Faction #3 - Which trope will it be?

Again, you don't seem to understand. My comment that this 'doesn't matter' is a jumping off point for discussion over whether this is what we want, not a decleration of this thread not mattering. This thread matters a great deal; it touches on some key and substantial elements.

You ask, 'What will the next trope be?'.
I ask, 'Do we want another faction that is just a substanceless trope?'

Starting a new thread for a question that is so intertwined with yours seems superfluous.

The defenition of a trope isn't that it already exists is it? All tropes that do exist weren't created in a database before they could be found in any story/plot/what have you. It's the other way around, the stories define the tropes.

And just because parts of a story can be connected to tropes doesn't mean it's suddenly a bland and substanceless story. There are both cliche tropes and very rare tropes. If you put all your focus in avoiding every single trope that already exists, you would have a very hard time writing an interesting story. It would be like banning all colors already used in paintings, and trying to make a new painting with what's left. Instead, if half of the worlds paintings were black & white, maybe avoid that particular combination, but it doesn't mean black or white is terrible to use in a picture.

I don't think OP meant that they should pick out a bunch of tropes instead of thinking on their own, but most likely whatever they do end up writing will probably bare similarities with existing trope(s), so guess which you think could be the next "one".

What evidence in the limited fluff do you have so far to support this assertion though?

Neutrino has stated that at least one commander's memories are "shredded", but not that they were wiped and reformatted by some event which hasn't been described yet. Even if we had one commander which this did happen to, that does not also then require that it happened to all of them.

If the last thing you remember is being in a fight, it is not an illogical conclusion that one would immediately prepare themselves for continued fighting.

The lore shared so far apparently only deals with a specific point in time as well, and I would submit that none of the commanders' arcs has developed to the "time" when PA game play starts. These stories are in the past as far as PA is concerned, as we go from commanders trying to help each other out to outright galactic war.

The lore only dealing with a specific timeframe is also an issue. Why limit the first information we get for each Commander's backstory to TDZ? There's no narrative difference between Commander #1 and Commander #2. They wake up, they become leader of a faction of 'lesser' Commanders, they gather forces, they prepare for more of the Forever War.

Why not find a different angle to come at the story from?
Why not have some variety?

True. It's a shame then, that the Commanders do have a bland and substanceless story as their first introduction to the community.

Let me stress again; tropes are not a bad thing in-and-of themselves. Just being a walking trope with no other defining features, is a bad thing however. Without context, a trope is just a reference.

Space amish robots is a nice oxymoron

Space robot hipsters? Being commanders before it was cool?

"Oh, I see your serial number is 8 digits long. Mine is only 6."

So what do you actually WANT to see then?

you're capable of criticism, i get that. But i don't understand what direction you want it in, what you want the story to be. You're talking about depth and whatnot in TA, but i never experienced it as that. It's just two types of people battling for so long that the outcome doesn't matter anymore.

Beautifully simple

And completely not the point. That's the surface. If you tried scratching anything more than the paintwork then you find Transhumanism staring back at you.

Devak, What do I want to see?
If we are to believe that the deeper message here is one of the definition of self through memory, then I would like each faction to be an exploration of that idea. You need some form of idealistic conflict, opposing viewpoints on that subject.

It's not enough to just have all the robots wake up with amnesia and then fight because that's just the done thing; they need to have a cause for fighting.

Unless you want to assert that the "desolate volcanic world" Invictus woke up on was the same as the one which he witnessed the "vast plain of green grass and multi colored wildflowers [which] had now been reduced to a landscape of smoking craters and burning wreckage", the exact "cause" for fighting hasn't been revealed yet.

Same case with [Ezek], though his story doesn't give us the "stream of consciousness" from TDZ, it's him reminiscing about TDZ while in a conflict.

We don't even know if commanders can convert between factions, or if they're "locked in" once they choose a "side". So far the two ideologies presented have had enough in common that they could be compatible, depending on how far down the Roman "emperor is god" path you want to go, but it's possible that some otherwise innocuous event between the two has caused irreconcilable differences.

Early after TDZ there may have been shaky alliances, backstabbing, subterfuge, and deception, but we don't know that yet.

We know that at TDZ the commanders awoke to find incomplete memories, that circumstances can cause lost memories to be rediscovered, and that at some point in the future the different factions will be at war against each other.

I mean, we don't even know if they'd all be at war against each other at the same time. To then try and assert what the core philosophical quandary should be at this stage is even more limiting than just trying to identify tropes - it would mean that not only are the back stories going to be identical, but that they'll all have exactly the same problem with each other.

Instead, it would be much more interesting if the nature of their conflicts with each other weren't even over the same issue. One faction doesn't like another because of how they venerate their leaders. Another two are upset with each other because a third party is manipulating them. Another two are at it because of the perceived value of specific systems because of their geometric relationship to other systems. Yet another two because of how exactly to get rid of the Progenitors.

It may all boil down to "we are at war because we aren't the only ones with power", but if the way their struggle manifests is unique and different, then it provides more interesting stories to tell, and can help players who resonate with lore to more readily identify with specific factions and commanders.

