Here's my hot take : Evil players already get literally *all the goodies* in this game. It's the peaceful traders that are totally screwed.
Peaceful traders: Pay tarriffs, low profitability, try to be friends with factions, nobody rewards you anyway.
Evil warlords: Do warcrimes, never pay taxes, traffic in drugs and human organs, starve colonies to make extra profits on food, commit literal genocide all the time, get mega rich.
Maybe Alex can throw a bone to the players that want to roleplay being a nice guy once in a while? If I wanted to know all about a *** place where evil wins, I'd just read the news or look out the window.
The issue here is, the world of Starsector is canonically and intentionally depressing, desolate, and morally abrupt. I think it is actually
by design that players who wish to be peaceful have a worse time, because with the state of the Sector, it's just genuinely harder and not as rewarding. If this is intentional, complaining about this would get you into a discussion of whether or not games should represent their own narratives through their gameplay. Maybe it feels lazy from a design standpoint and it feels like Alex just genuinely isn't putting in as much effort to allow "good" players to have fun as well, but I'm fairly certain that avoiding being a bad person is just
supposed to be harder.
In terms of what you said before about why players want to be able to commit warcrimes so badly like this; no matter how you cut it, as other people have pointed out in this thread, there's serious narrative and gameplay issues here regardless. My issue here is simply the game saying "nuh-uh-uh, not right now, you have to do this first." Talking about the horrible narrative implications of bombing Chicomoztoc feels pointless because it ultimately isn't why the game prevents you from doing that in the first place; it's literally
only to prevent players from softlocking themselves. Once again, you can still satbomb Chicomoztoc as much as you want
after the main quest is over, the issue is just that it limits the player's freedom and agency in a sandbox game where that's the entire point to begin with. Yes, narratively, repeatedly nuking the most populated world among several other worlds is a terrible,
terrible thing to do; but nobody is saying that it isn't, including the game itself. There is a reason why multiple factions become instantly vengeful towards you when you satbomb
any planet. The issue is that it feels like there's a better way to go about this than just telling the player "no, not right now."
