In the Infinity universe, the CA is steadily growing from becoming somewhat of a threat to an existential threat. The issue with that is that it makes the lore smaller. Any internal conflict in the Human Sphere is explicitly stupid as it gives the CA an even bigger advantage. It's essentially treason. There's no room for internal power struggles when there's such a powerful enemy at the gates. Likewise, there's no good reason to withhold technology from your competitors. Sure, they'll get a technological leap forward, and that's for the future you to worry about, and the chance of there being a future you is significantly lowered unless you share the technology in the first place. It becomes everyone against the CA and there's no room for PanO against Yu Jing, etc. Humanity needs unambivalent victories so the CA goes from being an existential threat to being a credible threat. There are ways in the lore that can help facilitate this. 1. The way the CA wages war is unsustainable. Forget 50% of their troops just vanishing in the wormhole. Manpower can be replaced. They're losing 50% of their ships and other material as well, and while the CA can decide to throw all the money they want behind this effort and they can get the raw material from asteroid mining there's still the logistical aspect of time. Producing that material takes time and eventually, the losses of the CA will mount faster than the production capability. As the war in Ukraine shows, throwing half your men away so the other half can do something is a losing strategy, just ask the Russians. Perhaps the CA is forced to adopt a less intensive resupplying and safer pace to avoid losing half their forces before they even see combat 2. Internal strife. The Morats would probably willingly throw themselves at the wormhole because the species seems to have a collective psychosis. Less so with the Shasvasti. They lost their cool because humanity blew up a pod ship with a few thousand Seed Embryos in it while happily accepting throwing half their armed population away. These two things are dissonant since a species fixated on survival would never sacrifice itself for nothing. Perhaps the Shasvasti raises a stink at home about being thrown away like nothing despite being loyal. Even the Russians who're loyal to Putin are raising a stink about just being thrown away like that. 3. As opposed to normal warfare where the CA has attacked single enemies whose colonies naturally would have had to have fewer resources than their home world this time the CA is effectively attacking 11+ home worlds at once that have their own logistical system in place and effectively are independent entities bound together by trade and shared interests. This is a far different foe than the former. There's also the logistical reality that any losses incurred by the CA will take far longer time to cover than similar losses incurred by the Human Sphere since their production lines are right next door while the CA has theirs a galaxy away. Perhaps the HS actually uses its logistical advantage against the CA properly As I opened with, for the sake of the narrative the CA has to be taken down a peg so there's room for internal conflict. It's the inverse proportionality of stakes. The higher they are the less people can get involved in them. IMO the Infinity universe was cool and had a diverse option for conflict when the CA occupied less of a space in the lore. The more the CA has grown to fill that lore the more it has pushed away the space for other conflicts. PanO and Yu-Jing corps being in conflict to colonize Ariadna means nothing when the CA can take over any moment and it may reduce readiness since Ariadna has to divert resources to keep those corporations in check, which makes it even more likely the HS will lose to the CA because the involved parties are unable to give their all since they have to watch their backs constantly. Once the CA has been hammered down to a size where it's still a constant and credible threat and less of an existential one there will be space in the lore for internal conflicts within the HS since some of the outside pressure will be removed and the capitalistic and nationalistic greed impulse will thrive again. Right now, there's room for none of that.
Although I agree with you on the point you raised about how the increasing CA threat is "making the lore smaller", I think you misunderstand how huge is the difference in manpower/resource capabilities between the EI and Humanity. This is not like Russia attacking Ukraine, but more like the China sending a few people to Vatican City to stirr problems and try to learn some secrets about the Church.
Eh? Getting digester intact before humans can tamper with it justifies any expenses and any losses. I'm surprised they are not blowing planets up left and right. I don't see any way for CA threat to be dialed down until another NOT Defiance goes through the hole and blows it up.
