Recently, I was prompted to do a bit of a "story Bible" for this fan-fic of mine as I look to engage new folks to come and supply content of their own. This involves taking a step back and looking at the story so far with fresh eyes. It also means a bit of ret-con work to make the story "true up" when all the pieces are laid on the table, end-to-end.

Sadly, this will ruin many of the dates previously supplied, but I suppose

Here are the fundamental elements of the world I built on Brian Reynolds's back, as it were. I will expand these as I develop more of them.

Missions to Alpha Centauri

▪ The Pathfinder Probe launched during a fruited period of Earth's history, under circumstances far more auspicious than those surrounding the Unity Mission.

▪ The Pathfinder Probe landed on Alpha Centauri, and a base was established, but contact with the colony was lost shortly thereafter amidst an outbreak of viral illness. The specific fate of the Pathfinder colonists was not disclosed by the U.N. Security Council and remained a mystery even to the Unity command crew.

▪ Because of the challenge of training a huge number of people on common systems when some of them would enter cold sleep decades before their comrades, the mission opted for a "last common technological paradigm" philosophy. It would be the equivalent of a space ship in 2060 launching with systems and equipment built in the 1980s, or at least designed with only the same set of components.

▪ Work on Unity commenced in 1996. Unity left the Sol System for Alpha Centauri in 2071.

A Brief History of Violence

▪ Earth was afflicted by a series of human-caused catastrophes, including but not limited to: a pandemic of Red Flu, the Six-Minute (atomic) war between India and Pakistan, the Sino-Indian War, the Hypersurvivalist Wars, and the Second American Civil War.

▪ "Hypersurvivalist Wars" is a blanket term for hundreds of conflicts, fought primarily in North America and Europe, that pitted adherents of the anarcho-populist "survivalist" movement against various national governments and local self-defense forces. The central figure in this tragedy was Nathan Holn, a malcontent and pseudo-intellectual famous first for his hagiography of Vice President and would-be American monarch, Aaron Burr, second for his calls to arms against the legitimate governments of the United States and Canada, and third for his execution after being found guilty of attacking a U.S. Army base in Colorado. Holn died before the turn of the twenty-first century, but he lived on in the popular imagination of his fevered followers, who feared and resented the change that social media told them was happening so rapidly and on all fronts. The conflicts during this period followed a distinctive pattern. A national emergency would occasion pleas for assistance from Washington or Ottawa, leading to confrontations between authority and the self-styled “Holnists,” often in extreme conditions for which only the latter were properly prepared. As pirate radio broadcasts urged concerned citizens to hoard supplies and discount official instructions – frequently invoking the specter of government-operated concentration camps – Holnist instigators would infiltrate hospitals, distribution centers, and staging areas, accusing authorities of withholding vital services. Sometimes, the Holnists distributed supplies of their own to burnish their image of legitimacy. Popular unrest would then provide the hyper-survivalists with cover to conduct organized looting of food convoys and private property. The federal government’s heavy-handed response would cow some, outrage others, and generally arrive too late to do anything but pick up the pieces. During the first few years of the Anarchy, tens of thousands of new recruits rallied to the cause thinking to find assistance from the seemingly well-stocked Holnists, while the central governments lost what precious little legitimacy they had previously managed to retain. The reality was that Holnism was usually just another word for self-aggrandizement. Holnists took what they wanted--land, goods, people--and defied anyone to stop them. Holn’s philosophies never constituted a coherent roadmap for political transformation, and though a cottage industry of serious thinkers labored mightily to produce political platforms and coherent manifestos for living, the masses of his so-called adherents had no time for intellectuals or consistency. Holn's calls for a Second American Revolution fired the popular imagination, that's all. The existing alliance between "self-governance" movements and religious radicals provided the path down which millenarian movements like Evangelical Fire marched to secession, then to defeat. Holn's collected papers contained a message that was, at root, fundamentally self-contradictory and anti-social. Holn knew what he was against: compromise, racial and gender equality, civic-minded sacrifice. He hardly knew what he wanted the United States to become. Put simply: Holn claimed to want to make the world “safe for the little guy, who works hard and deserves much,” but his mélange of racism, misogyny, and anarchic sentiments was generally a formula for making civilization impossible. Holnists were bushwhackers and sociopaths dressed up in philosophical trappings.

