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Yeah, I know I haven't been detailing INTEGR society as much as I did Al Falah's, but my interpretation of Purity is generally Star Trek: INTEGR's primary reservation against artificial intelligence and augmentation of all kinds is a fear of promoting systems of inequality among their people. INTEGR sees that poo poo, and their assumption is that such stuff is difficult if not impossible to apply evenly across all levels of society. A rising tide [heh] that lifts all boats in politics/economics/society is a myth, and INTEGR knows it. Fix society's problems first, then worry about any idea of improving the human baseline. To INTEGR, in my mind, groups like ARC and the Alliance are putting the cart before the horse. Edit: I'm recording the next update. Everyone who wanted me to get into a war? You can shut your traps now. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Oct 8, 2019 |
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Oct 8, 2019 01:33
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Dr. Bones posted:Purity can certainly seem incredibly, even staunchly rigid in its dedication to the sacrosanct nature of the human body and mind, with a great distaste for or outright aversion to any sort of major modification of the human corpus or human agency, but I think there's a way they could be chill with the other affinities, even if their affinity moreso than the others takes on a religious cast in its fluff. It would be safe to say that there would certainly be sects of a Purity society that would be decidedly more fanatical in their dedication to the immutable human form and would treat others with extreme suspicion, but it's equally as likely that your average Joe Purity Person could look around at the others, shrug, say "It's not for me", and live and let live past that. Thanks. This really does help me see Purity as not intrinsically hostile to the other affinities. Even earlier in the thread when it was pointed out that Purity could be just the belief that humanity can be great if they just stop loving up helped my perception of them, and it really seemed like something that would work really well on its own, as in if there weren't other factions there squabbling about things. A lot of my problem was just the thought of Purity Pete decrying from inside a sealed dome that transhumanism may never work and they shouldn't bet on it when Harmony Harry is running through the Miasma without a suit as a morning jog and Supremacy Susie may not even need to breathe at all. I couldn't really get that in my head as the latter two shouldn't exist to the former rather than just being 'meh, not my thing'.
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Oct 8, 2019 05:23
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Ashsaber posted:A lot of my problem was just the thought of Purity Pete decrying from inside a sealed dome that transhumanism may never work and they shouldn't bet on it when Harmony Harry is running through the Miasma without a suit as a morning jog and Supremacy Susie may not even need to breathe at all. I couldn't really get that in my head as the latter two shouldn't exist to the former rather than just being 'meh, not my thing'. And even then, Purity Pete can don his environment suit and join them, confident in the knowledge that he can get the suit upgraded without a extended hospital visit.
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Oct 8, 2019 08:40
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ManxomeBromide posted:And even then, Purity Pete can don his environment suit and join them, confident in the knowledge that he can get the suit upgraded without a extended hospital visit. Purity Pete would also be in favor of just cleaning up the Miasma so no one needs to worry about breathing or environmental suits if they want to go out jogging.
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Oct 8, 2019 12:18
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Cythereal posted:Purity Pete would also be in favor of just cleaning up the Miasma so no one needs to worry about breathing or environmental suits if they want to go out jogging. This is also a really good point. Purity, at its core, seems to be much more externally concerned than the other two affinities, with the ultimate ideal (supported by most of the tech options that give Purity points) being to terraform whatever planet this is to be just habitable to normal humans. It doesn't even require the extermination of the local flora and fauna, since those can exist outside the Miasma just as well as within it. Really, the more I think about it, the more Purity seems like the domain of true Human interstellar pioneers, the brave few who are willing to volunteer (to crib from Cythereal's conceptualization as Star Trek People) to Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before (until those other Earth Jerks show up) and do the hard work of figuring out how to make this new planet safe for humanity. This is reinforced by their use of the Exodus Gate to pull the rest of humanity away from a dying world and into a new one, while hopefully paving the way to prevent the same Mistakes from happening again. Sure, it's a little Manifest Destiny-feeling, and it's very easy to read a lot of ugly political ideals into it, but at the end of the day they're just humans doing human things trying to save other humans, and for them the simplest way is to fix the outside as well as the inside, the environment and the culture.
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Oct 9, 2019 03:06
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Dr. Bones posted:This is also a really good point. Purity, at its core, seems to be much more externally concerned than the other two affinities, with the ultimate ideal (supported by most of the tech options that give Purity points) being to terraform whatever planet this is to be just habitable to normal humans. It doesn't even require the extermination of the local flora and fauna, since those can exist outside the Miasma just as well as within it. Amusingly, a coworker of mine turns out to play Beyond Earth and it came up when we were chatting during a power outage this morning. This is how she described the affinities. In front of you is a machine that's very important to your way of life. You could live without it if you had to, but it's hard to imagine what that life would be like. And it just broke. Purity fixes the machine. Supremacy builds a new, more efficient machine. Harmony decides that the machine is unnecessary and that change of lifestyle is for the best.
