Some lazy Saturday morning reading led me to a potential bug fix here:
https://github.com/b-casey/OpenSMACX/blob/defe36bdb1604c738f9cdf842ce1c8caabc456f1/src/faction.cpp#L222
Circumstantial evidence suggests that this Psi Gate prereq check in the climactic_battle function is legacy code left over from when Psi Gates apparently had some role in a Transcendence Victory. I wonder if it makes the AI unduly agitated too early at the arbitrary tech of Matter Transmission?
See this thread on reddit regarding the evidence: https://old.reddit.com/r/alphacentauri/comments/iua8v2/miriams_psiicide_put_in_another_light/
Cybernetic and Thought Control are just different kinds of Dystopian.
Police State / Democracy
Free Market / Green
Knowledge / Fundamentalist (Belief)
Power / Wealth
I guess since none of the factions were designed around the SE we'll never know.
The Data Angels are kind of the closest thing but they were written to have Democratic agenda.
Planned / Cybernetic can oppose (centralized / devolution)
Wealth for Pirates makes sense. I don't know about them being pacifist... I think I have them at aggressive but might tone them down to erratic.
The trinary system does ultimately have some problems. In my most recent AAR I've become very annoyed at the false choice between my Socialist (Planned) and Green. Similarly, what's the difference between Police State and my Theocratic (Fundamentalist) ? Did I miss a memo on how Iran or North Korea are run? Or now, Afghanistan?
Free Market is the capitalist pigs destroying the environment. Green opposes it. Morgan vs. Deirdre.
As I learn about so-called EcoSocialism, I'm aware of some problematic differences from straight up Socialism. Often, not enough emphasis on workers, and not enough wrapping one's head around the business environments that workers are currently stuck existing in. So yes, it's possible for there to be differences. I do object to the game portraying them as stark differences though, like things either camp would go to war over.
The game does play up there being some kind of difference between the operative methods of a religious vs. atheistic police state. They call one Fundamentalist, and the other a Police State. They're both actually police states, and use exactly the same methods to control the population, in real life. Secret police, making you say certain things, do certain things, carry certain things, not carry other certain things, rat on your neighbors, publicly execute people, etc. I was particularly 'impressed' by ISIS throwing gay people off the tops of minarets. Now that's a very dramatic public statement.
I might like someone to explain to me, what the realistic game mechanical difference could possibly be, when there's no real world evidence for it. It's really really apparent in the history of the North Korean dictators, where they have been regarded as religious figureheads. You do worship the leader over there. Those leaders do have special powers beyond those of ordinary human beings over there. There's a really good Netflix documentary series lately, narrated by Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones / Tyrion fame, called How To Become A Tyrant (https://www.netflix.com/title/80989772). Plenty of stuff on N.K.
I am wondering what game mechanical system would actually embody differences between atheism and religion. It should probably be its own axis in a SE table. Perhaps called "Beliefs" ? It could get a little redundant, as everything could actually be a belief. Anthropologists for instance talk about "belief systems", as a broader term than just religions.
Zhakarov isn't actually opposed to Miriam though! He's opposed to people picking something other than Knowledge and he's incapable of Fundamentalist. Miriam isn't actually opposed to Zhakarov. She's opposed to people picking something other than Fundamentalist, and she's incapable of picking Knowledge. In the original game, which is anti-religious and doesn't actually fit with her dialogue in the quotes and Secret Project videos. I made Miriam opposed to Cybernetic, which she clearly is.
Compare Zhakarov to Santiago, which is straight up Knowledge vs. Power.
The 3-way opposition is actually Yang, Lal, Miriam.
Some of Zakharov's quotations suggest that, although his avowedly atheistic society is structured along the lines of a university faculty, they, too, employ secret police. Genetic Inspectors, I think?
Spartans - Peacekeepers (reflecting the war-like and peace-like valences of each, respectively)
- Believers: removed MORALE bonus. Reinstated FANATIC attack bonus. Changed personality to Erratic. They have been underperforming, but I haven't found a solution for it. I tried giving them a SUPPORT bonus but oddly, it didn't help. These changes at least give them more flavor than a "generic fighting" faction.
the Peacekeepers are there to enforce the Charter by any means necessary.
Some of Zakharov's quotations suggest that, although his avowedly atheistic society is structured along the lines of a university faculty, they, too, employ secret police. Genetic Inspectors, I think?
