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[Bungee_man]

I just finished watching The Death of Stalin, a comedy-drama movie about the power struggle following Stalin's death. Definitely comes across as an inspiration for the new quest - Macario is a somewhat less evil version of Beria, for example, and Caden fills the same role and personality niche as Malenkov. A common theme in the movie is the degree to which any given person is a true believer, and willing to forego practicality in the name of the party line (and, of course, their willingness to do the opposite). In general, it seems like any government built around a set of beliefs settles into a a single position on this matter, for most of its population, with little deviation. That is to say, in a society that's decided that everyone must be a true believer, there's little room for pragmatists, since whatever's enforcing everyone else's cooperate-cooperate equilibrium is likely to be dangerous for anyone who doesn't also forego personal benefit in favor of demonstrating their devotion to the cause. Likewise, in a society where there's an official party line that must be recited in public, but people are generally willing to deviate from it among friends, true believers will be at a disadvantage and be unlikely to find positions of power, since they're necessarily fettered while everyone else isn't.

Considering this, I tried to apply it to the Sindrian Diktat, and draw an overarching trend. I'm probably missing something, but a few of the situations are hard for me to make sense of:

• The Diktat's treatment of outsiders is the big open question, for me. Visiting starship captains attend the same bars as domestic dissidents, for example, and are subject to regular raids by beat cops. Wouldn't it be more practical, and more commercially viable, to segregate visiting traders from the locals, the same way Latin American autocracies are depicted as doing in most media? You wouldn't want the (relatively-speaking) cosmopolitan attitudes of a League trader to rub off on the locals, and you likewise wouldn't want wealthy visitors skipping over your mid-sector fuel stop for fear of violent encounters with the local authorities.

• Likewise, there don't seem to be any officials whose role is dealing diplomatically with outsiders - a common role in even the most hermetic regimes. The big interaction you can have with a run-of-the-mill Sindrin official is offering them the planet-killer, but, rather than being directed immediately to a pragmatist who handles delicate negotiations with foreigner who share none of the expected priors, your chosen official goes out of his/her way to make the expected "give me money for my weapon" exchange difficult. We know there are pragmatists in a higher position of power who can handle this kind of thing, since your official gets contacted by them and told to make a deal that they previously rejected outright, but for some reason they didn't order the call transferred. How would an official with that degree of naivety keep a high-status job when not just surrounded by more practical-minded (and ambitious) underlings, but also working under more practical-minded superiors who are likely to become exhausted with such behavior?

• Further, outward-facing officials tend to treat outsiders the same way they would treat Diktat citizens who were raised under Andrada's cult of personality. A Diktat commission is treated with relative formality, and presented as the player becoming a part of the Diktat, subject to its ideological guidelines and culture. Given the purpose of hiring mercenaries as opposed to homegrown soldiers, and the Diktat's status as a wealthy but repressive government, I would sort of imagine a greater separation - perhaps cultivated explicitly - between the regulars and the less politically reliable but better-equipped foreign guns for hire, similar to what's observed in states that follow a similar model.

• Regarding the characters, Caden is a devout true believer in a political system where it's possible to not be one and survive, but he has an army behind him. Even with Macario quietly trying to arrange things in his favor, why would his soldiers be willing to follow him (and potentially endanger themselves) in a power struggle? Wouldn't someone more pragmatic (and more capable) have supplanted him by presenting a more reliable source of patronage?

• I'd mention Macario, since my initial expectation would be that a skilled spymaster wouldn't just go up to someone on the street and start a conversation about a coup with no double-speak or plausible deniability whatsoever, but, looking into the real life Beria, he is - much like the Beria in the movie - much saner. The scope of potential player characters he's willing to recruit is a bit broad, but that's clearly a gameplay concession.

[yajusenpai]

You know. People ought to be more polite when that random spacer you just beat can suddenly snap and glass the planet you are in.

[Bungee_man]

You know. People ought to be more polite when that random spacer you just beat can suddenly snap and glass the planet you are in.

Part of it is just that planets are canonically much better-guarded than what we currently see in the game, but it's nonetheless strange that the Diktat is the one faction that doesn't seem to have interactions with outsiders considered into its system, despite being the most dependent on them.