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Oct 10, 2019 17:33
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And hey, let's also not forget that late stage harmony and supremacy are actually kinda terrifying and alien. It's easy to simplify purity down to some kind of luddite "uhh no I don't like smart computers/native lifeforms", but a certain horror and revulsion towards people turning themselves into computer hiveminds or unrecognizable alien monstrosities is a pretty understandable response.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:19
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Covski posted:And hey, let's also not forget that late stage harmony and supremacy are actually kinda terrifying and alien. It's easy to simplify purity down to some kind of luddite "uhh no I don't like smart computers/native lifeforms", but a certain horror and revulsion towards people turning themselves into computer hiveminds or unrecognizable alien monstrosities is a pretty understandable response. The fact is both Supremacy and Harmony have a radical transhumanist ethos at their core, something that would reject the whole concept of mankind in order to become something else. Purity and the hybrid affinities (expecially Purity-Supremacy) at least keep technology in an ancillary role (to serve, to help humans) and does not pretend to transform mankind in something inhuman, something totally alien towards humanity.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:02
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I just really like the purity victory condition. Save everyone!  Cythereal posted:Amusingly, a coworker of mine turns out to play Beyond Earth and it came up when we were chatting during a power outage this morning. This is how she described the affinities.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:03
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The Storm The first refugee ARK, christened New Copenhagen, was completed on schedule. Sea settlements follow the same rule as land settlements and are new to Rising Tide.  Project Exodus yielded a great deal of information for INTEGR's social scientists. Health and food. Terra Vaults are a Purity specific culture building I will not be building because I don't think they fit INTEGR as written. Why would the Initiative build super-bunkers filled with Earth art and relics?  The Initiative had high hopes for the future. Learn from the past, but do not let yourself become obsessed with the past. To be stagnant is to die.  That hope was about to be tested. The Alliance's attack came without warning. We're at war now out of the blue. Happy?  The Alliance's invasion caught the Initiative flat-footed, and focused primarily on civilian targets. Miasma-laced explosives and shells filled with corrosive acids derived from native life devastated Streben's infrastructure. Most of the farmers and industrial engineers reached emergency shelters or evacuation craft in time. Most. Lots of razing, no actual attacks against our units or cities.  Lena's speech to her people, original colonists and Exodus refugees, did not dwell on bombast or propaganda. The Initiative was ready, and the Alliance would regret their aggression. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. The Initiative Armed Forces were very well prepared.  Purely kinetic railguns were bad enough. Nanothermite warheads fired from railguns were not appreciably slowed by the Alliance's miasma-based CIWS, and set even the strange bio-plastic armor of Alliance warships ablaze with a fire that happily burned even underwater.    For most of the Alliance fleet, the only question was what would win the race to kill them. Cruise missiles launched from an ARK's bastions? Supercavitating torpedoes fired from subsurface launchers on the same floating cities?  Sea-skimming nanothermite missiles from Initiative dreadnoughts?  Plasma railguns on Initiative frigates?  The more traditional railguns on the dreadnoughts, with their nanothermite payloads?  The three-stage anti-ship missiles on Predator strike craft?  Ship by ship, the Alliance invasion fleet went to the bottom in a matter of hours.  Duncan Hughes expressed his displeasure at the Initiative's defense.  Oh look, an Alliance city. And it used to be OSAS...  T4 hovertanks aren't just for show. They're actually pretty useful on island maps, and not just for invading other islands.  Here's one other perk for being INTEGR. If I didn't already have a huge (and much more advanced) military, I could buy one without spending a point of energy.   Copyright remained alive and well in the meantime.  Power-assisted servomachinery also finally became affordable for civilian purchase and use, speeding up settlement growth comfortably away from the Alliance front.  More Alliance ships arrive and are greeted as their predecessors were.   Railguns made precision bombardments a true reality. When the assault on the Alliance-occupied city of Manoel commenced, only 0.001% of rounds fired by Initiative warships missed their targets.  Duncan Hughes continued to take it poorly that INTEGR did not meekly submit to the Alliance's invasion. Lena quoting back to him the parable of the hunting dog that caught the raptor bug probably did not help.  Close assault by frigates covered the landing of Initiative marines in the city.   