy, sometimes economic considerations trump above all, sometimes the reasons for decisions are so weird and eldritch that they are barely even explained to outsiders.
In practice, I think the Hyperboreans statted out in SMAC would be a lot like Sparta but with less repression and more enlightenment. Particularly foresightful thinkers, artists and scientists are considered talents in their society, and the Hyperboreans are very good at giving these people the support they need to come out on top.
AGENDA: {Truth and Beauty}
TECH: {Social Psych}
+2 MORALE: {Rationalistic military policy}
Extra TALENT for every four citizens: {Attracts intellectual elite}
-1 INDUSTRY: {Preference to add infrastructure slowly}
(no aversions (maybe - not sure yet), favours Knowledge)
A simple and small faction to start with, but one that should be interesting nonetheless. It's not quite as militarily flexible as Sparta (no free prototypes), but on the other hand it doesn't need to use extra units for drone control early on. Playing a more builder-y strategy, the Hyperboreans will keep their drone control advantage even in FM in peacetime, but will also have the same problems as all the other factions trying to leave their borders.
The Straylightians
My very own pet faction, from the same roleplaying forum as the Hyperboreans above. Think of the usual marine objectivist utopia gone wrong, except only about half as wrong as the linked setting. They take individualism to an absolutely ridiculous level. For them, the social contract is an actual piece of paper that you sign (or, rather, you put out a cryptographically signed public affirmation that you're accepting it), the financial system is based entirely on personal credit, and a hundred people is an enormous business organisation by their standards.
I don't particularly mind forcing the Straylightians into a fairly specific economic strategy. They should have a society consisting predominantly of highly competent and competitive enterpreneurs, a kind of person that in Straylightian society will be considered a talent.
AGENDA: Society of formidable individuals
TECH: {Doctrine: Flexibility, Industrial Base}
+2 EFFICIENCY {Economy based on scale-free networks}
-2 ECONOMY {Minimal state control over finance}
Extra TALENT for every four citizens: {Attracts enterpreneurial elite}
Immunity to PLANET penalties: {Small ecological footprint}
Enhancements may be built in ocean and trench squares with the discovery of Advanced Ecological Engineering: {Trained for life at sea}
Bonus mineral from ocean shelf squares: {Culture and technology adapted for the ocean}
See what I'm getting at? Go FM/wealth, and use the talent bonus and a bit of psych spending to perma-GA, and turn that economy -2 frown upside down
! After which you can just sprawl all over the place with the help of that efficiency bonus (and if you want to sprawl in the ocean, you get the pirate economic boons). Alternatively, just simply sprawl all over the place, but do it with minimal infrastructure, and beat the others down with sheer numbers.
They are, however, a bit of a special snowflake faction, especially if you compare them to something like the Hyperboreans. Not sure what to do about that.
The Nameless Legion
Yeah, it's about Anonymous. No, I don't honestly think that sort of social organisation could ever be used to run a nation. But it's an interesting development nevertheless, especially in light of the whole history of hacker culture from the 1960's and earlier. I was thinking of the Legion basically taking over the Peacekeepers from the inside, so that the usual power structures would technically be in place, but in truth decisions would be made by the Legion. They've got some conceptual similarity with the Data Angels, except they're less eighties cyberpunk and programmer puns, and more an honest attempt at bottom-up ad-hoc social organisation.
So, instead of an institutionalised structure, just a lot of people intently keeping an eye on their social media of choice, and going with whatever idea seems like a good one. This means that the Legion's decisionmaking can be very, very fast, with single-person OODA loops being used all over the place. And, naturally, thanks to the limited information available and the limitations of the decisionmakers themselves, it can go very, very wrong. However, there's no question that in certain situations they can get very impressive things done in a very short time.
AGENDA: Bottom-up organisation
TECH: {Information Networks}
75% hurry cost: {Rapid response based on individual decisionmaking}
-1 SUPPORT: {Difficulty maintaining long-term military investments}
Receives DOUBLE votes in elections for Planetary Governor and Supreme Leader.
{May not use Police State Politics.}
Not sure if these guys need more pizzazz on the SE table. I've never played with modified hurry costs so I don't know how much of a difference they make. 75% sounds like a lot, though, so they might be pretty powerful. If it turns out they are, I guess -POLICE could be added. If on the other hand they are underpowered... mmm... maybe +PROBE?
The Futuremen
These strange creatures claim to come from a universe where the Manifold Usurpers were successful in ascending to Transcendence, leaving mankind to drift as threads of personality at the bottom of Planetmind. They managed to hijack the bodies of a team that had been sent off to a Manifold experiment of temporal mechanics, and even to jump back by hundreds of years, in order to send a warning to mankind to unite against the Progenitor threat before it's too late.
