The Strategist custom faction project

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Maybe you and Hydro would have suggestions about names, ethnic background.

Nothing's hit me yet, but I haven't done anything to his face in any version- that's when I get a lot of my sense of the person, staring obsessively at the face- that he’s a dude doesn’t help, either.

Jotting down what I do know/free associate as I write may help jump-start me or Hydro.

Hmmm. He’s smart. I mean, the original looks very intelligent- not something I’d have articulated as a reason for wanting to use this portrait because I hadn’t thought of it that way in so many words, but it was there- he looks smart.

He isn’t a charisma leader, exactly. He couldn’t have gotten where he is without some people/management skills, but they must have been acquired later than most people learn them, through hard work and deliberation around college age. Because as a boy, he played chess while others where doing what most kids do. I don’t know if he plays much anymore, ‘cause he has trouble finding opponents who can engage him at all. He’s like when Bobby Fischer told Dick Cavett in an interview that he likes “crushing the other guy’s spirit.,” and computers are just toasters. He plays the game of nations like he’s freakin’ Napoleon looking for that challenge.

His dad was a clown out of The Great Santini”, a harsh taskmaster, impossible to please. His mother was loving, but could be cold, and didn’t protect him enough. There were siblings, but they don’t much inform his character, except they sometimes let down his need of them, only accentuating his paranoid tendencies.

Chess never made anyone crazy, IMHO, but it is attractive to some crazy people. (The same argument I make and recommend in defense of D&D.) Bobby Fischer would have died homeless and broke without chess, instead of (grudgingly) admired, rich, and indoors.

But Strategist isn’t crazy; he just tends to see every situation as an adversarial zero-sum game where someone has to loose- not him. He seeks power over his surroundings to feel safe, and as an exercise in implementing his strategic ideas, and for something to do- though he’s never admitted that last to himself. He’s bright enough that he’s easily bored, and imaginative enough to have boundless ambition.

He wants to rule the world, not realizing how much he’d hate having no more worlds to conquer.

I don’t know how all that informs his point of origin, though. Maybe it’ll bounce off one of you guys hard enough, or your bounce-back will off of me.

(It would, wouldn’t it, be way too corny to make him Greek, named with a variation of the Greek word for general, stratego?)

[Ironwood]

I can't help but want to go Russian with this guy. Not only are the Russians well known for producing top class Chessmasters, a character of this sort in a movie would just plain have to have a Russian accent. My only issue with this is that it would be: 1. Stereotypical (not necessarily a bad thing, but its good to wait on a better idea before going with the stereotype) and 2. We've already got a Russian (Zhakarov).

What was his role on the Unity? How did he manage to turn his obsession with strategy into the bedrock of a faction? I'm drawing a blank.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Russian- well the Soviet Union region, more likely -could work- there was a lot greater ethnic diversity than you tended to see on TV.

He could be from just anywhere- there are great chess players all over the world, just tending to cluster in certain places with a stronger chess culture- the US not being one of them, and Russia being way on top. But yeah, a stereotype that doesn't rise to archetype status, better avoided if we can do better.

There are some fine chess players in Turkey. I mean you wouldn't wanna get into casual pick-up games in a cafe' in Istanbul if you couldn't handle losing a lot. Turkey could fit.


I'm gonna havta think about his Unity role. I thought security, but no, that's wrong for several reasons- mostly, not fitting his skill-set well. Then I thought colonist- they had to be the vast majority- but he’s not a hew-wood, til-fields guy that would have gone just to be a pioneer. Still, that’s not all a colony needs- his job could have been planning when they got there and saw the place.. Like, how much do we know the Unity crowd knew about where they were going? A colony could well use someone who specialized in accessing situations and formulating optimal policy in the form of strategic advice to the colony leader.

Games theory has wide applications; not just games/war stuff.

Or he could have been attached to the research group. He’d be a better than simply talented mathematician, given the chess and his field- and GT’s a legitimate area of instruction, as well as research, albeit an applied, not hard, science.

Dunno. I like the onsite field planner idea best. Can anybody suggest better?

[vyeh]

Long-range planning?

Economist?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Long-range planning?

Economist?

I see him as having an excellent grasp of economics- they figure into the complex factors of deep strategy too much for him to ignore. But as a specialty, it would be going another way from everything we’ve discussed.

Long-range planning, for sure. And maybe short-range and in-between. Totally in keeping with everything that's been suggested.

Good colony expeditions need a lot of stuff that isn't that obvious. One is some ability to adapt to the unforeseeable. One guy who can game out the possibilities of a random event triggering for the colony leader is worth more than many, many tons of equipment. I think this idea as to his Unity function ought to be considered pretty much a lock.

-Though it doesn't necessarily exclude him from Zak's group, either- the colony would need him teaching possible successors.

-and it could even be that HE was intended as colony leader.

Good question, Ironwood- very helpful.


As to how he got his own faction?

I don't know anything specific, but there are obvious relevant general principals that arise from his basic concept.

