Best Of

I'm not a PVP expert by any means, but I CAN comment on the theme of the Celestine Ascendancy, since I was mostly the one who developed and wrote it.

When I did a pass on the three player factions in Starmourn, I wanted each one to be a cluster of various tropes found in science fiction so players could gravitate towards the sci fi "flavor" they liked the best. I knew, of course, that any initial foundation I created would very possibly be warped or even erased by player actions, and I was fine with that.

Scatterhome was meant to embody the space western. Your Cowboy Bebop, your Firefly, your Deep Space Nine, even bits of Star Wars to some extent.  Scatterhome is all that is dusty and dirty and falling apart, Scatterhome is far away from anything convenient, Scatterhome has no atmosphere, Scatterhome is a frontier town built in the stars.

The Song Dominion centered around what I guess I think of as "shining spires" or "hopeful" science fiction. This is Asimov and Niven, all about big structures, big concepts, and high, lofty ideas carried out and made real by the ingenuity of agile minds. I always felt there would be a little dystopia in there, too. And a little bit of, "if you don't fall in line, we'll band together and stop at nothing to destroy you" which is probably something a faction with such a war-torn and tragic background would naturally drift towards.

The Celestine Ascendancy is, tbh, pretty dear to my heart. I wanted it to be all that is cyberpunk, which is my favorite genre. Dirty, but TECH dirty. Neon grime and hackers. Urban density at its densest. Snowcrash and Neuromancer and Serial Experiments Lain and Blade Runner and Coruscant. Where Scatterhome is a dusty frontier and Song is a velvet glove of optimism over a ruthless fist of steel, the Celestine Ascendancy is venerable. It is established, and it is old, and it has been rebuilt on the corpse of itself a dozen times over. The level of decay and corruption that has eaten through it has made it unstable - but it has also made anything possible. 

I get that maybe people don't pick up on that totally or feel it as strongly as I do - and I hear that! I think that part of the reason for this might be because it is a lot larger in scope than the other two factions. Song is pretty contained on their perfect and shining sky island, Scatterhome is, well, it's a bunch of rocks floating around in space and it's not hard to make asteroids feel cramped and crowded.  But the Celestine Ascendancy's capital could swallow about twenty New York Cities. It's just real big! Maybe this is what feels limiting to some, because it isn't a box you can step into and feel at home in immediately. I'm open to ideas on how to give it more of a direction, but I'm honestly pretty happy with what people have managed to do with it so far. 

I generally enjoy pvp content regardless if its a win or loss. When caches first were released, the small but elite model was kind of working for CA. But Song has been improving their tactics and building their team cohesion, as Cubey mentioned, to the extent that this model is now less effective. 

The advantage SM has over a game like Aetolia, though, is that since it's a three-way fight with fuzzy boundaries, it's perfectly viable for the other two to "beat up the leader". Yeah so maybe Song has North America, most of Europe, and is now expanding into Asia. But SH has South America and Africa and CA is obvs in Australia. Also, CA has a killer hand. Maybe the factionless have Japan. Idk tho, theyre probably just playing Pictionary instead.

Group combat is awesome and complex with so many potential interactions. I've only scratched the surface in terms of reflexing for it. Plenty of room for learning and growth, and that applies to everyone.

But I hear you. CA pop is a negative feedback loop, demoralizing and difficult to climb out of. CA has always been the least popular, given that our faction mechanics are the least novel among IREs. Player-driven drama last year did not help the situation and resulted in a mass exodus. Those who stuck around largely did so to prevent the faction from completely dying.

Perhaps it's worth considering, in the long-term, a rework of CA's faction mechanics to make it more unique in the IRE ecosystem and attractive. Perhaps CA becomes a megacorp state, for instance, with governance driven by a marketplace of ideas, spacers being unequal shareholders in the state, lorded over by a Board of Directors appointed by shareholder majority. Okay now I'm just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks...

Well in equal skill, more people will always mean more likely to win. That being said a number of systems have been tossed around relating to this. One that I think caught some traction was reducing the damage taken by some function of the number of people who had hit you in the last x seconds so that being mobbed upon isn't such a drastic situation. Additionally however I have put a lot of work into creating roleplay opportunities to help solve this problem. My character formed and maintains a mercenary group.... Talk to me IG.