Unfortunately, they jumped too far. The Futuremen are creatures consisting more of sentient resonance than either Progenitor or human biology, and they require infrastructure that was available on Planet only decades before Transcendence to properly maintain their corporeal form. In particular, leaving the confines of their bases by any means other than robotic excursions is nearly impossible for them. They make up for their weakness with their unusual understanding of both Progenitor and human psychology and technology.
They are considered an alien faction, so the usual alien-related rules apply. (I wonder if the game deals properly with having three alien factions in a game, btw)
AGENDA: {Ensuring human Transcendence}
TECH: {Social psych, Progenitor psych}
+1 PLANET: {Understands Planet's purpose}
+2 RESEARCH: {Working to develop toward Transcendence}
Free RECYCLING TANKS at every base
"Energy Grid" at each base: {Increased infrastructure generates additional energy}
Extra DRONE for every two citizens: {Resonance interference in crowded bases}
Begins with 100 extra energy credits.
That's right, a lot of big-time bonuses, this faction should be... wait, is that an extra drone for every two citizens
? That's right, your citizens are so awesome they can't even hold themselves together 
.
Anyway, yeah, this faction is probably the one that needs the most playtesting to get any idea at all of how they play. I assume that the way it works is that (on transcend level) their cities will riot on size two, even if guarded. That's why I gave them that extra starting money to get some rec commons up quickly. But beyond that, I really don't know. I'm not sure they really have any options beyond Sikander-style ICS. But I could imagine that regardless of city spacing they're only going to be working a couple of tiles per base at most, and mostly basing their economy on crawler-supported specialists.
The art of crafting SMAC factions seems to be one that people take on far too easily, as I'm sure that anyone who remembers networknode.org (fondly, or less so) can attest. Being that it's, uh, been a while, and the audience for any new faction designs is going to be smaller than it would have been ten years ago, I decided that I'm not going to craft these faction ideas into real, playable, actually balanced ones... unless enough people (for a very arbitrary definition of "enough") turn up and say they're actually interested in trying them out in-game.
So here's the ideas I had in my mind. Note that these factions are not designed to be played by the AI at all. Some of them have to use very specific strategies or run non-favoured SE options to really make the best of their boons on Planet.
The Hyperboreans
A culture of just about the right size to be made into a SMAC faction, from a roleplaying forum I frequent. It's difficult to boil down Hyperborea to a sentence, but if I had to try, I'd say that they go to any length to be collectively sane. That includes things that seem patently insane on the face of it, from institutionalised LSD treatments (because they take the mind-opening effect seriously) to having the entire society effectively led by a weird priesthood obsessed with Truth and Beauty. Decisions are based not on politics or identity culture, but detailed statistical projections, and tend to have little simple ideological consistency: Sometimes even big conveniences are rejected because actually having them would end up making people less happy, sometimes economic considerations trump above all, sometimes the reasons for decisions are so weird and eldritch that they are barely even explained to outsiders.
In practice, I think the Hyperboreans statted out in SMAC would be a lot like Sparta but with less repression and more enlightenment. Particularly foresightful thinkers, artists and scientists are considered talents in their society, and the Hyperboreans are very good at giving these people the support they need to come out on top.
AGENDA: {Truth and Beauty}
TECH: {Social Psych}
+2 MORALE: {Rationalistic military policy}
Extra TALENT for every four citizens: {Attracts intellectual elite}
-1 INDUSTRY: {Preference to add infrastructure slowly}
(no aversions (maybe - not sure yet), favours Knowledge)
A simple and small faction to start with, but one that should be interesting nonetheless. It's not quite as militarily flexible as Sparta (no free prototypes), but on the other hand it doesn't need to use extra units for drone control early on. Playing a more builder-y strategy, the Hyperboreans will keep their drone control advantage even in FM in peacetime, but will also have the same problems as all the other factions trying to leave their borders.
The Straylightians
My very own pet faction, from the same roleplaying forum as the Hyperboreans above. Think of the usual marine objectivist utopia gone wrong, except only about half as wrong as the linked setting. They take individualism to an absolutely ridiculous level. For them, the social contract is an actual piece of paper that you sign (or, rather, you put out a cryptographically signed public affirmation that you're accepting it), the financial system is based entirely on personal credit, and a hundred people is an enormous business organisation by their standards.
I don't particularly mind forcing the Straylightians into a fairly specific economic strategy. They should have a society consisting predominantly of highly competent and competitive enterpreneurs, a kind of person that in Straylightian society will be considered a talent.
