Everyone around does murders. Ninjas, Hexas, Kazak Spetsnaz, Caledonian SAS, Zeros and so on. Yet they do not bother themselves to leave a polite note. They - in most cases - would even deny any involvement.
For me your super-positive :D And if he had Kamau in full link and few Helots than your just a saint! Keep up the good work! PozdRawiam / Greetings
Every faction is bad/corrupted/grey in their own ways. To say that Haqqislam/Nomads/Ariadna are good guys is an over-estimate especially when you look at the lore of each faction. I could point out a few things where Haqq's positive image is a farce despite any "good intentions". Janissaries and Hassassins come to mind along with the Bashi Bazouks among other non-combat areas like government.
Fire team had the lieutenant, kamau sniper, ORC hmg, fusilier paramedic, fusilier hacker on it. The kamau hmg was across the table in the nearly inevitable Patsy haris.
Meh. Haqq can be called good guys, but they are still lighter tone of grey, not clear white. They maintain their look by improving medicine and (if trust to RPG sourcebook about them) hire corsairs to enforce their interests without direct force. True good guys are now out of interest and will be very dull. About thread theme - IMO the most interesting part here is idea about uniting people around hardly reworked in humanism side religion. And sometimes i'll buy some odalisques to make them as HVT, because I can.
I would say that from the PR side, Haqq does few nasty things for a reasons that residents of the other nations would call "a good cause", which definitely helps them being painted in the brighter gray, a rather antihero approach in the world full of heel factions. My story of picking the netion is easy. I asked my friend which factions are underdogs, and he already played Ariadna so i picked Haqq. And i do love arabic aesthetics.
I don't disagree with your overall point but I feel like the only connection Janissaries now have to slavery is that many of them were rescued from it (via purchase and immediate granting of their freedom). This may be as a result of a recent soft retcon to more heavily imply this, but I digress...
Most def on all your points. But when everyone is a shade of grey, light grey ends up at the top of the grading curve. Plus, Haqq can be designated drivers for us Ariadna folks. Might have thought of asked the Nomads but they're probably high.
CA are definitely baddies. Tohaa too really. Haqqislam are probably amongst the lighter side of things generally. But not entirely. They are not the wholesale good guys but they're closer than many to it.
Actually, I wouldn't agree with Combined Army being all that black. The EI seems to be simply following lifeboat ethics: do whatever it takes to survive. Simly the event it aims to survive (heat death of the universe) and the manner in which it tries to do it (ascending to a higher plane of existence) are beyond what most humans can grasp. The Sygmaa, we are told, consider life on the EI side of the Combined / Tohaa front just as normal as it was on the Tohaa side, don't they? I don't really think them to be all sepsitorized. The Shasvastii are bent on their species survival - and after a near-extinction level. Another lifeboat ethics case, I think. They wil do anything to survive. In this case it meant siding with the most powerful force around, the EI. And if I'm not wrong, they still have their own plans on the side, likely contingency plans in case the EI doesn't do them good. The Morats, well, they are a product of a culture of war. Hard to find a redeeming quality here. But when even their unborn babies fight their siblings for survival, it has to be deeply engraved in their biology and culture. Not something you could actually blame them for. It would take a major cultural breakthrough to change this culture. Can't speak of the Umbras, I believe we know too little of them. So, I'd consider EI very, very dark shade of gray, but not entirely black either. Just as Haqq can't be considered to be pure white.
Well, the Umbras are bloodthirsty maniacs who only serve EI because it gives them things to murder. I believe that if EI had noone to fight with, it would get rid of Umbras altogether, since they are too hostile to any living being. Didn't they initially destroy everyone in their system before turning on each other because there was noone to murder anymore?