The battle of Manoel was over in less than a week. Though the city originally belonged to the Organization of South American States, the Initiative chose, for the moment, to place the city under a direct Initiative protectorate, citing the OSAS' continued aggression towards most of the planet. If this was anyone else's city originally, I'd probably liberate it because we're good guys. However, Reggie's a warmongering rear end in a top hat so he'll get his toys back only when he proves he can play nice.  Lena found Hughes' vitriol over the fate of a city he himself had ordered the conquest of rather hypocritical. True, the Initiative protectorate had made their first priority the establishment of military gene therapy clinics so that any Brasilians and Alliance who wished could have genetic 'augmentations' removed, but contrary to Alliance propaganda the Initiative was not arresting and forcibly de-augmenting all such individuals.        On the whole, the Initiative navy's enforcement of shipping regulations and inspection of cargo vessels for hazardous cargo was well received internationally. This is actually determined by whether they have certain traits.   Manoel, sadly, will not be useful for some time.  Still, the Initiative government tried to downplay the recent military successes in popular culture. Even now, many descendants of Germany were not entirely comfortable with the notion of being a military superpower.  Planetology research continued.  Moving north, another Alliance-occupied OSAS city was sighted.  I am still settling Earthlings. Not every turn, though, because I regularly forget to click on the drat gate. No, the game does not remind you that you can summon an Earthling each turn.  Alliance outpost sighted. Lena signed off on the Armed Forces' proposal to cut off this outpost before it could grow any larger, if possible. Bringing a hovertank over to deal with this.     Dourado fell in short order.  Deepcastle, the North Sea Alliance's first landing on Eine Zweite Möglichkeit and colonial capital, was in sight.
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Oct 12, 2019 02:55
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I like the idea of having the victory endgame be mechanically represented by ingame mechanics that you've been engaging with since the beginning as opposed to just ticking down one final technology or something. I feel like the main thing that bugs me with affinities is that they're asking questions that have very little to do with reality as we know it right now. Like it's hard to fully sympathize with the positives and negatives of various styles of transhumanism, because as of now, they are largely fictional. At best, highly speculative. It's just hard to fully sympathize with these questions about things that do not exist. Like how some of Bioshock is about criticizing the ethics of the exploitation of magical deep see slug powers. Also the game doesn't really seem bold enough to say much good or bad about the options it does present. I think the biggest choice the game made was presenting genetic engineering as the most environmentalist option.
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Oct 12, 2019 15:56
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You made a good choice not liberating that city; I just got around to finishing the game I mentioned earlier - I played as Hutama, for so long that I got 8 trade routes out of my capital and three other cities with 7 routes each which was ridiculous - and to liven up the wait for Transcendence I attacked the NSA and liberated their captured cities, including two of Brasilia's. The turn after I beat the NSA, Brasilia declared war on me immediately. What a prick. (It turns out Phasal Transporters are extremely good at parking SABRs and Autosleds in range of AI-placed cities, and it doesn't matter if Xeno Titans have poo poo movement if they can be dropped next to a capital)
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Oct 12, 2019 18:41
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Illuyankas posted:You made a good choice not liberating that city; I just got around to finishing the game I mentioned earlier - I played as Hutama, for so long that I got 8 trade routes out of my capital and three other cities with 7 routes each which was ridiculous - and to liven up the wait for Transcendence I attacked the NSA and liberated their captured cities, including two of Brasilia's. The turn after I beat the NSA, Brasilia declared war on me immediately. What a prick. That's always been my experience with liberating cities in Civ5 and CBE. The AI is as stupid as it is treacherous, and there's a reason why I didn't knock the NSA fully out of the war. Oh well, final update recorded. If I ever do another run of things, probably as Harmony, it won't be for some time.
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Oct 16, 2019 01:51
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It's amazing how much the AI bitches after you give them a taste of their own medicine.
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Oct 16, 2019 04:21
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SlothfulCobra posted:I like the idea of having the victory endgame be mechanically represented by ingame mechanics that you've been engaging with since the beginning as opposed to just ticking down one final technology or something. Thank god for SMAC and Crossfire so you can properly feel like a dictator/monster when the nerve staples are applied. 
