That first contact with Voice was wonderfully eerie, nice job.
I love the diversity of the factions for this game, it's very rare that you get so many differing ideologies in such great quantities for the same product. I'm a big fan of the end game changer that Planet is ultimately alive. Biotechnology and cyberpunk were concepts being explored quite thoroughly in nineties science fiction, so it was nice that it got a look-in and a genius loci is a nice way of shaking up what could ultimately turn into a stale game. It's also very Clarkian in its application of mysticism and transcendence as an attainable goal and transhumanism is always a fascinating subject to delve into. After all, it would probably take only two centuries or so before those who first colonised Mars considered themselves disparate from Earth. They would likely still consider themselves human, but technological divergences could lead to their concept of "human" becoming very different from that of Earth's.
Crowley wrote:I would say for game mechanics it's overall like a speed-up function for feeling the repercussions for pursuing high-intensity industry that causes considerable ecological damage that would normally take a century or two show any serious effects, and even longer to fix. And that's not getting into the more fanficul science fiction aspects of it.
Fanciful for the purposes of storytelling certainly, but it's not unreasonable at its core to suppose that humanity would encounter an organism larger than itself that grows and learns -- over however long a period -- to communicate with us. Not likely through voice, but some other method perhaps or maybe that's anthropocentric thinking.
The Romulan Republic wrote:It occurred to me, watching this, that the Alliance from "Firefly" (which has a similar backstory in some respects) comes across a lot like an alliance between the Chinese legalist faction under Yang, and the capitalists under Morgan.
Which has more than a few utilitarian shades of the Federation from
Blake's 7 and the Peacekeepers from
Farscape, although not to either extent.
The Romulan Republic wrote:The eco. one sounds like too narrow a focus.
It depends on how you play them. It's an extremely good faction for building, not so much for conquering (given their ideology, I'll file that under "Duh."), but you can supplement a great deal of your rather meagre military units with contingents of native lifeforms; i.e. the worms. That's what I love about this game (I usually play as Zakharov), you don't need to go in and smash everything in sight in order to win. Even if you're playing a role that leans heavier on conquest like Yang, you can win through technological, diplomatic or economic means instead.