▪ After Nathan Holn, perhaps the second most-infamous man in modern American history was Jean-Baptiste Keller. Keller was no more successful a man than Holn in his many careers, but his politics were far more coherent. A wind farmer and sometime-lay pastor in southern Illinois, he was a self-described “mourner” of the breakdown of civil society at the local level. His rise as a globally influential thinker coincided with a steep decline in the fortunes of his local church and a severe economic depression that once again hollowed out the cities of the West’s traditional industrial heartlands. In a deliberate critique of phylism, Keller linked the decline of social and economic well-being with the breakdown of the traditional family and physical community – literally, one’s geographic neighbors. While neither a Luddite nor Evangelical, Keller echoed the traditional complaint of the Religious Right that the Internet 2.0 was a gateway to troubling addiction, deluding its users by enabling them to engage in fundamentally false, and therefore spiritually unfulfilling, interactions. with free trade policies, which he considered responsible for an “epidemic” of social ills. Keller allowed that his appeals were not intended for a general audience per se, but hoped that they might have special application to those facing economic and social dislocation as a result of changing patterns of economic and cultural behavior due to globalization. This pattern of thought, although less popular than Holnism, nevertheless attracted hundreds of thousands of committed followers. Keller eventually amassed a bizarre constellation of supporters, including the families of out-of-work engineers from the Great Lakes region who accused Wall Street of failing to stand by the American worker and students at the Midwest’s many public universities who felt that they were being prepared for vocations that free trade policies had rendered inviable. Keller later reappeared to rally communities of the faithful both within and outside occupied Des Moines, orchestrating a series of diversionary attacks on Holnist defensive positions to cover the smuggling of weapons and relief to followers trapped behind enemy lines. Gradually derided as cultists, Keller’s followers were frequently subjected to massacres, first by the Holnists, then by the U.S. Army, and later by various adversaries ranging from mercenaries employed by the American Reclamation Corporation to local Home Guard units operating under federal writ during the Third Reconstruction. Of necessity, Keller authorized designated followers to raise standing “self-defense committees” on the model of the Viet Minh, raising money and collecting weapons and other supplies intended to make good on a new vision of “armed neutrality.” Whether at Keller’s command or otherwise, forces acting in his name not only ejected the Holnists from Des Moines, but slaughtered tens of thousands of refugees in the care of the Red Cross, alleged retaliation for pogroms previously visited upon the Kellerites themselves. Keller’s adherents eventually went underground in the face of mounting pressure from the U.S. Army and the ARC. Many relocated to the Northern California region where they centered various around shared cultural heritage, civic orientation, or even lineage, frequently lamented the breakdown of civil society at a distinctively local level, consciously rejecting the move toward globalized conceptions of identity enabled by the telecommunications revolution of the early twenty-first century.

▪ Decades after the reunification of both the United States and Canada, Holnism remained a powerful political lure for those who considered themselves to have been failed by the reconstruction governments, and the Spartan Movement took some cues from Holnism. Spartan ideology begins with a Realist premise: the State of Nature is a war of all against all. Security is possible only through subjugation or elimination of threats, and the soldier must maintain their skill through practice. In choosing coexistence with geopolitical adversaries, the West doomed itself, first to subversion, then to military destruction. Spartan thought differs from Holnism in that it is not explicitly predatory, although it is equally as violent. The Spartan competes with the "lesser self" as much as with opponents; unlike hypersurvivalism, however, it values military readiness more than generic "preparedness." That said, a fight against an unwilling or unprepared enemy is of no moral value.

Notes on the Geopolitical Situation on Earth

▪ At different times, national sponsors for the U.N. Mission to Alpha Centauri included: the United States, Canada, the European Union, the British Empire, the French Union, the U.S.S.R., Communist China, Golden China, India, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina.

▪ Antarctica was settled, terraformed, and ultimately home to several new nation-states by 2070. Large new landmasses were raised up in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to facilitate human settlement.

▪ Colonialism and freedom struggle continue to dominate a world where the Cold War still rages. France, despite having pioneered what it calls a "third way," is mostly seen as a Soviet stooge. A rift that began forming between Communist China and the U.S.S.R. cracked wide open with the rise of the Golden Emperor, but China is still coming into its own as a great power. The U.S.S.R. is suffering from economic and political difficulties reminiscent of the Gorbachev era. The United States is still rebuilding from the horrors of a civil war that ruined much of the South and Midwest.

Notes on the Faction Leaders

▪ Prokhor Zakharov was the second-oldest official member of the Unity passengers. (In theory, a stowaway could have been even older.) Sheng-ji Yang is younger by a few years.

▪ Captain Jonathan Garland's was murdered. No perpetrator(s) were ever apprehended. Most survivors assume he was ordered killed by Santiago. Morgan, sometimes called "the first stowaway," is the second most-popular suspect.

▪ Santiago lost control of the mutiny she started. The "mainline" Spartans intended to commandeer mission resources to build an independent colony. The Holnists began self-destructive attacks on the ship and its crew--violence for its own sake. They were seemingly content to destroy the Unity, and themselves along with it, as an expression of retributive rage over being excluded by mission planners.

Fundamentals of Faction Design

▪ Each faction in the story is led by a single leader (with the exception of the Dreamers, which are led by two). The leader has articulated an ideological vision that answers three questions in a unique way. These are: (1) What is the fundamental truth of the universe? (2) Why did civilization on Earth fail? (3) What is needed for the human species to survive, and thrive, on Chiron?

▪ Here is a link to some basic faction information. As you will see, some are incomplete or uncomfortably similar to others.

I have a subject that I’d like to put up for discussion. With apologies for the interruption of our regularly scheduled programming. Consider this the watering that ensures the garden will continue to bear fruit.

