Nyct, would you be willing yet to commit to a final traitlist for the factions?
Yeah, sure.
They're both greedy as *** megacorps. TT has the monopolist trait and it just seems very appropriate to all have that in common. However they are differentiated by exactly what export goods they are monopolists about.
For MbG I dropped paranoid but kept monopolist. If MbG exports only organs then it actually makes monopolist redundant, since I don't think the player can actually build structures to produce organs, or am I wrong?
Since we're balancing for vanilla, we're assuming only 1 planet (and I don't use Angry Periphery in my test game) so lowprofile seems like a survival necessity. Since koC is designed to ally with either Heg or perseans I can be sure they will be in a big nasty war so it seemed like they need the help. In your experience, is it not really necessary?
Low Profile is absolutely a necessity, and even then they might be at risk of invasion especially because of their poor defenses.
As for Monopolist, I feel like M-G should have it (organs can be obtained from Population at high enough sizes though, which could cause them to get mad at everyone) but if KoC is working for the Heg then it seems like the Hegemony would block any of those sentiments, no?
Although both Monopolist and Paranoid would be somewhat useless for M-G, because Monopolist gets them into limited amounts of trouble and Paranoid assumes that there's somehow a war they can
win.
Given what we've went over, what are the other lore/gameplay reasons do you think make the case for reducing militarism?
Well, the KoC isn't exactly a military power and is ultimately run by a civilian government, just one stacked with ex-military. Technically
most civilian governments are stacked with ex-military people though. As a megacorp, they're also probably going to be more pragmatic about their approach and so I feel like an emphasis on military at all would be misplaced. In fact I'd even go as far as saying they should get Pacifist, for the sake of simple pragmatism - while they might not identify as them they might have a strongly pacifistic foreign policy to avoid any incidents.
That's a relief, but in my own test agme I lowered the values by 2/3 and it seemed more appropriate. Or did you already read that aprt and take that into account?
I did, I think 2/3rds is a bit much but they should probably at least have the opportunity to switch allegiances - bring Heg/PL - KoC relations to +40 and +25 could cause such a balance, and Tach/Diktat - M-G relations to +60 and +30 or so could cause a similar oddity.
Putting it all together, my proposal for traitlist is:
M-G: Paranoid/Monopolist/Tempermental (1-2, prefer Temperamental), Devious, Low Profile
KoC: Helps Allies, Submissive, (Optional: Low Profile), (Optional: Pacifist)