Edit: Missed adding the word memories in a spot.

How about a doomsday faction? A faction of robots made to be activated as a last-ditch retaliation after nuclear devestation (ala Dr. Strangelove's doomsday device). They were activated long ago, their enemy is long defeated, but still they march on. Their goal is one thing: destroy all worlds!

A story should be largely influenced by character development. Character development in my opinion is the most important thing in an immersive story. A character starts with a past, or in other words memories of the past. That define the choices that the character will make in the future.

When a character suffers from memory loss, the story usually unfolds into a quest of getting back those memories in order to establish who that person really is. Knowing the past gives you an identity, it gives the character a direction to go in and it gives a sense of reality.

Now here's where it becomes odd "I struggled to repair parts of my memory core that would tell me more, but I soon discovered it would take more than a few nanoseconds to do so.".

So this sentence is basically what should have been an entire story. Because that's what's going to define who the commander really is.

Chronoblip you're missing the point entirely.

Protectorate - The progenitors are an ancient evil.
Racist - The progenitors are sub-robot.
Avengers - The progenitors killed my dog robot.
I Have No Mouth - The progenitors owe me my suffering, in interest.
Salvation - The progenitors need to be saved. In ZIP format.
Ecoterrorists - The progenitors cause excess pollution.
Socialists - The progenitors don't pay enough taxes.
Genre-savvy - We ARE the progenitors!

...I may be reaching.
Going with the current theme of all the factions hating the progenitors and yet having absolutely no desire to cooperate.

I've posited that the premises for your criticism of the lore are not valid, and as such the conclusions you are drawing about the lore are also flawed.

I don't want to bother arguing the finer points of your opinion when that opinion is based on a flawed understanding.

Are you going to make any attempt to show that you do understand the source content by rebutting any one of my accusations?

Who says that story isn't going to be written?

Why would that story have been important to tell right now?

We have blurbs that provide the reader little more than an introduction to the characters, intended direction for said characters, vague setting information, and revealing some of the writer's writing style.

Some of these complaints about the lore are identical to complaints about the beta game play being flawed, incomplete, or imbalanced.

Would that be more or less interesting than if all the factions didn't hate the Progenitors? Or perhaps that the desire to cooperate was originally there, but was destroyed by interactions between the factions as they start to spread into the cosmos?

What of the treasure hunter commander that recovered no negative historical documents relating to the Progenitors, and is merely trying to seek out artifacts of their civilization to better understand where they came from and what happened before TDZ?

What of the astronomer commander who, when noticing a distinct lack of Progenitor activity, elects to try and find unique stellar arrangements, and finds the other factions destroying them to fight an enemy long gone a reprehensible act?

What of the conspiracy theory commander who believes that the Progenitors never existed, and that all the commanders are being manipulated to fight for the entertainment of some unseen force who was also responsible for TDZ?

I can certainly understand the desire for narrative consistency, but I don't believe we should limit ourselves to specific themes when their alternatives could logically be possible or plausible.

I'd like to see a faction of kidnapped girlfriends and princesses.

I often enough think the need to humanize (assign personalities, philosophies etc) machines is a bit overkill. Oh sure, it's simplifies storytelling if you can assign all sorts of motives and complex schemes to the opposing side (the new battlestar did this to death), but from my perspective it takes too much out of them being machines.

The given base stories allow for a bit of copied backgrounds (not necessarily complete or uncorrupted) from their faction affiliation and partial memory wipes can be a nice explanation for retaining basic procedures and objectives ("do fight","build stuff") without the explanatory reasoning behind it. Given the classic progression of memory loss stories, we can expect to regain some of the more interesting bits and pieces along the way.


Aside from that, in RTS games you don't need more story than the victory condition given at game start, the rest is game mechanics, in particular if you don't have to explain the existence and degree of differences between unit pools of factions.

Second note, having only some base framework of a backstory might also be nice for the creative freedom of people who want to mod campaigns or story driven missions, in particular if the main release won't feature a campaign itself.

I'm disappointed that the factions can be stereotyped into popular tropes.

There, I said it.

how about a faction of robots which kills people because that's what they do

I guess I have to quote this again, hmm?

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Chronoblip, I would give you a rebuttal to your accusations, if any one of them was even remotely related to the point I was making.

Yes, you made the point that the fluff we have so far is very limited, well done. It's also very overdone, overwritten twoddle that is completely irrelevant. Waking up and not knowing who you are is not a defining character trait. Why waste our time with worthless polls over names that don't matter, rather than giving these supposedly advanced AI beings an actual reason to fight?

If the vapid excuse for a backstory that has been provided so far is any indication of what is to come, then I don't care that 'there could be more in the works'. Just piling on more of a bad thing doesn't magically start to make the bad thing better.

Total Annihilation gave you the intellectual quandary in the opening 'text crawl'... in the very first sentence.
PA on the other hand is being deliberately obtuse with it... if one even exists at all.

Works for me.