No the University is trying to avoid the (Planetary) Council's Genetic Inspectors. They're surely like our real world U.N. Weapons Inspectors. "Vice Provost for University Affairs" is denying everything and saying they're not allowed to search this faction's private residences.QuoteSpartans - Peacekeepers (reflecting the war-like and peace-like valences of each, respectively)
Lal's character may be peaceful / pusillanimous wimp, but his faction AI is Erratic. Which makes him a warmonger roughly half the time you interact with him. I suppose one could chalk this up to ludonarrative dissonance. Like when some "hero" utters lines in a cut scene about peace and humanity after the player has murdered thousands of people as that hero.
Anyways, the Spartans and Peacekeepers have no inherent conflict on the SE table. In fact you should expect Lal to choose Power. Now, maybe Santiago will choose Fundamentalist early in the game to get the +1 MORALE bonus, and that will bend Lal out of shape. That's about it though.
Santiago doesn't spend any time talking about "U.N. / Planetary Council" stuff. She's not into governance. She only prattles on about how everyone's gonna stay permanently at war.
Lal does talk about "their own private army of demons". Since "unscrupulous power brokers" was plural though, "violating the sanctity of unwilling human minds", there's no reason to think that Santiago was being called out specifically. One can readily assume the Morganites and the Hive are also using such troops.
We know that Zhakarov doesn't think there's any sanctity to a human mind, although his amorality is from his faction sheet and penalties, rather than any quotes or lines of dialog. We can't be sure that Zhakarov is anti-war so much as anti-Power, which the game represents specifically as military power. We all know that knowledge is power... if we didn't, various characters will tell us when offering techs for sale! So yes, Zhakarov could be a "power broker" using cyborg troops. Add the professor to the list of suspects worthy of Lal's fretting.
To the extent that the Peacekeepers could also represent humanists deeply committed to self-actualization through free choice, I'd expect them to have serious objections to Spartan society.
But it is also possible to conceive of the Spartans as something short of would-be fascists.
The Believers suffer terribly, I think, from a disconnect between their lore and the way that they act in most games. I think it was Michael Ely's fiction that did a good job of suggesting that the Believers stole from other factions to avoid starvation in their own. In my own fiction, I've stipulated that this is because they landed with the greatest number of mouths to feed--by virtue of having tried to evacuate anyone who was ambulatory, including those sick with advanced radiation poisoning. But in the computer game, when controlled by the AI, the Believers tend to resemble the Crusaders of 1097--a rampaging army of zealots
whose piety may seem contrived to justify banditry.
There's nothing terribly wrong with the survival nut side of Spartan culture. They're a caricature of 1990s militia groups. So they wanna run around exercising the 2nd Amendment and shooting dangerous mindworms. What's the big deal? Planet's a dangerous place, so shouldn't everybody be doing that? I think only the Gaians would have issues with survival nuttery on Planet, seeing everything as a "species to protect".
It's not in the game's lore. Fascism isn't really a subject that SMAC deals with. Probably because Civ II didn't deal with it either. It was in Civ I and for some reason they dumped it.
I think the religious far right coming after the music and game industries was in recent memory back then. So they made a cartoon Church Chat Lady ala Saturday Night Live. The cartoon version is dissonant from the developed character version.
Never got that vibe from the game. Miriam is not in it for the wealth or resources. She's a true holy roller.
Quotes and videos make Miriam nuanced. Faction abilities, one liners, and hard coded diplomatic dialogue, are all Church Chat Lady. It's like 2 different authors, 2 different periods of authorship. In general, the "short cookie cutter templates" of the faction.txt files, do not leave room for nuance. You've got room for some good zingers, i.e. Santiago polishing her beloved artillery pieces.I think the religious far right coming after the music and game industries was in recent memory back then. So they made a cartoon Church Chat Lady ala Saturday Night Live. The cartoon version is dissonant from the developed character version.
I don't think the in-game lore did Miriam as dirty as you do.
But I think a lot of Miriam's quotations are not necessarily sinister, whereas I take a lot of Zakharov's to be just that, for instance.
I always imagined that Miriam and her followers would look at the Unity survivors as the Elect, and Planet as their God-given portion. Kind of the way the Bible presents the Land of Israel to the Israelites. Such an outlook would provide a broader contextual justification for hegemonistic or exploitative behavior toward other factions.
