Emiscary wrote:

I'll try repeating this one more time in the hopes it sinks in:

If no less than *four* factions can be inherently good or decidedly two-dimensional in lore, why would *one* being bad somehow destroy the fabric of the Endless universe and ruin any sense of immersion?

Why would *one* minor faction or *individual agent* shatter the fanbase's expectations and result in a flavor text civil war?

And again, the list of compelling stories about malevolent and bad tempered character is exhaustively long, so the "you can't tell a good story about a villain" shtick falls flat on its face if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds.

(Also for someone keen to dismiss a criticism or request on the basis that it's a personal one you're pretty quick to cite your own preferences in defense of your standpoint.)

Are you trying to convince me of your opinion? I accepted it the first time so no need for it to sink in really. I said I get what you're saying. I'm not trying to dismiss your criticism. I just don't agree with you.

You like what you like, fine. You're unlikely to be getting it in ES2 looking at the history of how factions have been done so far. What's left for you is using your imagination, creating a custom faction and roleplay.

What else is there to talk about?

I like having ideological battles with others but I think I depleted myself over this topic.

Pretty much all the factions have the capability to be antagonistic and pose a huge threat to life in the universe. Faction quests play a role with alot of them driving your faction to a darker path or one that is brighter.

There are a couple of factions that are certainly inclined to a more antagonistic role obviously the Cravers and Vodyani but then also we have Hissho, a military dictatorship that slaughters planets and considers it 'honourable'. Horatio litterly wants the entire universe to be Horatio. United Empire are jingoistic oligarchs and come with all the moral issues an Empire brings.

But throughout the course of the game these factions are shaped by your desisions you can absolutely play as a belivable 'big bad' and I totally agree with you that its fun to be the bad guy but you can totally do it with pretty much all the factions.

"Here's the TL;DR of my gripe in a nutshell: I get that every faction can *do* things that're pretty dastardly if you make them- IE: building an obliterator and snuffing an entire star system of populated worlds like a candle. And if you view any hostile or military action from the ground level POV of whatever civilization is on the receiving end it's pretty grim to imagine. I just wish that there was *one* and I do mean just *one* faction that's *characterized* as villainous in the lore."

It sometimes depresses me how often someone will reply in a thread with a point that was already addressed... 

Did you create a thread to get to know other people's thoughts, or just to admire your own?

Sublustris wrote:

Did you create a thread to get to know other people's thoughts, or just to admire your own?

I'm thinking the latter...but what do I know?

Emiscary wrote:

"Here's the TL;DR of my gripe in a nutshell: I get that every faction can *do* things that're pretty dastardly if you make them- IE: building an obliterator and snuffing an entire star system of populated worlds like a candle. And if you view any hostile or military action from the ground level POV of whatever civilization is on the receiving end it's pretty grim to imagine. I just wish that there was *one* and I do mean just *one* faction that's *characterized* as villainous in the lore."

It sometimes depresses me how often someone will reply in a thread with a point that was already addressed...

You can't just throw your personal opinion onto a public forum for discussion and shoot down everyone else with "but I said-". It frankly looks impolite; like you aren't even reading replies, just copy-pasting your own every time.

What we're saying isn't that the player's actions are the only thing that makes the factions do potentially villainous things. Using the Riftborn as an example once again, even if you play them as peacefully as possible, their end goal is still tantamount to galactic genocide. Their end goal as a species is to recreate the universe to be like their original one. It doesn't seem like such a bad thing when you're playing as them, because it shouldn't! Why would someone believe they're in the wrong for holding up what they believe to be the proper course of action?

When building the narrative for a character or even a whole faction in a game like this, the more depth you give them, the more morally-ambiguous their actions become. That's the natural course of character building. As a general rule, "I do good things because they are good" and "I do bad things because they are bad" are very shallow, surface-level traits. The more depth and characterization you add, the harder it is to retain that.

Let's use the Cravers here. They would undoubtedly fit your tastes if their characterization had stopped at "all-consuming murderous hivemind." That would be all that they are, and that would indeed make them the kind of mindless villains akin to the xenomorphs of Alien. But that wouldn't be interesting, would it? Certainly not in the same way that the other factions are. They all have their intrigue and depth and inner conflicts, so a race of evil bugmen would stick out really badly. And thus, their backstory as programmed war machines was written, and by consequence they suddenly seem less "evil" because it was simply in their programming.