This is a long piece, so grab a beverage of your choice and tuck in.

Why does this game mean so much to us?
SMAC is uniquely excellent storytelling. I think its staying power in our hearts and minds is a reflection not merely of what were then (and in some respects, still are) innovative game mechanics, but the quality of the characters and ideas that Brian Reynolds put center-stage. Alpha Centauri has sometimes been called space opera, and Reynolds confessed to having written it while listening to the Les Misérables soundtrack, which he suspects may have infected his creations with unique passions.

When SMAC released in February 1999, the seven factions, their ideologies, and their leaders spoke directly to the particular anxieties of that moment in time. What’s more, they did so in ways that were both relevant and powerful. The Cold War was over, but the fresh tragedies of Rwanda and Yugoslavia were hard reminders that we had not excised all the flaws from our natures. Human cloning and the cure for cancer seemed just around the corner. New awareness of acid rain, melting ice caps, and deforestation raised urgent questions about whether we would soon push the Earth past its breaking point. The Internet was in its infancy, and we were sharing information and ideas at speeds and over distances that still amazed us. The world felt smaller, and “One World Government” came into the popular vernacular alongside older ideas like "Spaceship Earth” and “Global Community.”

Brian blazed some new trails. While he was thoroughly steeped in classic science fiction, he offered unusual diversity and subverted popular stereotypes. A feminist faction. The militarist was a Puerto Rican gang member, and a woman at that. The white male was a Russian. The mogul was a black African. All of the faction leaders were public intellectuals of a sort, and all had something insightful to say about topics beyond their professional ambits. They engaged in witty banter. And they could be played straight, or subverted. Was Deirdre Skye a committed conservationist, a deranged ecoterrorist, or a bit of both? Was there a kernel of truth in Yang’s disturbingly amoral beliefs about the extraordinary capacities of the human body and mind?

Reynolds also achieved the kind of brevity that is enigmatic. We don’t know much about the factions or their leaders, in the end. We have some pictures, some quotations, a bit of fiction that most players probably did not read, and a set of fictional biographies accessible only on the game’s obscure website. Enough to whet our appetites, but not to fully understand their motivations.

How should we think about Brian’s legacy as it pertains to this story space?
In 2014, I put the question to some friends of mine on a forum just like this own. What would the seven factions look like if Brian Reynolds had created them in that historical place and time, not sixteen or seventeen years before?

To help us, I offered three basic thought prompts to help sharpen their responses. First, what did the faction believe was the fundamental truth of the universe? What axiomatic claim was it making as the basis for new leadership of humanity? Second, each faction needed a particular take on why human civilization on Earth had failed. They should all be different enough that the factions would struggle to find common ground about which problems most urgently required solving on Planet. Finally, each faction must have a unique prescription for how to secure the future of the human species after Planetfall—one they were willing to fight, and if necessary, die for.

So how can you help?
In this space, I have put forth more than a dozen new faction ideas. Some of that has meant reworking Brian’s original seven. Two of the others, the Human Tribe and the Shapers of Chiron, are creations of old acquaintances on defunct forums (individuals going by the handles Thorn and Iron Talon, respectively). The rest, including the Dreamers and the Hunters, are my own designs. Let’s review.

The Original Seven

Gaia's Stepdaughters, led by Lady Deirdre Skye, the Conservationist, wish to live "in dialogue" with the natural world around them. Skye believes that patriarchal structures led our species to destroy its original homeworld.
The University of Planet seeks to pursue a program of unrestricted research. The Scientist, Academician Prokhor Zakharov, believes that everything is knowable through empiricism. He will not allow superstition or folkways to restrain the kinds of inquiries that could create the tools to make life better.
The Human Labyrinth, also called the Hive, is dominated by Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, the Despot. Yang has established a rigid and highly repressive caste society. He is instructing proteges in the mental techniques and ethical precepts that he believes will uniquely merit them to be stewards of those in their not-so-tender care.
The Centauri Monopoly, led by the Mogul, Nwabudike Morgan, seeks to achieve a planetary energy monopoly. Morgan has a seductive thesis: nothing went wrong on Earth; it simply ran out of resources. We should change nothing. In time, Planet, too, will be depleted of value, and our species will again turn its sights to richer pickings. Happiness is uninterrupted consumption.
The Lord's Conclave wants to place faith at the center of the human experience. Sister Miriam Godwinson, the Prophet, asserts that there is special value in our species' religious inheritance, which contains an enduring set of historical lessons for right living that still apply today. Her followers value what can be experienced over what can be communicated to others.
The Spartan Federation is a haven for followers of the Survivalist creed, which offers a big tent under which are clustered those who wish a life of rigorous physical and moral discipline, as well as many Social Darwinists. Colonel Santiago's vision is to hone a warrior society that will keep itself sharp through preparation for war.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, the Humanitarian, leads The Peacekeeping Forces, which seek to enforce the principles of the United Nations Charter and so secure the rights and privileges that Natural Law tells us are the entitlement of every sentient being.