I think, from the perspective of the victims of someone like a hegemonistic Miriam, it would seem very much that the Believers preached morality without actually living as moral people.
I think the Planet penalty arises from the same idiosyncrasies that today explain why so many religiously-motivated conservatives reject anthropogenic climate change.
it nonetheless also fits a certain kind of purely materialistic interpretation of dominion.
For Miriam's followers, it's more like, "Working our will on it is the point. It's ours. We can do whatever we like with it. No obligation."
I always felt that Miriam and her followers weren't really predisposed to understand why they had to defend their own commitment to faith.
And that's pretty much the anti-Christian bigotry in a nutshell. Like there are no Christians that are liberal, no Christian environmentalists...
You can paint them up like that, but it's a rather specific characterization on your part.
The game actually has Miriam defending her faith left, right, and center. God's always behind the last theorem. Miriam's defense is she can move the goalpost forever. She doesn't acknowledge that it's a bad defense, a pattern of self-serving argument. She never makes the explicit comment that at the bottom of it all, the final axiom, is her faith in God. Nothing else. Zhakarov of course sees this as her stupidity, and humanity generally. And as an atheist, I'm with him.
All of the original cast of 7 are arguing with someone. Although, like radio evangelists, there's nobody actually arguing back, when they utter their great platitudes. You can do it in your own mind, but you can't actually call in and say, "Excuse me, excuse me, Mr. Billy Graham..." You get cut off. On to the next caller, if there are ever any callers. The usual format is one way sermonizing.
Or in SMAC parlance: here are my memoirs. My Little Red Book for you to read.
I disagree. Miriam's comment on the modernity--"The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress"--is actually subversive to anti-Christian stereotypes.
I don't think there are many "wrong" interpretations.
It's just a bunch of dissonance. I refuse to utter the mouthful "vendetta" when I'm writing up After Action Reports. I'm not writing about the Italian mob. Factions declare war.
If I were writing a clean slate 4X TBS (which nominally I am; 1st worrying about graphics stuff) I don't think I'd call these groups of people "factions". But, Firaxis had the right idea of not calling them Nations either. Hmm, what the heck would I call them?
Most of them are pretty close to being political parties or regimes. Many are movements, being concerned with ideology. None of these are great names / terms though.
'Bloc' and 'sect' are terms with some applicability. The Believers and the Cult of Planet are definitely sects, and possibly so is the Hive. Maybe even the Cybernetic Consciousness.
The Hive is probably the hardest faction to subvert. Played straight, Yang is a monster. Slightly subverted, he's a potentially Platonic despot. But totally subverted, he's the kind of ruler who demands a strict accounting from his disciples--a kind of governing elite who are held to a higher standard in order to model proper behavior for everyone else, whom Yang genuinely supposes he is helping to survive the rigors of life on Planet.
Miriam presumably thinks that we strayed from the path of righteousness, whatever that may mean. It could be a fairly pedestrian decline in church membership, a darker reference to frustrations about thwarted theocracy, or something else.
Yang, I guess, would say that humans failed to place the good of the many ahead of the good of a few. That, or we "allowed" ourselves to be ruled by unsuitable people.
Morgan thinks we did nothing wrong. We just ate our way to the bottom of the buffet salver.
Zakharov would perhaps feel that we did not sufficiently exploit all the literal and figurative tools in our intellectual arsenal to solve our problems, perhaps because we let pesky ethics get in the way. In my retelling, Zakharov blames liberal democracy for promoting tolerance of what he calls "folkways." In other words, we "freedom convoyed" our way to practical extinction.
Santiago must figure most people chose the path of least resistance and didn't fight for what mattered.
Lal's quotations indicate, ironically, that we fell prey to dictatorship after allowing ourselves to become the victims of censorship. That's quite a specific fate for a guy who is otherwise generically the "democracy" selection. Freedom of expression and obsession with bureaucratic forms aren't one and the same.
Come to think of it, "society" would probably be a great replacement for factions. Especially in the early years, the colonists are refugees forming hardscrabble frontier societies. And societies imply values, which go hand-in-hand with the factions' ideologies.
I think there's more interpretations to be made there. Fanon considers him to be inspired by Legalism- well then, he could be a 21st century Planetary version of any of imperial China's emperors, from Qin Shi Huangdi on. None of those rulers, even as despotic as they could, did everything themselves. (Though as a twist, one could imagine a far-future tech Yang who entrusts the administration of the Hive to cybernetic A.I. copies of himself- or actual biological clones. Ironically, the SMAC spiritual successor and knock-off/clone Pandora: First Contact did that with their Hive xerox (https://pandora.fandom.com/wiki/Solar_Dynasty).)