Tri-Tach has the standard corporate package, free hors d'oeuvres, polite representatives who are happy to get you a catalogue of directed-energy weapons. The Luddic Church (and even the Path) have bars that keep the fundamentalists away and allow enough technology that visitors can go about their business. The Hegemony, likewise, considers everyone a citizen on paper, but is perfectly willing to acknowledge that most don't return the sentiment, and will deal with people on a mercenary basis when it's clear people want money rather than acclaim.

[Killer of Fate]

You know. People ought to be more polite when that random spacer you just beat can suddenly snap and glass the planet you are in.

Part of it is just that planets are canonically much better-guarded than what we currently see in the game, but it's nonetheless strange that the Diktat is the one faction that doesn't seem to have interactions with outsiders considered into its system, despite being the most dependent on them.

Tri-Tach has the standard corporate package, free hors d'oeuvres, polite representatives who are happy to get you a catalogue of directed-energy weapons. The Luddic Church (and even the Path) have bars that keep the fundamentalists away and allow enough technology that visitors can go about their business. The Hegemony, likewise, considers everyone a citizen on paper, but is perfectly willing to acknowledge that most don't return the sentiment, and will deal with people on a mercenary basis when it's clear people want money rather than acclaim.

my guess about that is just that the game really wants to make the player understand that Sindrian Diktat aren't "based" or whatever. And they do so by skipping the most important part about them appearing subtle to the outsiders.

[Bastion.Systems]

You know. People ought to be more polite when that random spacer you just beat can suddenly snap and glass the planet you are in.

This is a game limitation of the dialogue not changing when you become a major player.

Interstellar economy requires independent captains bringing in goods and credits to keep the economy afloat so they can't be banned, but the Diktat would really like to.
They have already lost two planets to rebellion and fear a further deterioration. Independent captains are the smugglers that equip the rebels, resistance cells and defeat propaganda narratives by bringing people news from outside world.
Authoritarian states don't always act rationally, if the party narrative is that independent traders are scum, then building them a fancy foreign quarter might be ideologically untenable, even if it is be beneficial.

[Killer of Fate]

You know. People ought to be more polite when that random spacer you just beat can suddenly snap and glass the planet you are in.

This is a game limitation of the dialogue not changing when you become a major player.

Interstellar economy requires independent captains bringing in goods and credits to keep the economy afloat so they can't be banned, but the Diktat would really like to.
They have already lost two planets to rebellion and fear a further deterioration. Independent captains are the smugglers that equip the rebels, resistance cells and defeat propaganda narratives by bringing people news from outside world.
Authoritarian states don't always act rationally, if the party narrative is that independent traders are scum, then building them a fancy foreign quarter might be ideologically untenable, even if it is be beneficial.

which ones? Volturn is still under their control, Umbra was never theirs to begin with and I just assumed Nortia to be a low enough target not to care for it.

[Sleet]

Oooooh, Soviet history *and* Starsector? All my Christmases have come at once!

A bit drunk right now, so will come back later, but: Caden doesn't really fill the Malenkov role well. Caden is more Kaganovich -- ruthless hardline loyalist without a purpose once the Big Man is deposed.

Will share more in-depth thoughts once sober tomorrow :p

[prav]

It's 100%, citizen.

[Bastion.Systems]

which ones?

Ideologically they consider the entire Askonian system theirs. More practically the independent planets are both causing discontent, either through piracy and terrorism, arming resistance or just by existing and leaving a way out for anyone that can get hold of a planetary shuttle.

[Bungee_man]

my guess about that is just that the game really wants to make the player understand that Sindrian Diktat aren't "based" or whatever. And they do so by skipping the most important part about them appearing subtle to the outsiders.

I don't think that can be the actual reason. Experienced writers like ours have the discipline to understand that a character (which is what the factions more-or-less are) that they're too emotionally invested in in either direction to portray in three dimensions can't really be interacted with in an interesting way. "Kill your darlings" is one of the most ubiquitous bits of writing advice, to the point where even non-writers like us have heard of it, but it refers to negative as well as positive emotions - anything where sentiment interferes with building a comprehensive model of a person or event that allows it to behave plausibly within the story.