Agreed that there is a scale change with full-on CA invasion, and that it should change the Sphere Powers' motivations. But your supposition that the full invasion will reduce human infighting drama is wrong IMO, so I don't think you need to worry about losing the focus on that type of conflict. In fact this just raises the stakes and drama. Hypercorporate societies at large scale will probably never do a good job of pulling together in the face of a categorical threat to survival, when commercial interests may gain some advantage by ignoring that threat. Publicly-held corporations are making many of the large decisions in Infinity at the "national" scale. Their criteria and feedbacks for decisions are not based on long-term survival, assuming corporate structure and regulation look anything like current western economies (outside maybe Germany). And given the massively shady decisions in the fluff, they are possibly even -less- well -regulated than current-day corps. The major feedback or guidance for corporate executive behavior is share price, which leads to shareholder and board endorsement or removal of executives. Not survival of the human race, or even of the company itself, or quality of product, or ability to repay lenders not owning shares. Ethical decisions that do not increase share price usually get executives removed in massive corporations even today. Add to that a future of automated behavior from securities or the purely digital security-manipulation tools themselves with less human intervention (whatever automated contracts become when empowered with actual AI) and acting and voting as shareholders... and you have a system hardwired to prioritize profit over ethics or human wellbeing. Yeah, there are O-12 regulators and Sphere governments which might try to demand unity, but those powers are also subject to forms of lobbying from corporations, so even their concentrated power will probably get redirected/slowed while corps try to get more shots in at each other or avoid maximizing profit from war materiel Imagine now that you have an ongoing barely-cold-war with a significant deathtoll already between the Powers adding to the temptation to keep infighting even beyond profit. I'm actually guessing that some elements of the Sphere will not unite at all, and that it leads to massive defeats. Like maybe a planet or two exploding... Anyways, I don't think you need to worry about this scale change reducing the drama between the current parties.
It is a problem of scale and logistics, simply put the Human Sphere is vast and its recourses while lesser than what CA have in general, but not on theater, are closer to infinite than to depleted, CA not only needs to secure and protect any land it ahs, but also to reinforce and supply not only from off world and off system, but from outside the human sphere. As I see it the fluff takes the next logical step, a massive fleet breakthrough that is not after planets but the interplanetary logistics chain, the Circulars, they do not try to invade, but to isolate the human powers to more manageable chunks.
The more Combined Army we get, the less I like it. The squabbling between human factions is the most fun for me.
It is not, yet. In my understanding this is the concern of this thread: Right now there is the conflict on Paradiso, but it is not so bad that is leads to „all of mankind must unite“. They do work together, more or less, but there is still room for internal quarrel. But as the CA is so overwhelming - what will happen if they win at paradiso? Can the fluff be advanced without CA destroying everything?
I am out of the loop, then. My knowledge was that CA and the human sphere are at a stalemate in the paradiso system. From time to time, the CA can get an extraordinary attack group through the defense (like Durgama takeover), but overall the human defense holds. What is the development here that I am missing?
Mostly: Concilium invasion. The CA created a wormhole to the Concilium system leading to an invasion fleet hardly kept at bay. We also know there is a beach head on Dawn since a long time now, and CA (mostly thanks to Shasvastii) gather troops in the Edges of Humanity. The Third Offensive on Paradiso was a hard blow to human defenses, and it seems the Acheron's blockade has fallen now. The CA war is no more reduced to Paradiso but is spreading all across the Human Sphere.
I remember, that main goal of CA (and some other forces) is to get one alien bio-computer, that was on Paradiso before. Am I right? I don’t remember details. Would be happy, if you’d tell me. (It is not easy to get free info... and that is sad))
The Digester was on Paradiso, but after the events of Campaign Paradiso, it has been removed somewhere in the Human Sphere: a place named the "Penny Arcade". The location is unknown, even if the CA lore bits we had at the end of Campaign Paradiso had an artwork with an Anathematic looking at a Earth hologram. Finding the Digester is the reason why CA is spreading in the Human Sphere (that and the fact it finds humanity has potential in the transcendance project).
Hahah. Wake up soldier, combines are already on Concilium. That's like... 4 circulars are now vulnerable
I feel CB went a bit too far in the story. It's too big compared to what we play. I can't help but feel that in the beginning they thought the game might expand into a big mass battle game. It was certainly a possibility. Who knows where things go when you first start something.
Yea...not much in the lore makes a lot of sense to be honest, the CA invasion being a big one. Had they left the CA making raids, or sending recon units to search or infiltrate it would still make sense. But at this point in the lore we are well beyond 15 random fuckos who wouldn't even associate if this was an actual military sent in to...I dunno, blow up a heater terminal I guess? That said, the game is mostly fun.
If only they were actually making some larger-scale games for the setting... like say a fleet game... I don't think you need to be able to play all scales of conflict in a fictional setting created to host one scale of game. The systems that have done so (like Renegade Legion/Centurion/Leviathan/ShannedamCounty, or 40K/Epic/BFG/Relic etc.) have been fun experiments but not super successful at creating an integrated play experience. That said, don't rule anything out with CB. Sometimes they move slow but they put out some pretty incredible stuff given the resources they have as a smaller company. Squad action, raids, and black ops in not-official-war settings can make up really important parts of much wider conflicts. See very recent history in places we are not allowed by the mods to name right now. The Yahoo News account of the first actions of the irregulars, football hooligans, and retired soldiers who became the Kraken unit is pretty incredible, and feels a bit like some of the Infinity fluff stories.
