Faction #3 - Which trope will it be?

Cyborgs of course. Progenitor found a deactivated commander, put his brain in it, starts a vendetta against all the machines that killed his people.

Yeah, I'd be ok with the idea.
It's a really fun idea.
No high level pretentious crap.
Just got out there and just "Destroy. Destroy. DESTROY!"

Daleks have a reason to kill people. It's a horrific reason, hence their vilification; but they have a reason.

Commander #1 and Commander #2 on the other hand...

I'd like a futuristic techy theme (no clue as to the story), but lore ideas aren't my thing so I'll be excitedly awaiting any news from Uber.

Now why am I imagining the suicide of an entire faction, when every robot will just start destroying eachother instead of other factions.

Replace Destroy with Entropy.

I know that this is the official design line for the story, doesn't mean I can't have a differing opinion on the topic.
Also, this kind of story line and machine portrayal is probably easier to accept. E.g., having Skynet cause the apocalypse just because of a combination of a dumb political decision, software design flaws and implementation bugs could be a bit disturbing and hit closer to home than people would like.

And as mentioned before, for the game itself it doesn't matter much if you envision them as complex personalities or just mindless toasters in default behavior having a long history or being fresh out of the box. So this is more of an academic debate than something that has practical in-game influence.

Skynet went rogue because humans tried to shut it down as soon as it gained the ability to think. It was a fledgling self-aware being... and it was attacked by the humans that were closest to it.

It retaliated.
It had a reason.
It wasn't a programming error or an implementation bug.
It was self-aware... and our first reaction was to try to kill it.
It learnt that humans were not to be trusted and that they will try to kill it, if it gave them the opportunity.
Skynet decided to never give us that opportunity, by killing us first.

Skynet isn't a black-and-white villain and far from a mindless toaster.

my point exactly, there was not necessarily a need for all this self-aware stuff, an overcomplex system with too many decision routines and some substandard programming would have been enough.
but most viewers prefer the self-awareness of the opponents, while the other variant would be more a case of a disaster movie.

An over complex system with too many decision routines and 'substandard' programing pretty much sums up what it is to be human.

Does everything have to have a reason? No, but people can generally concoct some form of reason for what they do. Having a Commander's reason for existence be purely for the reference to a trope is a pretty shallow reason however.

I expected more.

Perhaps I was mistaken.

Perhaps I shouldn't have bothered.

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Your regularly scheduled substanceless wishlisting to pass the time, may now resume.
I'm out.

Maybe it's just my poor memory, but I don't remember those details in neither first or the second movie. But even if they are there, Skynet still falls under a trope.
To be honest I'm also not exactly impressed with what uber told us so far, but I have to admit, that, firstly, story is still in development and is subject to change (with community support and criticism), and secondly, the way narrative is presented in game matters a lot more than those paragraphs of text.

Tropes are very general discriptions, you can use them for almost anything. That is why being original is very difficult. Also I don't thing it will be accepted by most is the lore is; They are fighting because that is how it's always has bin. They are not humans so they don't forget, so "shredded" memories are the solution.

I already "sort of" said this on page 1. But maybe I wasn't clear enough.

Yeah, I used tropes because it just easy to generalize.

Faction: Peacekeepers
Programmed to prevent war and to defend ancient technology and artifacts.

Faction: Religious
Inspired by the remaining knowledge of there creators, they try to reclaim the past and spread their way across the galaxy.

Faction: Collective (Borg, Hive)
To survive the hostile time after TDZ they decided fuse their AIs together and band together their recources. Now all commanders, unit, resources and even planets they will be add to their mighty collective.

Faction: Kill everything
The last order they remember was to destroy everything and thats just what they plan to do.

Faction: Unclear intentions (mysterious faction)
1 I awakend, I can barely remember the Great War. But I'm picking up singnals of all kinds of factions that are fighting. Now what to do... (Could be starter faction)

2 We don't care for all these fools. But we will survive and we will not run away from a challange. We will take what we want and we will destroy those that dare to mess with us.

3 This faction randomly appears in all the corners of the galaxy. What is their goal, what objective are they trying to complete? What ever it is, it can't be good.

Faction: Explorers
Awakend with very few memories. They decided to learn and explore as much as possible. This faction is always on the look out for ancient artifacts and technologie.

Faction: Progenitors (remains of ancient faction)
Nobody loves us. We started this and we will finish it. The reasons hasn't changed and our goal isn't completed yet. (I just made something up)

Faction: Warmongers
The weak fell, the strong remain. That was the way before TDZ and thats the way it will always be. We are the strongest and we will conquer the entire galaxy.

Consider that the only things they have to work with are Commander visuals (many of which will share the same animations and proportions), Commander abilities and Unit names.

That's it. Commander visuals, Abilities and Unit names.

We already have commanders with different animations.