Jerks and unsuitable people end up in leadership positions all the time- because they are capable, and therefore looked-up to. I see Strat as a cold-seeming guy; people naturally look to him for direction, not because they like him, but because he gets results. And he's not a terrible leader at all- mature enough to control his nerdish qualities, and good at seeing the utility of having better people-managers working under him, and listening to their advice. In part he's a lot like all of us would like to be, albeit much less fun.

It got him a faction of his own because people want to be on the winning side, too.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

By the way, there's a faction idea buried in there- The Colonists.

It's kinda been done before, though I think not with quite that focus. All the SMAC leaders were crew, and half or more of the SMACX ones- none at all explicitly colonists.

Anyone interested in a new project?

[Ironwood]

The thing about general colonists is that they'd have to have some kind of specific ideological draw, one that fits with his humble background, to actually draw a faction. Domai did so with his "power to the people" approach. Cha Dawn is one from humble background who was "touched" (if I remember his background correctly). Aki was a specialist, but once again, her role is based not on her prior leadership, but on the example she sets for others that would follow her. All the others had the advantage of great personal ability combined with their background.

As to our Grand Strategist, I'm thinking he'd have been part of Zhakarov's department, and I agree with the mathematician role Buster's Uncle has suggested. He mostly just taught what the university expected him to teach back on Earth, making his name on the Chess circuit. But once on the Unity, after waking up, he started giving some controversial lectures which drew a following, but also disturbed many others. Maybe he applied Praxeology, a discipline currently limited to Austrian economists, to the goal of domination and control. Either way, he was essentially advocating a form of dictatorship that goes beyond the military, a level of totalitarianism that goes beyond what such petty thinkers as Chairman Yang or Sister Miriam can imagine.

The creepy thing is, he doesn't sound evil when he describes it. He sounds like he genuinely believes such a future is the best possible future for mankind.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

This good stuff, and the perspectives are compatable, should we choose to assign him a dual role. He could have worked as an accademic in the main. Think-tank is often not a full-time job.

Never heard of Praxeology before, but it sounds fine- especially the Austrian part. This would be the Fascist streak I mentioned as a possibility. Austria may be a good point of origin, at that- many have considerable Turkish in them, I believe.

I believe Domai counts as crew, Aki could have been either, and Cha, being born on Planet, doesn't count either way. We don't know enough about Roze to say.

I think they clearly intended us to assume many/most of the colonist were asleep and blew up real good, but still.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

...And to any surviving colonists, being good at it could be enough of an ideological draw, if not quite enough hook for an interesting faction. Some colonists would only be interested in pioneering well, not guns, nature, computers, totalitarianism or what have you...

When I said it’d been done with different focus, I was thinking of any terraformer factions that got completed, like, nine years ago, when there was a lot of talk on the forum about terraformer factions. I don’t recall if I saw any finished ones posted, but it would be worth searching for something to adapt if anyone’s interested in the notion. A lot of AC-heads thought terraformer was enough of a gimmick for a long time back then, to be sure. I bet no one did graphics for one, though.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

...Actually, I seem to recall some at least partially-done graphics- the logo was a former...

[vyeh]

Check www.apolyton.net/smac. Look at the files tab at the top. Then choose factions. There are is an entry that says it is the network node factions. There was a terraformer faction among the network node factions.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I downloaded the lot long ago, and that's probably where I saw graphics. I'll go poke around in that folder right now if there's no love in my inbox on the way offline.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Took me a while to find, but time spent pawing through the NN stuff isn't wasted for me- there's lot to steal/build-on there.

I don't think this was Network Node, though- there's other stuff I saved in there, and this was downloaded later- and the graphics are just unaltered Drone- he'd have made SOMEthing new- not the former-logo thing I've seen somewhere either, but there's a presumbly playable text file. Here you go.

I could look more, but don't wanna right now.

I highly recomend the NN download at the link vyeh posted as a resource for those of us interested in that kind of thing.

Be good to NN when you steal from him, though; you'll notice he cared enough to sign a lot of his work if you open the .pcx files, and that makes me think he's like me- interesed in being credited when his work is used- and I've seen it uncredited a lot coughSMAniaCcough.

...Already getting bad thread mutation here, and all my fault. Somebody please take an interest and start a new thread...

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I probably saw the former logo in an old thread in this forum, BTW- if anybody cared to check out threads with attachments, they could probably find it pretty easily in the first ten pages back- as far back as attachments seem to go. That, or the most recent of the archives. I'm not gonna.

[vyeh]

Proposed Bonuses:
Efficiency: Faith in the design of the Chief Strategist reduces corruption
Morale: Their troops fight with fanatic zeal, confident that even their deaths will advance the strategy.

Proposed Penalties:
Economics: Lack of individual initiative stifles economic growth.
Probe: A tendency to assume others are part of an unknown part of the strategy.

How about the above as well as

Penalty:

Support: Gets caught up in Rumsfield theories about light footprints (Buster's Uncle or Hydro, can you rework?)

And we'll go with Democracy aversion and Thought Control agenda.