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So which civilization is best to do a maximum Purity, maximum rear end in a top hat run?
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Sep 5, 2019 01:52
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The Sandman posted:So which civilization is best to do a maximum Purity, maximum rear end in a top hat run? ARC. There's a reason why if/when I do a second, Purity game I'm not letting people vote for them. Americans, and a megacorp. I cannot think of any way to write them as good guys.
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Sep 5, 2019 01:56
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Nothing forces you to play as good guys. We are goons! Go MAXIMUM HITLER!
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Sep 5, 2019 01:57
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Cythereal posted:ARC. There's a reason why if/when I do a second, Purity game I'm not letting people vote for them. If you're willing to assume that their blurbs are not complete lies (because if so, why write them?) they're at least a step up from most modern corporations because they aren't concerned with maximizing quarterly earnings.
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Sep 5, 2019 02:09
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Defiance Industries posted:If you're willing to assume that their blurbs are not complete lies (because if so, why write them?) they're at least a step up from most modern corporations because they aren't concerned with maximizing quarterly earnings. They're better than any real-life megacorp, I agree. But unless I promptly and immediately had them stop being a megacorp, I could not in good conscience portray them as good guys. So I'm not. They're straight up going to be off the table for the second game. Siegkrow posted:Nothing forces you to play as good guys. We are goons! Go MAXIMUM HITLER! I wish all Nazis would follow their leader's example and blow their own brains out alone in the darkness surrounded by people that hate everything they stand for. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 02:11
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I appreciate your commitment to writing stories that you're comfortable with. :civberttwitterlikeicon:
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Sep 5, 2019 02:19
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Afrofuturist Purity Barre would be cool.
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Sep 5, 2019 03:00
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The Pilgrimage  The meaning of life? By and large, Al Falah had concluded that that was a question best asked of the maker of any given life. Health or science, health felt like a nicer thing to do at this point.  In the case of Al Falah as a society, for example? Trade networks were rather akin to a circulatory system.  'Simple' animals could form vast colonial organisms. Is a human society really any different?         We don't think so. A representative from the PAC, an elderly Chinese doctor, proclaimed us the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. quote:What does it mean to be human? Clearly it cannot be to pursue the identity of the unique self, which must be achieved at the expense of other equally valid humans. Nor can it merely be the propagation of memetic systems, ideologies, religious beliefs, philosophical positions, or moral axioms. No, the truest expression of the meaning of humanity is found in the complete sublimation of the self, leaving behind the quintessence of humanity - the collective will and action of many individuals, each of whom is defined only in the ideal of the whole.  Chungsu fleets keep appearing at the periphery, hanging around for a turn or two, then turning around and leaving. Chungsu's having trouble with other wars and Al Falah's strength remains high. I think Moon wants to attack but keeps realizing it's a really bad idea.  Humans could at last freely walk either way through the doorway separating the empyrean from the material. The concept of djinn as separate from humanity was already a little thin. Now it threatened to become completely obsolete.  Here's your drat giant robot.   Whatever Soma is, it heals you for drinking it. The other option gives you some culture from distilleries.  I shall not play in God's domain, I shall not play in God's domain, I shall not play in God's domain...  The African Union lost a few cities to Chungsu, but INTEGR's taking them now with their own Tenet patrol boats and Arbiter cruisers.  Couldn't find a kraken, but I did find a sea dragon and tamed it...   Gene smelters are a pretty good health structure, and you can either make them into an amazing health structure or a solid science structure in addition.  What hath science wrought?  Cyborg levitating space-going jellyfish that can spray acid as orbital bombardment!  To many in Al Falah, the distinction between biology and engineering was finally at an end.  We've had quests referring to us using nanotechnology for a long time. Guess I should catch up on that. It's the tech required for the Purity victory, by the way.  The game will be over before this will be relevant. Feels good.  So that sentient amalgamation of Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia? Project's a go!  Wait, mister sea dragon! You don't know where you're going!  Welp. That's sixteen more strength towards the Emancipation victory. Godspeed, mister sea dragon.  Nanopastures are food buildings. Nanothermite is a very useful military wonder that it's too late for me to care about. Exodus Gate is how Purity's unique victory happens.  