I'm struck by how in Michael Ely's "Journey to Centauri" novella he had Miriam be the sole vote in favor of not dissolving the mission, besides Lal. Her faith doesn't view the U.N. as the antichrist's One World Nation, at least. My read of that novella is that Planetfall was particularly traumatizing for her, leading to an intense spiritual awakening and whatever fanaticism she gets into on Chiron has a lot to do with that. I think also her focus on the faith of her father and country is because everyone else, Lal aside, pretty much abandoned the mission when the going got tough.
That sounds about right. My pet theory is based on the Firaxis website bio, Yang also wanted to bring back the imperial-era Confucian system and ways of looking at the world, as he personally served as the bodyguard of a modern day emperor.
Yeah, not much to add to that. He reduces all of life to economic interactions, and as he's such a big fan of economic games, human life must perpetuate so there may be an economy.
Ely does a particularly good job incorporating that characterization into the opening novella's story when he has Zakharov insist on restarting the reactor or whatever over Garland and the others' objections, even when it may threaten the integrity of the ship itself.
The patchwork crew proved unequal to their new task. Damage control operations began almost at once under the supervision of Unity's Executive Officer, General Francisco d'Almeida, clearing the way for Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov's technicians to assess the reactor spaces. They were disrupted by multiple groups of armed stowaways who proceeded to engage in a shooting war between not only themselves, but the mainline crew. One of the ringleaders, Colonel Corazón Santiago, read aloud a manifesto over the ship's internal address system, and was able to secure for herself a face-to-face meeting with Captain Garland. Thirty-six hours later, he was dead at the hand of an unknown assailant.
The surviving leaders fell into rounds of recrimination. Without extraordinary measures to correct drift, Unity would overshoot Chiron, be forced into a long elliptical orbit, and return only after a transit of eighty-four years. All the crew now-awakened would either need to re-enter cold sleep, a deadly-dangerous proposition, or attempt emergency landing on the world below with whatever diminished quantities of supplies they could reach in the chaos. Zakharov, whose advanced age greatly reduced the likelihood of survival in either contingency, insisted that it was still possible for his operators to save the ship and permit an ordinary landing with much of the cargo intact, but other division heads protested that their personnel were too disorganized, or else too few in number, to provide him with the necessary support.
In the end, every hand turned to sabotage. It wasn't enough that Santiago's brutes opened fire on the same people trying to seal rents in the hull. Nor that Jean-Baptiste Keller's followers used the cover of chaos to avenge themselves on Holnists and U.N. Marines alike. Zakharov, too, bitterly assailed his peers and refused them the benefit of his precious engineers. Deirdre Skye, the mission's head Xenobiologist, diverted first responders away from engineer tasks to reinforce the structural integrity of the ship's remaining greenhouses. Records show that Francisco d'Almeida awakened 400 more personnel than was ordered, none of them with the firefighting or heavy rescue billets relevant to the present danger, but all of them combat-trained. Aleigha Cohen oversaw the nerve-stapling of hundreds of newly-awakened prisoners in the ship's forward detention blocks. Leaving her post in an overcrowded surgery, Tamineh Pahlavi ventured into the heart of the ship and, with a few determined followers, made off with the genetic legacy of Earth--an index of every organism alive on Earth, and some already extinct at Mission Launch. Citing her authority under U.N. protocol, Miriam Godwinson, whom the ship's computer still flagged as deceased, refused to force crew members in her care to breach irradiated compartments to make crucial repairs. Finding the situation hopeless, d'Almeida, acting as Garland's successor, gave the order for each leader to gather those crew still ambulatory and abandon ship. In his last official act as a United Nations representative, he unilaterally declared the Mission Charter dissolved.
She was basically a Social Darwinian and it sounded like the Spartans believed that they were the only ones apex predator enough to survive the challenges that laid before humanity. So the people who messed up earth, both the leaders and the masses, were weak sheep who should've been led, and possibly culled, by her wolves.
Probably a legacy of earlier iterations of the game when Brother Lal led the Keepers of Wisdom and had a more science-oriented faction. No idea how they were going to manage that, since Yang's Labyrinth also had a science bent, never mind Saratov's Archons.