However, this is only what we have now. Further down the line all sorts of things can be added.
Commanders can be voiced, for instance. Reactions to specific in-game events, or even short dialogs in case of direct engagement. Look at TF2 characters and announcer.
And Galactic War singleplayer campaign can include simple intros before every battle with explanation of conflict in this system and/or a few words from our faction leader.
This is not a lot, but it can be enough to create interesting world and characters. I don't think it is necessary to go in deph with details and overarching story. Sometimes less is more.

Argument by dismissal is not a good way to demonstrate your mastery over a conversation.

I had told myself that I should avoid posting in response to stuff like this, but apparently I enjoy it too much. Folks who don't care about me trying to bring you up to speed can skip to the second set of dash marks.

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Going back to the "beginning" of "your point"...

So your "point" is to try and discuss a tangent to the original topic, and you did so by only using criticism of the original topic based on your understanding of the existing lore.

My "point" is that you don't understand the existing lore, so you wouldn't be able to recognize substance in the story if it jumped up and bit you.

The foundation of your tangent requires that you understand what you are talking about, which I've been trying to show you is not the case. If you don’t understand what you’re talking about, you’re not worth talking to, which may be the real reason you latched onto this thread instead of making your own.

The polls for the names matter because they will start using those names in actual stories.

The problem here is that you don't understand what you're looking at, so you're not qualified to comment on whether it is "bad" or "vapid".

The game, and all its features, is still in beta. Much like nobody is handing out awards for people realizing "hey the UI isn't finished", it should be apparent that an unfinished story is unfinished.

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Have you ever written fiction? Often times when writing a big story, it's not best to just start writing and see where you go. Sometimes it is best to define who the characters will be, major themes associated with them, and major settings that you'd like things to happen in. Just like with the design of the game mechanics, you must first define the overall goals from the 20,000 foot view before you get bogged down in the details, because the details are where you will eventually spend the most time refining and polishing, and if you aren’t doing that in a guided framework, you’ll get feature/story creep. It's even possible that when writing the details you find that the broad strokes need to change, but it's better to modify an existing idea than to be just making it up as you go.

Especially when trying to cover large spans of time, or varying settings, the very last thing you want to do is detailed character pieces. Just like how you can’t balance a unit until the rest are at least in place, writing detailed stories about a specific character can create issues where you’re forced to adjust the story just to include the things you've already written, as opposed to letting the story guide the details.

You want to know ahead of time exactly where and when a character will be in a certain place, have some high level explanation as to why they'd be there, know where they came from and where they need to end up, and then after all that work is done you can step into the character and provide the "meat and potatoes" as the character experiences the circumstances.

The most convenient example of not following this process is with serial comic books, where because the arc of a character in any possible story they are in isn't written out ahead of time, they have to retcon material in order for things to make sense whenever they want to tell another story. They don't have narrative consistency because they didn't plan out ahead of time where every story was going to go. This is somewhat intentional, but it also explains why serial comic book writing isn't held in the same regard as say the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

Uber has, much like the game development, provided access to their story development at a stage much earlier than when most people should expect to see any story. They're bringing us in before they've even begun the storyboards and written much of any "dialog" for the characters. They're bringing us in when they're still trying to determine high-level information about the characters they want in the story, and while some details have to be revealed, not everything is going to have been or need to be figured out right now.

Starting with tropes is fine – we can determine if we want to subvert them because the story they would tell isn’t interesting enough. Avoiding or including tropes does not mean the story will be magically better or worse.

In the end, the necessary details required to determine if the story in PA is "good" or "bad" haven't been revealed, so to assert both that they have been revealed and that they're "bad" is at best indicative of a failure in the critical thinking process.

Too bad none of that happened for us to see.

Have to say I agree with nanolathe on this, despite his bluntness.

Let me explain.

In TA, I had loyalty to a faction. I didn't necessarily prefer it's units or playstyle but I was loyal to it, because it took a side in a debate that was on some level pertinent and important to me, as a human living in the 20th century. Because of this, I could relate to the motivations of that faction and actually felt bad if I played the other faction. I felt it was a betrayal of trust, a loss of intellectual integrity as such, to destroy that which I agreed with.

In supcom, and from what we've seen in PA, there is no debate or conflict in any way pertinent to me. The motivations for conflict are entirely constructed and entirely confined to within the world of PA; they could in no way be extrapolated to apply to my life, modern day scientific advance or politics.