The New Kids on the Block

The Hunters of Chiron, led by J.T. Marsh, the Hunter, live wild and free in a deadly new environment that challenges them to test the limits of both their mettle and their endurance. Marsh believes technological dependence sapped our problem-solving capacities. The Hunters are a meditation on the masculine ideal captured in the fiction of Louis L'Amour.
Director Tamineh Pahlavi is a Supremacist. Her Human Ascendancy wants to force the creation of a new species uniquely suited to life on Chiron. Pahlavi is a proponent of gerontocracy: the "experienced" should lead. Relates to the human fear of mortality and replacement.
Sergeant "Pete" Landers, the Defender, leads The Human Tribe, a collection of stowaways who subscribe to the vision of civil society propounded by anti-disassociationist cult leader Jean-Baptiste Keller. The Tribe seeks to build societies bound by shared blood and place, immune to the lures of ideology. This faction is essentially an "answer" to the atomizing effects of the digital age.
Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine, the Aristocrat, has convinced his followers to trade a measure of social freedom for promises of security. His paternalistic society, the New State promises a place with purpose for every member. St. Germaine has taken his followers deep beneath Chiron's oceans to ensure that they are properly safe from negative influences. Inspired by a strange crossing of the problems arising from 9/11 and Jacques Cousteau.
The Dreamers of Chiron, led by Factor Roshann Cobb and Dr. Aleigha Cohen, wish to look inward for answers, exploring the depths of the human psyche in an urgent search to understand what makes us succeed or fail. Cobb, the Dreamer, is an addict; Cohen, the Transgressor, is a Cleckleyan psychopath.
The New Two Thousand, answering to Governor Oscar van de Graaf, the Empresario, signed terms with the U.N. that guaranteed them the right to split off from the Unity Mission after 5 years to attempt an experiment in independent colonization. Members have invested as stakeholders, although many are indentures. Van de Graaf proposes to form a society of individuals driven by their interest in real property. An homage to the cattle barons who "won the West" according to certain narratives.
The Shapers of Chiron, led by Coordinator Shoichiro Nagao, The Monk, shall remark Chiron in Earth's own image as penance, and extend the promise of salvation to those left behind.
The Memory of Earth, led by Commander Kleisel Mercator, the Cynic, believes that the best guarantee of survival on Planet is to unite against a common, external foe. Mercator is warning of an extraterrestrial threat. This faction is inspired by the idea that the end of the Cold War created political space for dangerous divisions in Western society.
The Children of the Atom, probably misnamed, are led by Dr. Johann Anhaldt, the Mediator. Anhalt was among Earth's foremost experts in machine learning. Anhaldt proposes that the societies of "Old Earth" failed to trust machine intelligence, which he felt confident could have identified unexpected "trades" to avert war and other catastrophes. On Planet, his followers are following a settlement plan prepared for them by an Artificial Intelligence.
The Watchers of Chiron are a collection of constables and convicts led by Commandant Sardul Singh, the Planner. Singh, a former prison warden, is of the belief that behavior is a matter of nurture, not nature, and seeks to create living spaces and conditions that will "cure" his charges of their anti-social outlooks.

So what's wrong with this picture?
You tell me! No, really.

Not all of the original factions were created equal. To this day, I think Corazon Santiago received the very short end of the stick when it came to quotations with deep meaning. Some of the most provocative material about the philosophy of Sheng-ji Yang is either fan fiction or informed speculation, depending on one’s perspective.

Played "Straight" or Subverted?
At some point, my story will ultimately need to determine whether to take certain moral turns with each faction. For example, is Zakharov a well-meaning, if deeply abrasive and self-aggrandizing, tinkerer who simply has no appreciation for matters of the human heart, or is he a man perfectly happy to play God among the ants, putting his own curiosity ahead of human considerations? Is Santiago a staunch individualist who refuses to be a burden to others, or a simple conqueror who mistakes bloody-mindedness for virtue?

My Take on the Backstories
In my story, Deirdre is as much eco-terrorist as conservationist. Zakharov is amoral to the point of evil. Yang is a despot deluding himself about the high-mindness of his aims. Morgan is exactly what he seems: a megalomaniac (and probably also living out his trauma as a person who was expected to live his whole life a victim). Miriam represents the best traditions of selflessness and grace for others. Santiago is a disciplinarian but not a tyrant. The Peacekeeping Forces are both bureaucratic and high-minded, but their aggressive impulses come from the right place.

The Hunters are nomads who just want to hunt the biggest dinosaur, and in the process provide a unique set of services to the other factions as scouts, merchants, and service-providers. The Ascendancy is a hegemonic threat to everyone. The Human Tribe just wants to be left alone, but is ultimately called to do righteous battle alongside the Peacekeepers. The New State is a less-bad version of the Hive. The Dreamers are a moral cesspit that beat out all others for cruelty but are too debilitated by their own debauchery to escape the reckoning that must come their way. The New Two Thousand is an unhappy obligarchy: van de Graaf, like St. Germaine, plays the paterfamilias, to the distress of all the other factions. The Shapers eventually bring on global catastrophe. Mercator is probably right, but nobody is especially worried. Anhaldt hides a dark secret--he's just the front for an Artificial Intelligence. As for Singh, he really means well, but his methods are rather questionable.