Guess I should unlock that last Supremacy unit, huh? State of Earth   By the end of the Emancipation campaign's second year, Al Falah had perfected the strategy they would employ for the rest of the war. Al Falah forces enjoyed unprecedented mobility thanks to agrav technology, spatial bridges from phasal teleporters, and the uniquely self-sustaining logistics made possible by molecular fabrication, and they exploited these advantages mercilessly. The first spatial bridge, made possible by a satellite brought through from Farah, linked the Persian Gulf directly to the Mediterranean Sea, and Al Falah naval and amphibious forces spread to both north Africa and southern Europe as they moved west. Athens, Tripoli, Rome, Algiers, Barcelona, Marrakech, Lisbon, and the Canary Islands became operational Al Falah bases in less than a month. From the Strait of Gibraltar, Al Falah's advance split north and south to maximize their sea-based mobility. The African section of the Emancipation campaign would ultimately be characterized by diplomacy more than warfare or religious awe. Civilization had survived better in sub-Saharan Africa better than anywhere else on the planet, and the nations of the Peoples' African Union knew better than to blindly trust technologically superior forces approaching from the north and west. Nevertheless, Al Falah's offer was tempting: the restoration of the Earth and the healing of its people. Food and medicine were simply left behind by Al Falah's diplomats, and communicators to contact them. What changed the hearts of the PAU's leaders was news from the Middle East. Al Falah had secured the major population centers of the region, and from there rail networks and terraforming sectors began to spread on their own with no humans at the helm. Drones patrolled the interior sectors and lead the advancing Al Falah infrastructure, and could communicate with anyone they encountered - summoning soldiers or diplomats as need be. The human involvement in holding so huge an area was astonishingly small, the spread of Al Falah's infrastructure network was almost completely automated and acted in so many ways like a living being growing to encompass the interior of the network points Al Falah had established. People could and did move freely between Al Falah held sectors and native lands, speaking of lands of milk and honey that flowed with fresh water and cures to all ills. They knew better, of course, the African Union's leadership. A propaganda tool was a propaganda tool, even if Al Falah were kinder than any colonizing power before them. What the Union's leaders were not expecting was a proposal for a diplomatic summit in the Union's capital of Addis Ababa where they would meet Al Falah's leader in the flesh, Secretary-General Arshia Kishk. Ultimately, representatives of sixteen nations recognized by Al Falah and the Union would attend. What emerged from the Addis Ababa Conference would come to be known as the Solar Protectorate, an interim measure until a proper representative government of Earth's people could be established. Al Falah would have no authority in the Protectorate, only an advisory capacity, and only with the consent of a member state would Al Falah be able to exercise military intervention. Observers from Al-Jalidia were also invited to Earth, to witness the Emancipation and have a voice in what would happen next for Earth. INTEGR, the North Sea Alliance, the Pan-Asian Cooperative, and the Jalidian branch of the People's African Union accepted. Unfortunate, while Al Falah was expanding into Africa by the pen and spoken word, stronger measures were required in the ruins of Europe. Europe, Al Falah learned, had been ground zero for the nuclear war that signaled the Fall, though details remained frustratingly unclear. The massive bay located where the city of Marseille had once stood was troubling. The nuclear devastation of Russia, France, Spain, and the British Isles was worse - curiously, central Europe and Scandinavia were untouched directly by atomic fire, leading Al Falah to speculate a war between Franco-Iberia and the Slavic Federation. Whatever the case, the European theater was even more grim than the Middle East had been for the Al Falah soldiers and relief workers. Not because of violence, but because of the sheer scale of the devastation. Conservative estimates placed post-Fall Europe's population at perhaps twenty percent of Europe's population before the Fall. More pessimistic estimates were lower. There had been both conventional and nuclear war, that much was certain, and most of Europe had regressed to the same tribal, scavenger-barbarian level that had characterized the more built-up parts of the Middle East. Only little by little did Al Falah piece together the broad strokes of what had happened: the crater that had once been Marseille was caused by an artificial asteroid impact, an effort by the Slavic Federation to bring asteroids full of valuable resources to stable Earth orbits where they could be more easily mined. Whether something went wrong or whether the civilian project ended up being used as a weapon was unclear to everyone, even African authorities, but Franco-Iberia took the devastating impact to be a deliberate attack from the Slavic Federation with a weapon of mass destruction, and retaliated in kind. The post-Fall Europeans were not, perhaps, as inclined to view the return of Al Falah in a religious light as the Middle East had been. But when Al Falah transhumans walked through the ruined streets of Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, and Moscow in apparently normal clothing, no need for a radiation suit and without ill effect, the whispers of angels began anew. For a certain strain of Christian eschatology, the miraculous return of humanity's star-lost children to save their kin and their homeworld even seemed like a thing of prophecy. Officially, Al Falah discouraged religious interpretations of their people or their return to Earth - among both Terrans and the Al Falah themselves. They were not angels, their cause was not divine, their return was not a miracle. Religious though Al Falah's people tended to be, the government had always been strictly secular, and humanitarian workers constantly reassured the Terrans that there was nothing supernatural about what they had become among the stars. Unofficially, the name 'Operation Emancipation' had fallen out of favor with the men, women, and djinn who went back to Earth. Whatever their religion or lack thereof, almost one and all they had come to prefer a different name for their mission: the Hajj.