AGENDA: Society of formidable individuals
TECH: {Doctrine: Flexibility, Industrial Base}
+2 EFFICIENCY {Economy based on scale-free networks}
-2 ECONOMY {Minimal state control over finance}
Extra TALENT for every four citizens: {Attracts enterpreneurial elite}
Immunity to PLANET penalties: {Small ecological footprint}
Enhancements may be built in ocean and trench squares with the discovery of Advanced Ecological Engineering: {Trained for life at sea}
Bonus mineral from ocean shelf squares: {Culture and technology adapted for the ocean}
See what I'm getting at? Go FM/wealth, and use the talent bonus and a bit of psych spending to perma-GA, and turn that economy -2 frown upside down
! After which you can just sprawl all over the place with the help of that efficiency bonus (and if you want to sprawl in the ocean, you get the pirate economic boons). Alternatively, just simply sprawl all over the place, but do it with minimal infrastructure, and beat the others down with sheer numbers.They are, however, a bit of a special snowflake faction, especially if you compare them to something like the Hyperboreans. Not sure what to do about that.
The Nameless Legion
Yeah, it's about Anonymous. No, I don't honestly think that sort of social organisation could ever be used to run a nation. But it's an interesting development nevertheless, especially in light of the whole history of hacker culture from the 1960's and earlier. I was thinking of the Legion basically taking over the Peacekeepers from the inside, so that the usual power structures would technically be in place, but in truth decisions would be made by the Legion. They've got some conceptual similarity with the Data Angels, except they're less eighties cyberpunk and programmer puns, and more an honest attempt at bottom-up ad-hoc social organisation.
So, instead of an institutionalised structure, just a lot of people intently keeping an eye on their social media of choice, and going with whatever idea seems like a good one. This means that the Legion's decisionmaking can be very, very fast, with single-person OODA loops being used all over the place. And, naturally, thanks to the limited information available and the limitations of the decisionmakers themselves, it can go very, very wrong. However, there's no question that in certain situations they can get very impressive things done in a very short time.
AGENDA: Bottom-up organisation
TECH: {Information Networks}
75% hurry cost: {Rapid response based on individual decisionmaking}
-1 SUPPORT: {Difficulty maintaining long-term military investments}
Receives DOUBLE votes in elections for Planetary Governor and Supreme Leader.
{May not use Police State Politics.}
Not sure if these guys need more pizzazz on the SE table. I've never played with modified hurry costs so I don't know how much of a difference they make. 75% sounds like a lot, though, so they might be pretty powerful. If it turns out they are, I guess -POLICE could be added. If on the other hand they are underpowered... mmm... maybe +PROBE?
The Futuremen
These strange creatures claim to come from a universe where the Manifold Usurpers were successful in ascending to Transcendence, leaving mankind to drift as threads of personality at the bottom of Planetmind. They managed to hijack the bodies of a team that had been sent off to a Manifold experiment of temporal mechanics, and even to jump back by hundreds of years, in order to send a warning to mankind to unite against the Progenitor threat before it's too late.
Unfortunately, they jumped too far. The Futuremen are creatures consisting more of sentient resonance than either Progenitor or human biology, and they require infrastructure that was available on Planet only decades before Transcendence to properly maintain their corporeal form. In particular, leaving the confines of their bases by any means other than robotic excursions is nearly impossible for them. They make up for their weakness with their unusual understanding of both Progenitor and human psychology and technology.
They are considered an alien faction, so the usual alien-related rules apply. (I wonder if the game deals properly with having three alien factions in a game, btw)
AGENDA: {Ensuring human Transcendence}
TECH: {Social psych, Progenitor psych}
+1 PLANET: {Understands Planet's purpose}
+2 RESEARCH: {Working to develop toward Transcendence}
Free RECYCLING TANKS at every base
"Energy Grid" at each base: {Increased infrastructure generates additional energy}
Extra DRONE for every two citizens: {Resonance interference in crowded bases}
Begins with 100 extra energy credits.
That's right, a lot of big-time bonuses, this faction should be... wait, is that an extra drone for every two citizens
? That's right, your citizens are so awesome they can't even hold themselves together . Anyway, yeah, this faction is probably the one that needs the most playtesting to get any idea at all of how they play. I assume that the way it works is that (on transcend level) their cities will riot on size two, even if guarded. That's why I gave them that extra starting money to get some rec commons up quickly. But beyond that, I really don't know. I'm not sure they really have any options beyond Sikander-style ICS. But I could imagine that regardless of city spacing they're only going to be working a couple of tiles per base at most, and mostly basing their economy on crawler-supported specialists.