Cadet Branches?
There is a trope in computer gaming, at least as old as Command & Conquer, and beautifully executed in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization, in which the same faction can be led by multiple individuals or played in ways that express different aspects of the same theme. Some of the factions I have rolled out, feel like cadet branches of the original seven. One could argue, for example, that the Hunters are a cadet branch of the Spartans that prioritize the physical adversity of adventure over war. The New State could plausibly be a cadet branch of the Labyrinth/Hive since both factions claim to need to physically isolate their followers from corrupting influences while segmenting society according to ability (utility). The Ascendancy is probably a cadet branch of the University; after all, genetics is a science. The New Two Thousand, inasmuch as it deals with the accumulation of things and their relationship to human society, could step right out of the Centauri Monopoly. The Shapers, with their roots (pun intended) in working the land, could be a cadet branch of the Gaians. The Tribe might just be a very particularized junior sibling of the Peacekeeping Forces.

Ideologies versus Themes
I think factions that offer very clear ideology are to be preferred to factions that are merely thematic. I think the Nautilus Pirates fell into that trap in SMAX, to their detriment.

Some of the new factions seem like they deal less with ideology or social organization and more with specific projects or fascinations on the part of their putative leaders. These include the New State (ocean exploration), the Dreamers (the mind as final frontier), the Children of the Atom (their "pet" A.I.), the Shapers (remake Earth), the Ascendancy (grow neo-Sapien), and the Restoration (previously unmentioned, but consisting of soldiers under Marcel Salan who want to return to Earth).

Asking Similar Questions
Several factions explore the same question of whether people are fit to govern themselves, or whether somebody (or something) else should govern them: the Hive, the Peacekeepers, the New State, and the Children of the Atom.

Backstories and Their Impact on the Quality of Faction Design
I fear that I have freighted Zakharov and Morgan in particular with so much backstory story, they are no longer easily recognizable as tropes. Zakharov has a personal fascination with longevity treatments that reduce the need for Pahlavi's character. Morgan's personal quest to avoid becoming anybody's puppet by buying his way to impunity is arguably very interesting, but far from his traditional role as Elon Musk-type provocateur.

In other cases, the backstory is something worth exploring. Van de Graaf's story in particular ties into that of Pahlavi (a former employee), Cohen and Anhaldt (former contractors), and Landers and Morgan (former adversaries). Landers has scores to settle with Van de Graaf and Santiago. Morgan knows to look out for van de Graaf and Cobb. Godwinson probably has strong opinions about van de Graaf given their mutual experience as high-level officials during the Second American Civil War. Lal could theoretically come in for a drubbing by everyone given his high-level role in U.N. policy-making prior to Mission Launch. Marsh and Morgan may know each other professionally because of their involvement in African war zones.

Sometimes, a faction with a rich backstory can go in a direction that opens up "space" for someone else. For example, if the Spartan Federation isn't all about conquest, then the Ascendancy can be. If the Morganites/Monopoly are all about bread and circuses and the dangers of one very rich person mucking up the global system, that makes it easier to have another faction, also inspired by Capitalism, that looks at the influence of property ownership on government.

[[MysticWind:]]

Metacommentary

Having skimmed through the archives of NetworkNode.org, and read others' fan sequel ideas (including played Civilization: Beyond Earth), I believe that the original SMAC was lightning in a bottle. It's just one of those classic works of '90s video gaming where everything came together, often by accident. And it's that cohesive, tightly-coupled nature of the game that makes coming up with new factions so tricky, and why that many find Alien Crossfire to be so lacking. The original seven factions (interesting that it was an odd number- it works out very well, as the roster isn't a set of dichotomies but more triangular multipolar relationships) all represented Big Classical Ideas. War and Peace. Environment or Economy. Religion or Reason. And uh, "Atheist Police State"/"High security state". It probably wasn't even originally intended to be like this- Brother Lal of the Keepers of Wisdom had more of a science bent, for instance. But what we ended up getting was a deep sci-fi work inspired by some great classical works of sci-fi. Mid-20th century and earlier works were all about big ideas of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a society, before the dross of modern genre conventions seeped in. In many ways, SMAC, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, could only have been created in the temporary respite of the '90s end of history. When Americans could loaf like Homer Simpson a bit in our placid bubbles, and dream up far future space operas shaped by Big Ideas rather than petty tribal affiliations.