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Sep 5, 2019 03:04
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Oh poo poo, the Slavs committed an Operation British on Marseille?
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Sep 5, 2019 05:35
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Cythereal posted:Americans, and a megacorp. I cannot think of any way to write them as good guys. Given their sponsor ability, and their logo, I would find it difficult to write ARC as anything other than as a group intentionally basing themselves on the Bavarian Illuminati. Given how much was lost in the Mistake, their idea of the Bavarian Illuminati may have come from the card games. Yes, that's supposed to be the Great Seal there. Yes. Of course it is. Nothing to see here.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:42
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Clearly the best option is to send angels through the portal to attack earth. What color is their wavelength pattern by the way? I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't stand ARC. Also the Russian who is making GBS threads cities and constantly acts like a colossal jerk. Similarly in Civ5 the only new world civs I can stand are Brazil and the Aztec because they aren't making GBS threads cities, or spamming prophets like the Maya, and Monty is the most reliable leader in the entire game. ManxomeBromide posted:Given how much was lost in the Mistake, their idea of the Bavarian Illuminati may have come from the card games. "I'm going to make my report *puts Give Report card on table* and-" "Report? You've activated my trap card." Poil fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 09:12
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Poil posted:I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't stand ARC. I do like that the North American leader in CBE is a half-black, half-Mexican woman who regularly mixes Spanish and English when she talks and her backstory emphasizes that she's a self-made woman who grew up poor and has battled racism, sexism, and classism her entire life. Shame she's just an rear end in a top hat after all that.
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Sep 5, 2019 12:12
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What factions did eastern/central Europe join with in main canon? Places like Poland, Hungary, Romania and all: Are they Slavic Federation or INTEGER? If neither could they be an alternative seeding? Also, could you clarify a bit about some of the restoration efforts in the current LP: "...there rail networks and terraforming sectors began to spread on their own with no humans at the helm" So, considering the biology/cybernetic nature of Al Falah what does this look like? Because I'm picturing things like train tracks spreading like creeper vines and ambulatory terraforming devices walking around doing their thing, stuff that would be totally alien and frightening to the backwater people of earth if there's nothing with a human face to explain it to them.
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Sep 5, 2019 12:22
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CheeseThief posted:What factions did eastern/central Europe join with in main canon? Places like Poland, Hungary, Romania and all: Are they Slavic Federation or INTEGER? If neither could they be an alternative seeding? In my imagination, I drew the line between INTEGR and the Slavic Federation as extending down the western border of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova to the Black Sea. West of the line, so Hungary and Romania, is INTEGR. East of the line, so Poland and Ukraine, is the Federation. Kozlov's civlopedia specifically notes cities in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus as being part of the Federation. That and Firaxis talked in interviews about the Slavic Federation being, out of setting, an effort to call to mind the more idealistic aspects of the Soviet Union and celebrate the Union's achievements in science, engineering, and space travel, thus the Federation's backstory about being Earth's leaders in deep space travel and exploration. quote:So, considering the biology/cybernetic nature of Al Falah what does this look like? Because I'm picturing things like train tracks spreading like creeper vines and ambulatory terraforming devices walking around doing their thing, stuff that would be totally alien and frightening to the backwater people of earth if there's nothing with a human face to explain it to them. That is exactly what I've been imagining. All that stuff can whistle up a supersonic transport with actual people on board if need be, but otherwise Al Falah's infrastructure is growing on its own and taking over the landscape like cybernetic kudzu. Yes, it's weird and alien and unsettling and most people who see it would probably think it's a genuine alien invasion. And they'd kind of be right. Goons voted for Weird poo poo, they're getting Weird poo poo. 
