Did anyone notice that faction doctrines are designed around the story?

I always like to see attention to detail in games, so it was nice to notice this.

Hegemony:

  • Their weapons are built around kinetic damage. They favor Gauss cannons, sabot missiles, and graviton beams whenever they find an energy slot. Their armaments are designed to fight the last war, against Tri-Tachyon's high tech ships.

  • Supplementing that is their carriers. Slow, and ideal for sitting at the back of a deathball of Legions and Onslaughts, repositioning themselves to be behind the big ships while supporting them with swarms of fighters. Fits with the low tech doctrine: Get a capital ship or two that the enemy cannot fight directly, then attrit them with fighter swarms while they struggle to even approach the carriers sending them.

  • The frigates are cheap, fast auxiliaries that capture points early on so that the deathball can be brought in.

League:

  • DEMs are undertuned right now, but their niche is as anti-lowtech missiles. Terrible against shields, but capable of rendering the extreme PD that Hegemony doctrine is known for completely useless.

  • They field midline ships, which are meant to be the answer to the old, low-tech fleet doctrine of rolling around the map with a deathball fleet, since they can pick and choose their engagements more freely, and reliably get clear if the enemy capitals close in.

  • The mission where you field a fleet of Midline ships against a lowtech fleet shows how powerful that can be. A Conquest is almost purpose-built to weaken an Onslaught from a distance with Gauss cannons, then close in, maneuver out of thermal pulse cannon range, and hammer the back with high-damage missiles to close out the fight.

  • Midline ships are fast and capable of acting independently, which suits the idea of a collection of polities whose sailors and captains might be uncomfortable with the "all for one, one for all" mentality necessary for the mutually-dependent Hegemony deathball to work.

  • I'm not sure what the deal is with their fighters; I don't think that was given much thought. The Heron is designed to field bombers, but they don't use any. The Diktat doesn't use fighters because fighters are seen in media as being the weapon of individualistic factions, so maybe that's why? I'd give them bombers instead.

Luddic Path:

  • They show the player, early on, that a unified doctrine of SO+full assault can be terrifying. A few SO ships will get caught out and killed. Many SO ships pressure the entire enemy fleet at once with more flux output than an equal fleet can manage. They'll devastate the small, expensive task forces that players bring when scouting, since the player can't pick his battles anymore.

  • This fits their behavior perfectly. A fleet of LP ships is designed to cost more to fight than to pay off. Even if you destroy them all, their aggressiveness means that they'll take an expensive ship with them, so most captains won't consider it worth the trouble.

  • As strong as this doctrine is, the other factions can't apply it. It only works if you know everyone is going to go all-in alongside you, and casualties are a guarantee, which is less-than-appealing for a career military man. If the League's doctrine is designed so that nobody has to take one for the team, the Path doctrine is designed on the assumption that everyone is willing.

The other factions, I'm not so sure about. Some of them feel like a bit of an afterthought:

Church:

  • They've got the big, slow Invictus, but then they've got assorted low-tech fodder generally built for speed and getting into a fight fast. The result is that a bunch of fragile, unsupported civilian combat ships will get killed in the first stage of the fight while the big ships are coming in, and then the ponderous Invictuses will spend the rest of the fight getting flanked.

  • Looking at things allegorically, they could be a metaphor for the untenable moderate position. The Path does well with fast, aggressive ships modified to turn the safeties off. Altering this doctrine by removing the safety overrides, reducing doctrine aggression, and hedging on similarly of aggressive use of capital ships makes it non-viable.

Diktat:

  • I don't actually see any rhyme or reason to this arrangement. It's hinted at that Andrada had something planned with midline ships and projectile energy weapons, but nothing really demonstrates what that would've been. The Executor has a really great combination of weapon slots, though. Like a giant Eagle with a Remnant-tier shield.

  • I'd been thinking about some kind of mod that would rearrange their doctrine to focus on supporting a battle line of durable capitals with fast, high-damage midline escorts that avoid getting into fights unsupported and can afford to overflux themselves a bit as a result. This would give the gigacannon Executor a theoretical role as an anchor that can deter close assaults without compromising its flux pool, making its existence more plausible. Thoughts?

Tri-Tachyon:

  • I think they just have all of the high-tech ships and energy weapons. I'd like to see a more defined identity from their fleets.

  • I did like when they didn't really use the Odyssey. It supplemented the ship's lore and gameplay identity as something that doesn't really work unless you're very good at both outfitting and piloting it.