The challenge is expanding upon that world. The problem is that when you have such a singular work, any attempts of expansion can only narrow its grand view. Even when the original creator is behind it, hence the disappointment of SMAX. (Behind the scenes, I'm not sure if the expansion was Firaxis at its best, either- I get the impression that its was rushed, and from what I've read, Brian Reynolds didn't even work on it.) But the problem with SMAX is that it creates factions that have much smaller concepts than the big ideas of the original. And in fact, that's why they are better thought of as splinters and separatist groups- the cadet branches, perhaps, of the original factions. The narrower scope of the expansion factions both reinforce the grandeur of the originals, and makes SMAX on its own a bit hard to imagine. Did all seven original leaders fall to the five new ones, and/or were wiped out by the Progenitors? Is the only chance of survival to be a hacker or a pirate? Just what the heck are the cyborgs about anyway?

There's only so many Big Ideas that one can come up with before you run into overlaps with the original factions. For instance, what about a faction based on Law? Well, Yang certainly cares about that, to a Legalist extreme. The Peacekeepers live and breathe the rule of law. And all of the other ideologies also have their own organizing principles around it. What about a faction based on Truth? Not only is that perhaps too similarly broad to organize a society around, that also exists in all seven as well. It's rather hard to hone in on the appropriate "scale" of concepts that new Big Idea factions can be based off of.

And, to circle back on the tightly-coupled nature of SMAC: the game has some great systems working beneath its hood. The Social Engineering traits are top notch, because they tie into every single stat attribute a faction has and can modify, the diplomatic relationships they can have with other factions, almost every aspect of gameplay. That's how the factions come alive in SMAC, even if you ignore all of the oodles and oodles of writing and voice acting. SMAC's stats make each faction distinct from each other. But this incredibly designed system is difficult to expand upon on its own. There's only so many agendas and aversions. There's no room for nuance or variation as in modern hyper-detailed grand strategy games. It makes modding in new factions difficult, because beyond the difficulty of maintaining good game balance (without duplicating any of the existing factions, mind you), you can only have so many traits to model new Big Ideas.

For instance, how could a faction revolving around Art work? Maybe if you had some of the culture mechanics that weren't introduced into Civ III then it could really shine. But without it, you're just left with something not dissimilar to Morgan Industries, because a Wealth-focused faction would have the time to obsess on Beauty and Aesthetics, right? Or maybe it's more philosophical and knowledge-based? In which then it'd look more like the University. Or how would you model societies that are anarchistic, all about Freedom, like many of the fan mods I've come across? How would you represent that, low or high Police, low or high Economy? Would it just be Morgan Industries but scrappier?

This might also be why SMAX factions are odd- they're based on the remaining game mechanics that went unrepresented in the base game, rather than story concepts.

What I'm getting at is that SMAC has enough statistics to tell stories with its own factions. But as fun as it is to make new factions, it's rather hard to make them distinctively different, because the mechanics don't support them.

These thoughts aren't necessarily in response to this project. This project does a fine job introducing new specific faction ideas for more nuanced, specific settings. So, something less Big Idea than the original. And I think that's fine- Firaxis themselves couldn't duplicate their original approach. I do think though there is something to be said about trying to come up with more factions that could embody more Big Ideas. And I do think the shortcomings of decades' of modders attempts at making good new custom factions can also inform the experience of creating new factions in a story. Because both in-game, or in-fiction, SMAC remains the same; there are frameworks that hold dear.

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

Played "Straight" or Subverted?

I think your take is fair, as the factions and their leaders have always been up to interpretation. Their morality, even their specific personalities, are up for debate. I think those are emergent properties that will arise organically in the creation of your story, as it might in a player's campaign. The only question is how you want to drive it, as this thread is more world-building than actual plot creation.

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

My Take on the Backstories

In this section you've explained your vision of the factions, old and new. It's all very fine, my only question is what scope you're looking for. The original SMAC's central tensions was having factions with diametrically opposed relations- but not purely so!- interact with one another. SMAX's story can be imagined as schism and rebellion from the original factions as Planetary development continued, plus the whole alien Manifold subplot. So what is your central idea of your setting? Do these new factions exist to serve as foils to the original? Or are you seeking to explore the ideas of these new factions in their own right? Maybe have them explore their own moral underpinnings in their interactions with one another, as the originals did? Or maybe play out the histories of Old Earth in a new world, with factions that haven't truly shorn off their connections to history? I think you can do all of this and the above, I'm just wondering if there's any specific intention behind it.

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

Cadet Branches?

I think it's fine to have new factions that feel like cadet branches of the original seven, without having them be splinters. Like I keep harping on, coming up with Big Ideas and representing them is difficult. (Just how could a society devoted to Art even look like anyway?) So it's natural for new factions to be more specialized than the originals. SMAX factions already do. Of course, splinter, insurgent factions also ramps up the intrigue, so maybe that could be fun.