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 12:41 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 12:33
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Given the nature of PR I'd have expected Al-Falah's infrastructure on Earth to be designer organisms constructing things. A dam growing itself from nothing is unsettling, a dam being assembled by giant beavers from logs made of nanobots is awesome. That sort of thing.
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Sep 5, 2019 14:28
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Just because we have creep generating our structures and covering the planet and aiding our genetically engineered bug cavalry and floating whale carriers doesn't make us The Zerg 
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Sep 5, 2019 14:47
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The Sandman posted:Given the nature of PR I'd have expected Al-Falah's infrastructure on Earth to be designer organisms constructing things. A dam growing itself from nothing is unsettling, a dam being assembled by giant beavers from logs made of nanobots is awesome. That sort of thing. The real breakthrough will be when we don't even need dams because we've programmed the water to behave.
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Sep 5, 2019 16:18
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Bah please. All we'd need is a rolled up newspaper. "NO! BAD WATER! GET BACK INTO POSITION!" *Watery puppy-like whines"
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Sep 5, 2019 16:33
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The Sandman posted:Given the nature of PR I'd have expected Al-Falah's infrastructure on Earth to be designer organisms constructing things. A dam growing itself from nothing is unsettling, a dam being assembled by giant beavers from logs made of nanobots is awesome. That sort of thing. If we were Harmony/Supremacy rather than Supremacy/Harmony I probably would have done something like that. Though probably something more like spiders spinning nanotech-laced webs in structural patterns and the building then grows from the individual strands of the web becoming the main structural support lines. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 18:03
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Al-Falah, the sort of place where, if you spit your gum on the sidewalk, the sidewalk will spit it right back at you.
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Sep 5, 2019 18:09
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Al-Falah, the sort of place where, if you spit your gum on the sidewalk, the sidewalk will spit it right back at you. We must dissent
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Sep 5, 2019 18:38
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Infidelicious posted:We must dissent Really, Al Falah is on the verge of becoming something that would meet post-Transcendence Alpha Centauri and shake hands with the sentient world-mind planet as equals in nature if not yet scope. I plan to touch on this at the end of the LP, but Al Falah's achieved functional immortality for its citizens even without the Resurrection Protocol - which is itself presumably becoming more accessible all the time. Reality for the average Al Falah citizen may not have much to do with the physical world at all, given virtual overlays and implants in the nerves. In this latest update, we've also hit the point where any sentient being in Al Falah can up-or-download into an organic or wholly synthetic body as they please, or just exist in a state of pure information if they are so inclined. Going pure Singularity probably isn't popular as I've written Al Falah, but it is an option for those who want it. If and when I do the second Purity game, humanity will be a little more... restrained.
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Sep 5, 2019 18:50
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What does bother me a bit about the functional immortality is that, y'know, without the older generations dying off, cultural advance would slow to a crawl. I mean, not in Al Falah at least, as it is a culture of early adopters and innovators, but still.
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Sep 5, 2019 18:57
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Cythereal posted:Really, Al Falah is on the verge of becoming something that would meet post-Transcendence Alpha Centauri and shake hands with the sentient world-mind planet as equals in nature if not yet scope. Speaking of uploading oneself and the like, how does the process work? Because I'm wondering whether I'd upload were I to live in Al Falah. I've a fairly critical view of simple destructive brain-copying, for one.
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Sep 5, 2019 19:46
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Siegkrow posted:What does bother me a bit about the functional immortality is that, y'know, without the older generations dying off, cultural advance would slow to a crawl. You ever watch Altered Carbon? That's 100% where immortality gets you.
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Sep 5, 2019 19:54
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Lynneth posted:Speaking of uploading oneself and the like, how does the process work? Quite well, thank you!
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Sep 5, 2019 22:05
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Honestly Al Falah is starting to sound alot like Polythreme to me, which could be rather interesting.