Probably there is some critical information that just hasn't been provided to us yet, or that we haven't noticed, in the same way that the ease of raiding and attacking very important planets doesn't make sense right now just because the game is still in production, and not everything that's going to be there is there yet.

This is a game limitation of the dialogue not changing when you become a major player.

Very true, and something that a lot of people miss. Starsector is in many ways a descendant of Escape Velocity - the OG 2D space simulator games, at least in terms of popular culture. A core facet to all of those games is that missions always talked about you the same way, even if you had conquered the entire known universe, simply because there is no way a human programmer or writer could cover every branching point that would be created by needing to know whether the player is the warlord of a mission's source or destination planet.

Interstellar economy requires independent captains bringing in goods and credits to keep the economy afloat so they can't be banned, but the Diktat would really like to.
They have already lost two planets to rebellion and fear a further deterioration. Independent captains are the smugglers that equip the rebels, resistance cells and defeat propaganda narratives by bringing people news from outside world.
Authoritarian states don't always act rationally, if the party narrative is that independent traders are scum, then building them a fancy foreign quarter might be ideologically untenable, even if it is be beneficial.

I think this is a severe oversimplification. I can't think of a single large, authoritarian state that didn't make the necessary concessions to ensure stability of trade with its partners. It's one of the core facets of a functional country, on par with having police, agriculture, or a military. Even the late-stage USSR, the setting of Death of Stalin, which had a pretty explicit, rather hard-to-avoid position on commerce and merchanting, had a cordial enough trade setup that they could import jeans and Coke without much issue.

From a gameplay standpoint, though, it might be more exciting to address this in a different way. What if the Diktat had a special program for favored traders, required to engage in exchanges with them? It could borrow aesthetic inspiration from those infamous tour videos of North Korea, where (presumably) sympathetic foreigners are allowed in to buy things, view the country, and create an impression to locals of having sympathizers across the globe, with large trade companies' captains having to mouth along as part of the job. A Diktat-aligned captain would get the Koryo Tours experience, an unaligned captain would get some worldbuilding material around checking boxes, signing rather exaggerated declarations of loyalty, and then going about their business, and a hostile captain would have to engage in smuggling in order to refuel, even if not on shooting terms with Sindria. As an added bonus, the presumed competence and skill needed to weave through Askonia's patrols would give Macario and his 'friend' a stronger justification for reaching out to a player that's already declared against their government.

Oooooh, Soviet history *and* Starsector? All my Christmases have come at once!

A bit drunk right now, so will come back later, but: Caden doesn't really fill the Malenkov role well. Caden is more Kaganovich -- ruthless hardline loyalist without a purpose once the Big Man is deposed.

Will share more in-depth thoughts once sober tomorrow :p

That's an interesting position. My reading is that Caden is devoted very strongly to Andrada, appointed as second-in-command largely due to his not looking like a threat to number one, and is being positioned by Beria/Macario as a weak-willed, easy-to-manipulate puppet leader in his absence. Kaganovich doesn't seem to go for the position as strongly, understands what's about to unfold a lot better, and, chiefly, doesn't start out as the natural successor.

Ideologically they consider the entire Askonian system theirs. More practically the independent planets are both causing discontent, either through piracy and terrorism, arming resistance or just by existing and leaving a way out for anyone that can get hold of a planetary shuttle.

The independent planet seems to be a Hegemony proxy, which explains what it's doing there. I don't know that it's involved in any kind of agitation, beyond helping the Hegemony with whatever its plans are - the Hegemony doesn't seem like it would create (another) humanitarian and economic crisis just for the sake of it.

The pirate planet, Umbra, is definitely of interest, though. Every faction but the Diktat seems to have a pirate policy that explains the outlaw activity in its territory. Tri-Tachyon uses them as plausibly-deniable mercenaries, so they keep them around. The League makes backroom deals to keep them from causing problems rather than spending the money to eliminate them. The Church is small, humble, unified, and well-armed, so they aren't a lucrative target. The Hegemony doesn't tolerate crime, so there aren't any pirate settlements in their territory at all.

The Diktat, given that they're perfectly willing to saturation bomb an independent colony for competing with them, would seem the types to just flatten (or invade) the actual terrorist outpost on their turf with a small contingent of ships, especially given that doing so would grant them an in-system source of volatiles.