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

Ideologies versus Themes

I actually think the Pirates have material to work with, they're just sadly underwritten along with the other SMAX factions. (I think the Cyborgs are the worst- they take a whole new sci-fi concept and are completely unelaborated upon. They're neither hostile assimilationists nor enlightened ultra-rationalists. They lack the transhumanist and/or cyberpunk themes of other sci-fi. They're just University with less emotion. They're boring.) But the Pirates have a latent Green nature ("protecting Planet's seas") that almost every interpretation ignores. They're Greenpeace of the future. They're Skye meets the Spartans meets the anarchist fan-modded custom factions. There's a lot of material to explore in piracy. Like the Data Angels' hacker-based society, there's something inherently parasitic or at least externally-dependent about the faction, but it's something that can be worked with. There's probably moral questions that can be brought up too- is it right that the Pirates believe themselves protectors of the seas while ignoring the land, and hypocritically benefit from stealing the wealth created by the landlubbers who amassed it by exploiting the seas? And piracy is a lifestyle/economic mode that entire nations have been built on.

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

Asking Similar Questions

On the note of who should rule, in a sci-fi context, the themes explored in the first two Deux Ex games would probably be helpful, especially the endings. Should a cabal of well-informed elites rule? An A.I.? How about smash it all and return us to the glorious tech-less Dark Ages? A new fanatical inquisition? Cybernetic hive mind?

Quote from: Trenacker on April 20, 2022, 04:19:12 AM

Backstories and Their Impact on the Quality of Faction Design

You have your own idiosyncratic take on the original factions, and I think you should stick to them if that's your vision. It's as original a creation as your new faction concepts.

And your thoughts on the dynamics between the factions, both personal and ideological, also make sense. I think it all comes down to what path you want to blaze.

Thanks for engaging, MysticWind. I am always excited when I see that you’ve made another post.

You’ve said quite a lot, most of which I heartily agree with, so I’m going to try to focus my reply to some of the aspects of your remarks I found most interesting.

You are certainly onto something when you perceive multipolar, not just bipolar, relationships between the various factions. Both the Spartans and the Hive are at odds with Lal’s preferred way of life. And despite the set-up for conflict between Deirdre and Morgan, it is Zakharov who fulminates against the Gaians in the game’s own media. Your point makes me wonder if I have been too harsh on myself for creating new factions that don’t necessarily have perfectly dyadic pairings (e.g., the Dreamers, the Ascendancy). In fairness, I guess it must be said, too, that factions concerned with big ideas (say, the Lord’s Believers) rather than specific projects (e.g., the Human Ascendancy) would have more rough edges to snag on other ideologies.

And I think, after today looking at some of the original quotations, I must admit that Reynolds and the design team gave the leaders a good deal of texture, sometimes at the expense of losing focus, which is not necessarily good or bad. I was a bit concerned that Director Tamineh Pahlavi should have something to say about robotics as well as cloning, thinking it might be casting her arms too wide and horning in on the Luddite philosophy of Warden J.T. Marsh, but Commissioner Lal has arguably even more to say in-game about ecology than he does about democracy or information, supposedly his faction’s raison d'être.

Fascinating that you spot the relationship between the original seven factions and “Big Classical Ideas” with world-historical heft, while I most appreciate how much a product of their time they seemed to feel, both then and now. The major “Big Ideas” I or others came up with that didn’t seem covered by the seven original factions were: the secrets of the human mind (Dreamers) (although it could be argued that Yang could always have ended up there), the demise of civil society (Tribe), the morality of life on the frontier (Hunters or New Two Thousand, depending on how one counts), crime and punishment (Watchers, if we say that Yang, while a disciplinarian, is not specifically interested in correcting antisocial behavior), the secrets of the deep seas (New State, originally called The Beneath), and criminality (Promise-Keepers), which didn’t really result in a functional faction concept.

I think Lal would need to grapple with both law and truth. Somebody interested in the “free flow information” would eventually need to confront what information overload does to a democratic society. The Janus face to the Peacekeepers in that regard is the New State, although it could be Yang, played broadly as a gatekeeper between himself and his subjects.

To model “freedom” for the Hunters, I went with a nomadic society that doesn’t build traditional bases. No idea how one would incorporate that into even a sequel from a balance standpoint.

This endeavor is more world-building than linear story. I’m not going anyplace per se, just enjoying the journey as I dip my toes every day into a world I have come to love. As a kid, I collected roleplaying game books and illustrated encyclopedias purely to go on mental peregrinations.

I guess what I’m looking for is critique from folks like yourself. Which new factions speak loudest to you? What “takes” on the originals do you think are most intriguing?

What gets me about the SMAX factions is that there was a petty active web community around Alpha Centauri after game launch. The developers of the expansion consulted with them for at least some of the new techs, although I’m unsure of whether they did the same for the factions. Three years ago, I got to ask Brian Reynolds a question on the Pean to SMAC blog. I was curious whether he’d left any factions on the cutting room floor when shipping the original title. He told me that there were seven, start to finish, which I found mind-bending.

When I ran an Alpha Centauri matrix game (think a Sufficient Velocity grand strategic roleplaying game), the Tribe and the Shapers were by far the two standout player-created factions. But for each of those, we got a dozen people wanting to play just another cult that was going to plug everyone on Planet into a machine mind.