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Sep 6, 2019 00:20
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 I give up. I'm researching endgame techs in two turns and can make a Betty Mk2 a turn every turn in Ard. And I might just do that. I guess I'll still space things out for the purposes of the story on Earth, but I could win the game in ten minutes now. I'm missing most of the references goons have been making on this page, I'm guessing because at least a few goons are referencing anime, but I did find it a little interesting to compare a CBE endgame civilization to a SMAC endgame civilization technologically. They're actually pretty evenly matched! The big thing a victorious SMAC faction would have is raw control over the material universe: they're harnessing black holes for power and weapons, and can directly edit matter to produce neutronium and antimatter, and even have some ability to manipulate time itself on a small, carefully controlled scale. CBE factions, on the other hand, display a greater mastery over the very stuff of existence, bending space for teleportation (SMAC's teleportation is much more limited and is from psi powers) and achieving faster than light communications (with the potential, the wonder notes, of leading to faster than light travel down the road). I just finished recording the next update, and I unlock what's pretty clearly CBE's version of quantum reactors. "Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outwards, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment." -Shen-Ji Yang "Hold my arak and watch this." -Arshia Kishk Cythereal fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Sep 6, 2019 |
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Sep 6, 2019 00:50
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You gotta make your own fun in games. Cover the planet in a grid of Planet Carvers, for instance. Make them fear your Inside-Out Death Star.
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Sep 6, 2019 01:21
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Polythreme is a Fallen London thing. Island where everything is alive. Literally everything. The beer screams when you try to drink it. Not that it stops anyone.
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Sep 6, 2019 01:28
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my dad posted:Polythreme is a Fallen London thing. Island where everything is alive. Literally everything. The beer screams when you try to drink it. Not that it stops anyone. Indeed, its part of the appeal 
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Sep 6, 2019 02:40
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Operation British was in Gundam where the principality of Zeon dropped a space colony from orbit. Adding up the immediate death toll and the deaths due to disease, famine and societal disruption die to it, half the planet's population died on the event.
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Sep 6, 2019 02:51
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Regarding the destruction of Marseille, one of my drafts went into much greater detail about the history of the Fall and how things got to be as lovely as they are on Earth in this imagining of things. In short, what happened is ambiguous: the Slavic Federation was indeed trying to bring asteroids in from the belt into Earth orbit so they could be easily harvested even when resources no longer permitted travel out to the asteroid belt. When they were inserting the first into Earth orbit something happened and the truth is a mystery. The Slavic Federation claimed their ship doing the moving was attacked, the North Sea Alliance said that the Federation had miscalculated, INTEGR assumed there was a malfunction on the guiding ship, and Franco-Iberia thought that what happened was a deliberate action by the Federation: the asteroid fell out of orbit and impacted in Europe. It was not a global catastrophe, merely a regional disaster and a city-buster due to the asteroid's relatively small size and velocity as these things go. But it was enough to spark a nuclear war between the already tense and hostile Franco-Iberia and Slavic Federation, which eventually drew in other powers and full scale global nuclear exchanges. Awful as that was, though, the nuclear war was only a part of the Fall. If it's any consolation to French readers, when I was writing that stuff I rolled a d8 to see which continental European city got pancaked to start the war. The other candidates were Naples, Venice, Edinburgh, Munich, Prague, Budapest, and Stockholm.The various national capitals, I was saving to get nuked.
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Sep 6, 2019 03:14
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I was referring to Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy. The historical Illuminati were an overtly anarchist offshoot of Freemasonry that splintered off and were swiftly crushed in the early 19th century, where it lived on forever in the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists as the Deepest of Deep States, which was hilarious in the 1990s and is grimly infuriating today.
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Sep 6, 2019 04:57
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Siegkrow posted:Operation British was in Gundam where the principality of Zeon dropped a space colony from orbit. Adding up the immediate death toll and the deaths due to disease, famine and societal disruption die to it, half the planet's population died on the event. Incidentally, the original plan was to drop it on South America, to deal with the Earth Federation's underground base somewhere in the Amazon basin. As you can tell by that image, they missed.
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Sep 6, 2019 07:17
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Do population units represent anything in particular in CBE? Do we have an estimate for the human (or at least human-template) population of Al-Jalidia?