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Oct 16, 2019 09:14
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Flood Tide The siege of Deepcastle began with thunder. Military conquest was not INTEGR's preferred solution to problems, but the Alliance's aggression and characteristically British high-handed arrogance had left no other choice.      The Alliance-occupied cities of Brasilia had shown little sign of Alliance occupation. Deepcastle was something else entirely. Concrete, steel, and titanium had long since fallen out of favor in Alliance construction. Wood - much of it genetically engineered to better serve as building material - and glass intermixed with the strange bio-plastic that had become so characteristic of the Alliance military. The semi-organic plastic was incredibly light, flexible, and tough, stronger than steel and more flexible than rubber. To the touch, bio-plastic was softly yielding up to a point, and could be layered into a lattice as resilient as any metallic alloy in Initiative use. Not that really mattered, nano-thermite warheads could set even the pride of Alliance materials sciences on fire, and railguns simply punched through it like cloth or shattered lattice-weave like ceramic. So much of Deepcastle's ARK was built from the stuff that a significant amount of reconstruction was necessary to simply restore the city-ship's watertight integrity. Alliance citizens watched Initiative centurions and dragoons with anxiety, but open resistance was rare. Yes, Parliament had voted for war on the basis of saving this planet - known to the Alliance as Avalon - from the Initiative's refugee resettlement program, fearing that the influx of millions of Terran refugees would catastrophically imbalance Avalon's ecosphere, but the war had not been popular from the beginning. Then the Initiative crushed the Alliance's navy, and counterattacked with overwhelming force. The future remained to be seen. Yeah, when you conquer a city it's instantly converted to your faction's architecture. I'm not going to finish the job on the Alliance because that makes me feel bad.  To the north, the Alliance occupation of Dourado ended under similar circumstances.  Only as I'm writing this did it occur to me I might have been able to do this with a Carronade. Outposts can only be destroyed, not conquered. I've never tested whether naval melee units can destroy coastal outposts. 'Fjarran' is Swedish for 'far' or 'remote.'   The Treaty of Weltgeist passed by a narrow margin, and despite Lena Ebner's personal opposition. ARC's eventual focus on using technology to save and preserve mankind rather than transform it had found a receptive audience in INTEGR's popular media, and the truth was that ARC had been remarkably well-behaved on Möglichkeit. I gave in mainly because ARC went Purity and hey, solidarity. And I no longer regard pissing off Brasilia as a bad thing.    International reception was similarly mixed.  INTEGR's science division continued to advance heedless of the war. To be honest, I've reached the point where I don't really want to research techs anymore. Nothing else on the menu seriously fits INTEGR as written, at least not how the game presents it with affinity points. You can't not research something, but from here on out I'm not going to mention it. Assume that I'm researching Future Tech or whatever.  New Copenhagen's settlement was completed on time.   Fjarran fell after a largely pro forma battle, with no casualties on either side. Fjarran's settlers were brought to Deepcastle. You can't conquer outposts, only destroy them. There's a culture virtue that auto-founds an outpost of your own on the spot when you destroy hostile outposts, though.   The noose tightens around Eilemuir, the Alliance's last city. Ebner's instructions are simple: impose a blockade. Let the Alliance end the war they started. The wiki thinks 'Eilemuir' is a misspelling (or deliberate linguistic drift in-setting) of 'Muireile,' Irish for 'Other Sea.'   For the Initiative, times were plentiful.  And for the Terran refugees, times were exciting. Terrifying, but exciting.  The Commonwealth, at least, took the appropriate response from all this of having a very healthy respect for the Initiative Armed Forces.   I still don't know what Soma is supposed to be and it kind of creeps me out.    The news of aliens resurging out of the wildlands south of Weltgeist triggered a response that some might have called disproportionate. The INV Argo's mission, however, was mostly psychological for the benefit of the Terrans. Some refugees had wondered if the Initiative could truly protect them in the wilds of Möglichkeit. The Argo settled that question. Ate almost all my remaining floatstone, but there is no kill like overkill.  New Vienna emerged to the west in the spirit of INTEGR-ARC detente. Earthling settlement three out of four.   I still have no idea what this is supposed to have to do with Purity.  Many in INTEGR regarded the reemergence of fans of Nietzche and the so-called 'will to power' with mixed emotions. However, the modern form of this concept was less nihilistic and cruel and instead focused on the sense of power and place gained from superceding the past. Revering the past without worshiping it, taking the best things from it while leaving the worst in the past, was after all the prevailing mood of the Initiative.  The blockade is complete. Anytime the Alliance wants to surrender, I'll let them.  New Vienna is done.  Sorry, New Bern, but I was having trouble finding good spots.  Tier 2 Harmony Hutama! I'm not actually sure what triggered this - the player response makes me think it's meant to be hostile, probably a "We're different affinities and I don't like that" but I don't know, I've never seen this particular line before. Not that it matters...  