This concept can be applied in reverse for the Unfallen. Their base trait is "tree people want harmony in the universe. Fighting bad. Be like tree." Again, that isn't particularly interesting, especially when compared to the United Empire's endless political conflict, or the Riftborn's struggle for survival. So, the Unfallen thus have their massive internal struggle about their personal identity- whether they should stick to their roots, whether they should embrace the technology of the future, and the nagging questions about what the Heart actually is. In the process, they humanize themselves, and rather than being simple trees, they gain the capacity to think selfishly, and to bring force to bear on behalf of other civilizations should peace be threatened.

Bear in mind that those two factions are the most polarizing on the morality scale. Every single other one, despite their intentions, has an end goal that lies well into the gray area of moral alignment. Not even the Umbral Choir comes close to the Unfallen- they may want peace, but as they grossly misunderstand what it means to be an individual mind, and until you force them to consider it, they're fully prepared to remove the free will from every being in the galaxy.

I'm not sure where you decided that four of the factions are inherently good/two-dimensional, but I can assure you that the only factions you can reasonably dismiss as "all good" or "all bad" are the Unfallen, Cravers, and perhaps Vodyani. Pretty even split, I must say, actually leaning towards the villains.

If all you want is a faction of characters that do immoral things because they want to, and actually are somewhat aware that they're "bad guys," well... we do have pirates. Any more depth and they'd have just as much character motivation as the Vaulters.

It's funny how I can reply to someone who pointed out something that I was already plainly aware of and acknowledged by demonstrating as much and subsequently be accused of not bothering to read what's been said so far.

S'what you might call ironic.

It seems like the niche of card carrying "bad guys" is left vacant. And this might just be because I'm one of those jerks who roots for the bad guys in a story more often then not, but it would nice if there was *one* faction at least that did terrible things not because circumstances force them to, but because they just plain enjoy doing them.

I think this sums up your issues and really should end the thread. The kind of cookie cutter villain you want does not exist in the Endless universe. And it really doesn't exist in any modern storytelling setting that isn't downright laughed at. 

What do you expect us, the players, to do about this? What do you expect Amplitude to do about this now that we are nearing the end of Endless Space 2 major faction additions.

Invite me to your games, I shall play the villainous whatever.

TL;DR: you are all wrong, OP is right

koxsos wrote:

Invite me to your games, I shall play the villainous whatever.

Hahahahaha! I watched a few of your games and indeed, you're the last person I want in my games!

Emiscary wrote:

"[...] the list of compelling stories about malevolent and bad tempered characters is exhaustively long, so the "you can't tell a good story about a villain" shtick falls flat on its face if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds."

And yet you stil have nothing to show for all your verbal j0usting and grand standing. It must get really hard having to pat yourself on the back all the time.

The game isn't changing and we the players can't really help you.

Can someone close this thread please? It's turned into a battleground.

I don't get it. This isn't exactly Star Wars.

I think it doesn't make sense to want this in a faction, although maybe the OP can mod it in (maybe a "Team Rocket" or Sith civilisation?). Many existing factions have disturbing sides to them, and we all have the ability to play the game with a lot of the narrative in our head inserted into the experience if we need to.

To me the idea of an entirely villainous society doesn't work because those societies would not function (or, at very best, would not function well). Disney villains don't make for good leaders, and while sometimes the demonstrations of this are a little ridiculous (The Lion King is a good example, where somehow having Scar as king turned things into a wasteland, and Scar actually wasn't nutty enough and may have actually been a decent ruler for a Kingdom at that level of political sophistication). Imagine a society that in some grand festival of evil sacrified 90% of its population every year (and that didn't have a particularly high birthrate). Sure, we'd be horrified at those sentient beings dying (even if they're all "evil"), but we wouldn't consider them a threat (not for very long, anyhow).

Again, if you want to throw logic out the window and make a mod, or in your head decide that the cravers or vodiyani don't actually have their reasons and are instead just plain bad but somehow not self-destructively so, go for it. It just doesn't really make sense, and to the rest of us might seem a bit silly.

Also how is hannibal lector lame? Come on, the latest remake was pretty solid.

koxsos wrote:

Also how is hannibal lector lame? Come on, the latest remake was pretty solid.

He is a singular character. Not an entire race. And his coolness also comes from the people he has around him. Not because he is a cold blooded killer.

Now translate that concept to an entire race of him and they wouldn't have gotten to the industrial age because they would have been undermining each other at every turn.

It just doesn't work for an entire race.

At least there is a faction that you "can expect to act like you think they will" and also "have a word for "to die stabbing each other"".

Note that they like that word.