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Sep 6, 2019 08:00
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I don't think they give a number, but relocating 20 pop through the Exodus Gate is enough to win the "move Earth's surviving refugees here" condition
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Sep 6, 2019 10:04
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Defiance Industries posted:I don't think they give a number, but relocating 20 pop through the Exodus Gate is enough to win the "move Earth's surviving refugees here" condition Which I always took to mean aren't the whole of Earth's surviving population, just those who agreed to come with you. The 1,000 points of military strength to liberate Earth is between 10 and 20 units depending on what exactly you're sending through.
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Sep 6, 2019 12:08
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Cythereal posted:Which I always took to mean aren't the whole of Earth's surviving population, just those who agreed to come with you. I kind of figured that it was just considered the in-game treshold to avoid stretching out the endgame past tedium. If the AI can't stop you from getting those first ten through the gate, it's not going to be in a position to keep you from getting the next 990 through either, so there's really no point in making you waste another 1000+ turns sorting it out. Likewise, if you've sent 1000 points' worth of unit strength through the gate and the AI still can't make a dent in your defenses, it won't suddenly break you on the 1010th. So the game cuts it short and says "Okay, point made, you win this one."
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Sep 6, 2019 17:47
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The Toast of Valhalla It's the earliest Supremacy unique unit you can build.  It's not very good.  Quantum physics had largely been a disappointment to colonial researchers, altogether less world-changing than demagogues had claimed. But it would be studied nevertheless.  I guess this could be useful? Energy hasn't been useful for a long, long time.  Introducing Betty's sister, Veronica. The rocktopus is one of those weird, gimmicky units that has a good gimmick and every upgrade choice has a flavorful and useful advantage, but it's so deep in the tech web you'd have to consciously go for them instead of less exciting but more broadly applicable advantages.    As with Jalidian authorities, historians remain divided whether the Bytegeist was a triumph or Al Falah's greatest mistake. Bytegeist posted:You have accessed the Civilopedia entry for the Bytegeist! Cross index to operating systems? Cross index to social utilities? Cross index to events? Cross index to friendships? Continue record.  Betty had startled the people of Earth. Veronica confirmed that Al Falah's genegineers were not restricted to one monster.  While Al Falah was busy on Earth, the Pan-Asian Cooperative had rather different goals in mind. They weren't to the point of contacting the Progenitors, not yet, but Daoming Sochua clearly intended to. Daoming's working on the Contact victory! You need two pieces of the Signal, and there are three ways to get one. Daoming researched a particular tech and built a national wonder. The other two are more luck-based, if guaranteed to eventually happen for one of the two options.  Perhaps it was for the best that quantum power wasn't quite the superweapon some had feared. Field reactors are energy producing structures and Mantles are Purity science structures. The Quantum Computer is pointless and the fluff for Hypercomputing says you're making quantum computers anyway. Also, despite Mantles being Purity, this is considered a Harmony tech for reasons.  From the very small to the very large, Al Falah continued to dream. Manned missions to Al-Jalidia's moons and other planetary bodies in the star system seemed likely within the next five to ten years. Ard's production is as ludicrous as our science rate. I can produce a Betty Mk2 every turn.  And will. State of Earth    The dawn of the Emancipation campaign's sixth year saw a majority of Earth's population under the ward of the Solar Protectorate. Africa, Europe, and India had been completely annexed, and Al Falah forces were making rapid strides into Asiatic Russia and central and southeast Asia. Al Falah leaders expected all of the Eastern Hemisphere to be under Protectorate control by the end of the next solar year, and after that the Western Hemisphere was not expected to last long. The remains of the Commonwealth of the Pacific and the Organization of South American States still played for time, but Al Falah's advance was seemingly unstoppable and put a distinct deadline on their efforts. Historians would in time agree that Al Falah's campaign on Earth was so rapid and so successful mainly because of Earth's divided state. The Al Falah Defense Force was grotesquely outnumbered, and the existence of any Earth power with comparable military technology, or even the current state of Earth civilization with a meaningful degree (i.e. pre-Fall) of unity, would almost certainly have imposed significant obstacles to the Emancipation campaign - if not stopped it completely. Al Falah's technological advances