New Ideas for Discussion

I've begun a new analysis of the factions. It's a combination of laying out the leader and society information in a spreadsheet format. This lets us look at their philosophies, as well as their game pieces, in juxtaposition to one another.

Some preliminary conclusions are emerging.

The more factions we add, the sharper and narrower each one gets. That's inevitable. But has it gone too far?

I love the Hunters. I think they'd be a popular faction from a gameplay standpoint. As a successor to the "-ization" series games, SMAC focused on base-building. But what if a faction didn't bother with a base? And what if the diplomacy was deeper so that you could have an intermediary faction that did deals with everyone?

It's in the lore that the Hunters become a bit more problematic. Not their ideology. If anything, the meditation on masculinity and the questions raised by Marsh's philosophy have become more relevant, not less, to our contemporary day-to-day. But in terms of faction design.

When the game released in 1999, the Spartan Federation was probably the faction I'd associate most closely with physical conditioning. Readiness of mind and body are paramount to war. When you start with just 7 factions, their collective philosophies have a lot of ground to cover. So you stretch them, like the membrane over a drum. The 5-color "pie" used in Magic: the Gathering illustrates this problem nicely. Red is not just the chaos color, but also the color of industry--of striving and ambition and risk. (One can almost see the tie to capitalism.) Black, which is all about death and exploitation, naturally encompasses necromancy, and it's just a short skip from there to the creation of lesser copies of things. But if you add a few more colors to the pie, it makes sense to combine industry and artifice into another color altogether, usually Brown or Grey. And once you make that addition, some of the original lore, or even the ways we might have once thought about the factions (or might still think about the factions) become warped.

In my fiction, the Spartans are warriors who want to practice war as a kind of self-improvement project. But the implications of their original "Keep and bear arms" philosophy, at least in the stereotypes sense of a freedom one "imposes" on others, got pushed to the Hunters, who are all about ignoring territorial boundaries and asserting their right of access to resources. Deep thinking about the link between health and survival gets offloaded to the Hunters, too. And the desperate grasp for "our fair share" of things that comes of making Santiago more a true stowaway than a mutineer proper is divided between the Spartans, Tribe, and Pilgrims (New Two Thousand).

The same happens with Morgan. The New Two Thousand crowd in on classic Morganite turf. They're all about free enterprise and the cross-over into banditry.

It makes me wonder if, the next time I tell this story, I should go with the idea that the new 7 are cadet branches of the original factions. This would meant that their leaders become prominent lieutenants, not necessarily founders of wholly independent societies. Thoughts?

What about my personal take on the factions?

Let's use Lal as an example. My Lal is much more an homage to the Kafkaesque caricatures of the U.N. popular circa 1998 than he is an ardent proponent of Net Neutrality. And while I don't think the original lore does that aspect of him any more justice than I do him injustice, that unexplored aspect of his design becomes very obvious when you take his quote and compare it to the other faction leader musings.

In my story, Lal is the guy who is guilty of staying his hand to avoid revealing an impotence that is already obvious to everyone but himself. It's like the old joke about the Soviet leaders stuck on the train. After trying to haul the engine with cables and shooting the mechanics, Gorbachev suggests the Politburo pull the window shades and simply pretend the train is moving. Combined with Lal's reflexive self-doubt, I think it makes for a good character. One tortured by his past and unable to confront bullies from the self-righteous high ground. In a narrative story I told elsewhere, Lal's subordinates loved him for his awareness that he had growing to do, and so they worked to imbue in him the steel of his own convictions. But we didn't talk about propaganda, or censorship, as bigger ideas.

Which of my versions of the leaders do you like best?

The discard pile.

I'm struggling with the Watchers of Chiron. Sardul Singh and his prisoners are interesting enough to sit at the top of the "bits box" I reach to for new inspiration, but I have so much more to say about everyone else. And the Labyrinth and Dreamers together can cover most of the stories about dystopian surveillance it's possible to tell.

I also wonder about the New State. Not because I would do away with them, but because the topic of aristocracy might be better addressed by a whole faction. But I appreciate that the New State, as described heretofar, has more going for it than just an "underwater" vibe. And I think they have crucial things to say about the tension between safety and liberty that is often at the heart of aristocratic societies. Of course, Yang's Hive already makes the case for despotism to counterbalance the tendency of the masses to panic and make unwise decisions about where to vest their trust. Just looking for feedback.

Where to see more

For those that want to see some of my notes and analysis, remember that my Google Drive AC2 file is open for comment.

Our Discord channel welcomes you.

	Frontier	Libertarian	Classical	Digital	Enlightened	Romantic	Technocratic
Politics	Democratic	Oligarchic	Autocratic	Representative	Theocratic	Anarchic	Meritocratic
Economics	Barter	Mercantalistic	Command	Planned	Green	Post-Scarcity	Free Market
Values	Survival	Wealth	Power	Stability	Truth	Welfare	Knowledge
Future Society	None	Eudaimonic	Thought Control	Computer-assisted	Transcendent	Retrospective	Caste