[Killer of Fate]

my guess about that is just that the game really wants to make the player understand that Sindrian Diktat aren't "based" or whatever. And they do so by skipping the most important part about them appearing subtle to the outsiders.

I don't think that can be the actual reason. Experienced writers like ours have the discipline to understand that a character (which is what the factions more-or-less are) that they're too emotionally invested in in either direction to portray in three dimensions can't really be interacted with in an interesting way. "Kill your darlings" is one of the most ubiquitous bits of writing advice, to the point where even non-writers like us have heard of it, but it refers to negative as well as positive emotions - anything where sentiment interferes with building a comprehensive model of a person or event that allows it to behave plausibly within the story.

Probably there is some critical information that just hasn't been provided to us yet, or that we haven't noticed, in the same way that the ease of raiding and attacking very important planets doesn't make sense right now just because the game is still in production, and not everything that's going to be there is there yet.

you might have answered your own question

[Bungee_man]

you might have answered your own question

I don't think so. "There's something I missed, or that we haven't been shown yet, that answers this question" isn't itself an answer to the question.

[Killer of Fate]

you might have answered your own question

I don't think so. "There's something I missed, or that we haven't been shown yet, that answers this question" isn't itself an answer to the question.

i think the answer to your question is that either the way how the story is written causes you to disagree with it, which is normal. Or that the story isn't complete yet, and the details simply aren't there.

[Killer of Fate]

(writing this under new post to not ninja anyone on accident)

Spiderman and you, on the topic of Sindrian Diktat not appearing subtle enough to outsiders, could be on the same page. And in the future when we get to choose via a quest the timeline in which Sindrian Diktat gets stuck. Choosing out of three options which we are presented in the game, then dialogue, planet descriptions (maybe?) get replaced accordingly. And the theme of subtelty is given to us. Somewhat. With Spiderman ruling Sindrian Diktat in a way that allows him to control how it appears in the public's eye. Applying symbolic changes via puppet officials to make it seem like Sindrian Diktat is changing its ways, but in reality remaining equally horrible at core. In that timeline, this request of Diktat having a "welcoming package" like TT is fulfilled.

On the other hand the two other options will cause the Diktat to remain stupid, and bury itself deeper by its incompetence. Or change its way thoroughly. And no longer be evil... More evil than everyone else.

[Bungee_man]

I just now remembered the big reason behind this thread - the Lion's Guard appears, in-game, to have genuinely perfect loyalty, aside from that one (possible, if you take Macario's word at face value) spy on Umbra. They're all super-patriotic, and there isn't a single Lion's Guard ship to be found on the black market. The implication there would be that they're all true believers, given that they're very aggressive in combat despite their deliberately bad loadouts.

Strange to think that this could work, given that the Diktat is not implied to have the level of competence necessary for that kind of filtering.

Spiderman and you, on the topic of Sindrian Diktat not appearing subtle enough to outsiders, could be on the same page. And in the future when we get to choose via a quest the timeline in which Sindrian Diktat gets stuck. Choosing out of three options which we are presented in the game, then dialogue, planet descriptions (maybe?) get replaced accordingly. And the theme of subtelty is given to us. Somewhat. With Spiderman ruling Sindrian Diktat in a way that allows him to control how it appears in the public's eye. Applying symbolic changes via puppet officials to make it seem like Sindrian Diktat is changing its ways, but in reality remaining equally horrible at core. In that timeline, this request of Diktat having a "welcoming package" like TT is fulfilled.

On the other hand the two other options will cause the Diktat to remain stupid, and bury itself deeper by its incompetence. Or change its way thoroughly. And no longer be evil... More evil than everyone else.

I agree that something like that is how the quest is hinted to eventually shake out, but Macario explicitly tells you that his path is to invade Umbra and then Nortia, so I'd imagine that trying to invade those two planets is the outcome if you side with him.

Caden probably replaces the main roster with LG ships, making them easier to acquire and making piracy easier in Diktat space, maybe adding them to the main Diktat markets as well. Hyder probably gets rid of the Lion's Guard. All three probably give the player some kind of reward or discount at the end of the questline.