could well have prevailed in the end regardless, but humanity's first interstellar war was hardly an even fight. In the interior of the Solar Protectorate, the Middle East where Al Falah had arrived, year six also marked a transition from conquest and consolidation to construction for the next phase of Al Falah's plans. Outside Ankara, the immense cosmodrome that had been Al Falah's space launch center during the Seeding was resurrected. Ankara had become a major hub in Al Falah's Terran rail network, and factories sprung up to begin launching one satellite after another into orbit... eventually, even Al Falah satellites had trouble with the Kessler Syndrome that had done as much as the Inflection Point to stop Earth from reaching the stars. Al Falah's solution to the Kessler Syndrome would have horrified the Solar Protectorate had they informed Terran authorities: a self-propagating nanotech 'plague' that fed on artificial materials and would convert consumed materials into projectiles that would then seek out and infect other pieces of debris. Upon contact with alloys particular to Al Falah spacecraft or high levels of oxygen, the nanotech disassembled itself. As things happened, the specifics of the anti-Kessler Syndrome swarm were only declassified decades after the Emancipation campaign's end - and after the Solar Protectorate had vetoed the use of similar self-propagating nanoswarms to work on Earth's atmospheric pollution. Outside Baghdad, another massive structure took form: a new Emancipation Gateway to create a spatial bridge back to Al-Jalidia. The primary bottleneck in Al Falah's logistics was, after all, the single gateway in itself creating a single point of travel between Al-Jalidia and Earth. For complicated scientific reasons, multiple gateways in an area roughly the size of a planet interfered with each other, so to create a second spatial bridge would require a gateway to be built on Earth. Earth's near-nonexistent material resources and industry could be provided by Al Falah through the first gate, but even so the project would take years. As for the Emancipation campaign itself, south Asia fell rapidly to Al Falah forces. After Kavitha Thakur had departed the Indian Protectorate, the subcontinent had barely lasted a decade before erupting in sectarian violence between dozens of would-be heirs to the gaping vacuum of spiritual authority left by Kavitha's departure. India's latest civil war was not as severe as the Mistake, if only because the region had less height to fall from. Arshia Kishk judged it would be better to not inform the Indian people that Kavitha Thakur was still alive and on Al-Jalidia, leaving that particular time bomb for a later date. In the Western Hemisphere, Al Falah forces departed west across the north Atlantic. Iceland had gone virtually untouched by the Fall, and negotiations to integrate Iceland into the Solar Protectorate went quickly and smoothly. From there, Al Falah naval forces island hopped to Greenland, then Baffin Island, then Newfoundland. The mainland of North America was in sight, provoking mixed reactions from the Al Falah soldiers. The Al Falah who had been Shipborn or descended from such had their own myths about North America, and one of the larger refugee groups that had become Al Falah on Al-Jalidia had been the Americans themselves. From the shores of St. John and Iqaluit, Al Falah pondered their next move in the region. True global climate change had been more severe in North America than anywhere else on Earth with the collapse of the Gulf Stream current, and so much of what had once been a center of global commerce, culture, and military power slumbered under radioactive snow. The north Atlantic stretch of Emancipation did, however, produce one of the iconic scenes of the war: the so-called Battle of Vestmannaeyjabær, where the AFNDS Naja encountered the ICGV Freya. The Freya, a sail-powered armed clipper ship of the Icelandic Coast Guard, had been on extended patrol and not heard of Al Falah's return, or the negotiations in Reykjavik, when the ship encountered the Al Falah heavy cruiser Naja. After a brief standoff, the captain of the Freya ordered a single warning shot be fired, a shot that would become legend: not only did the cannonball strike the Naja, the cannonball hit the ship's bridge and killed Captain Fadl van Hanegam. The Naja's automated defense systems hadn't registered the cannonball as a threat so not opened fire, while van Hanegam was standing on the bridge's open deck. Alarmed and disconcerted, the Naja's core mind withdrew the vessel to a safer distance to contact command for instructions. Negotiations between the government in Reykjavik and Al Falah had been going smoothly when the Civil Administration received word of the incident, and in truth the encounter changed nothing for either side. When the Freya returned to port, however, the encounter became a thing of legend. Iceland, the Icelanders would proudly boast for centuries to come, had been the only nation on Earth to inflict a genuine military defeat on the transhuman forces of Al Falah and force Al Falah to the diplomacy table through the humiliating military defeat.
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Sep 7, 2019 00:24
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