New Berlin, New Copenhagen, New Vienna, New Bern... soon joined by New Bucharest, New Athens, New Zagreb, New Belgrade, New Prague, New Sofia, New Budapest, New Bratislava, and many more. Neither old nor new, in the final analysis. The Mistake had washed away many old national divisions, and the centuries after the Seeding had weathered away more. Old names, a new world, a transformed people. We are transformed, even if we don't look like it. We have none of the genetic augmentations of the Commonwealth or Alliance, no cybernetics or robots. The subject of our transformation was the human condition, finally learning the lessons the universe tried so hard to teach us. Not everyone sees it the way we do, of course. The Alliance has reluctantly sued for peace, and negotiations to withdraw from the occupied cities are in progress - including the OSAS cities. The Commonwealth remains distant, seeing us as backwards, foolish. Backwards. If there is one great danger to the path I've lead us down, I fear it is this: stagnation. It will be easy to think we've built a better society on this world, one that is flawless and fears nothing. Perfect security is a lie, history tells us this much. How many times, in how many forgotten nations, have people said "We have built a nation without equal, we are safe and secure." Earth was destroyed by our greed and selfishness, yes, but also by our complacency. By the time we acted on the danger - long after we recognized our peril, of course - it was far too late. The nation that INTEGR was born from, Germany, has perhaps had a harder road than most in that respect. A nation late to the world scene, whose attempts at building an empire came down in flames, then lead to a poison within that to this day is synonymous with human evil, spoken of in the same breath as the CCCP and General Data (that misbegotten merger of media, internet, and computer megacorps in the old United States in the mid-21st century) in the litany of humanity's inhumanity. It's a rather long recitation. Which leads us to Eine Zweite Möglichkeit. A Second Chance. Except it's not really a second chance. It's merely the latest in chances beyond measure given to us, just more drastic than most. By all means, mourn the murdered Earth. But do not wallow in grief. Earth is likely beyond our ability to heal. This is our burden to bear. Yet it is a burden we bear poorly if all we do is don sack cloth and weep. Exodus should be a spur to drive us onward, not a shackle to the past. Humanity's ability to push onwards towards the horizon has never been in question, only our wisdom concerning how best to get there. I should not be here. I had made my peace with death, before Project Enoch found me. No, I never married or had children. My life has never had room for another, and I do not regret this. I am, and always have been, content with the place I built for myself, the journey I set myself on. Which is why Enoch was such a mistake. We still need you, the doctors said. We do not. You do not. Stagnation and complacency. That's what that complex is. 'Resurrection City,' a monument to vanity, selfishness, and despair. Death has been a part of human existence from the beginning of our species, and how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life. I've ordered the project shut down, and for humanity's sake I hope my instructions were followed. The Initiative will be fine. It was never meant to become a cult of personality and I was never meant to live forever or be the eternal face of the Initiative to the cosmos. And so, I have chosen to leave INTEGR on my own terms. Ungrateful of me to Enoch, perhaps, but I never asked to be brought back from the brink of death. Like Earth, do not let yourselves be hobbled by this loss. Mourn me if you wish, but always push onwards. That's the human way. Always onwards. - Lena Ebner, a note found on a nightstand in her apartment next to an empty glass and a bed where Ebner had already passed away by the time security found her. She had passed away painlessly, falling asleep before departing. Her final words would inspire generations to come. And that's a wrap for INTEGR! Cythereal fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 21, 2019 23:56
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An excellent end. Well done.
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Oct 22, 2019 12:42
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Thanks for doing these LPs, they convinced me to have another look at this game. Rising Tide does a lot of better rebalancing from when I last played the base game. Cheers!
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Oct 22, 2019 13:25
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Deadmeat5150 posted:An excellent end. Well done. ^^^ You do a really really good job taking a very sparse source material and turning it in to a convincing world/narrative.
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Oct 22, 2019 17:58
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Thanks.  I appreciate it.However, I think I'm done with Beyond Earth for the time being. Burned out both playing and writing it, and to be honest, as a writer, I think it showed. I may do a Harmony game at some point in the future, but if I do it won't be for a while. I still haven't settled on another game to LP beyond continuing my contributions to the Star Trek Online thread.
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Oct 23, 2019 00:08
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Thanks for the LP, Cythereal! 
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Oct 23, 2019 05:02
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Thank you for writing this! It was a pleasant read.
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Oct 23, 2019 05:09
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