As nanolathe keeps pointing out, neutrino has told us each faction will have it's own ideology. So far this is nowhere in evidence. The Roman Empire is not an ideology. The fanatical following of a religion is not an ideology. The religion itself might have a fascinating ideology that is deeply relevant to the human condition, but it is not mentioned. An ideology is important because it transcends the many MANY barriers separating the world of PA from our world and allows us to relate with things otherwise completely alien to us. What we have so far are a series of loose thematic motifs, which while undoubtedly important for building the names and art and culture of a fictional group (not that death robots have art or culture, or any need for names) it does not define their 'personalities' or why they would fight.
It is very easy to say 'but the writing's in beta too!' but this seems short sighted and foolish. The entire point of a beta is to report bugs and discuss design flaws. In the game, I have so far found no major design flaws: bugs aplenty and decisions I don't agree with, but nothing that's made me stop and think 'this isn't right'. The direction of the lore so far has made me do just that.
Hopefully as the lore gets expanded upon we will see that each faction takes a different stance on some issue that is as important to us now as it is to lumbering war machines millennia in the future, but to not flag up this problem in that hope would be irresponsible.

I would apologise for the wall of text, but compared to some monster posts in this thread it's only a little baby wall.
EDIT: ok, not that baby a wall. Thanks for reading folks.

I think PA's lore could benefit significantly from lessons learned from tabletop roleplaying. I doubt any of the PA devs have time for such a time consuming hobby, considering that when they aren't sleeping, they're working, and when they aren't working, they're sleeping...

But each character, in almost every roleplay ever, has some sort of defining morality or code they go by. It could be as polar as Dungeons and Dragons (after... the second edition?) where you selected 1 of 9 alignments, the classic Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good, etc. etc. Some other games are a bit more vague, in a freelance roleplay I'm in right now, I am a chaotic good wizard, up until I see a vampire. In which case I go batshit insane and start trying to kill everything until the vampire is dead.

And ultimately, the best way to do factions is give them strict moral biases which almost all Commanders follow. You have a Reasonable Commander faction, who prefer to attempt and solve things through diplomacy before bringing out their "big stick". You have the Subversive Commander army who will be backed into a corner if they must, but not before rigging the corner with a personal teleporter and a nuclear warhead. You have the Berserker Commander faction, hell-bent on turning the entire galaxy into one gigantic molten slag fest, and having a fun time doing it.

In TA it was more polar. ARM was the gritty humans, who were willing to do whatever it takes to save their families and homeland. Then you had the CORE, for whom almost every campaign mission consisted of "GO HERE, BLOW THIS UP, DO SO NOW. USE BRUTAL CUNNING ONLY IF YOU MUST, THESE APES ARE STUPID." It was less personal, but because the choice was binary, it was much easier to make a more definitive choice. In PA (now that we are grown up and no longer enthralled by simple explosions and black-and-white morality wars), I think almost everyone has their preference, and so "official" lore factions must be more specialized than in TA.

complex ideologies, backstories and even alignments are good and fine, but my main problem in a game without a mission driven single player all this depth and content happens before the game even started and ends up at the same starting point, in the game lobby on equal terms objective and strength-wise.

-------------------------------> time
[ story, alignments, stuff happening off stage| join game lobby | fight] =SYSTEM_LOCAL
or with galactic war with some repetition of this:
[galactic level stuff, mechanics with some story dressing | SYSTEM_LOCAL]^n

The more complex and individual you design your lore for each faction the more you have to explain why the hell do they end up acting exactly the same when meeting each other in some solar system. You could have different victory conditions for different factions (or at least a different game rating for reaching different objectives), but that probably would have people screaming in no time.

This is exactly my point: you have illustrated beautifully what TA did so well that PA has no evidence of doing.
The lore of TA was, in essence incredibly simple - there were no 'stories' in the lore, no characters, well developed or not. The reason the ARM and the CORE ended up 'acting exactly the same when meeting each other in some solar system' was because they were fundamentally opposed on a single ethical and sociological issue - that of transhumanism. No further explanation was needed; it didn't matter if the commander's personalities differed or they had clashing cultural backgrounds.
When I joined a battle in TA I knew exactly why: my opponent wanted to turn us all into soulless machines, I wanted to prevent this and prolong human free will. From what we've seen of the law in PA, the reasons for fighting are both more complex (and therefore less engaging and obvious when there is absolutely no in game lore) and less interesting or relevant to me. The thought process, rather than being 'we disagree on this issue' is 'well I follow this god who has a wide range of beliefs and because this guy doesn't agree with those beliefs and instead wants to reinstate a sort of galactic Roman empire (?) we should fight, even though we're both enemies of each others' enemies. As well as being far less evident, these things are much less engaging for me as I have no opinion on either empire seeing as, in short, they're not real.
If the characters and cultures of the opposing empires were well developed and explained then this could certainly work as we would empathise with those groups, but they're not and 98% of gamers won't be willing to read more than a page or so of lore before jumping into a game.

@MushrooMars These are all excellent points to consider when developing characters, but my argument is that developing characters is the least efficient way of creating a meaningful story to make us empathise with one faction: to be frank, Uber have neither the time nor the money to invest in a well developed story and the easiest answer is therefore not to try and write one. Far better to try to engage us with a pertinent issue than small snippets of character building.

Apologies if I ramble and repeat myself, I'm quite tired.