Discussion on the Empire and Kingdom's influence post-launch

[Sir Nerdbird]

Hi everyone,
I've been trawling the forums and discord the past couple of days seeing what topics have been coming up, and one that I've noticed cropping up a lot is how people are laughing at how insignificant they think the two official factions (Empire and Kingdom) are going to be post launch. I was kind of sceptical of this, so I had a look into it and I think I have some information to share regarding how I think these two factions are going to progress after the game releases (I know this should probably be in the factions part of the wiki, but I'll move it if anyone takes a particular dislike to this being here )

The first think I noticed people saying is that player made factions are going to be much bigger than either of the two official ones. Having looked into this, and considering the things the devs are probably going to implement when the game launches, this is pretty unlikely. For a start, although the Kingdom and Empire have much smaller numbers of people than neutral on the official discord (502 people are currently online for Empire, 302 for Kingdom compared to 2299 for Neutral) its important to point out that Neutral is going to be spread out between huge numbers of different factions. Even considering some of the biggest factions, I've yet to see any that has greater than 300 members, although alliances with other neutral factions will increase this number. However, the main think that I think is going to increase Empire and Kingdom numbers is going to be when the game launches. By the sound of things, as soon as players boot up the game for the first time they're going to be offered the choice to join either the Empire, Kingdom or Neutral. Given the number of people who have wishlisted the game but aren't on the discord, I think it's going to be about a 1:1:3 split on people starting the game choosing between the three options. This would give a huge boost to player numbers for both Empire and Kingdom.

I think another reason that the Empire and Kingdom are going to be a lot stronger than most people expect (at least at the start of Starbase) is the fact that they will already have established bases and with ships even from the first day. Even though these ships are, by dev admission, sub-par compared with what they're expecting the community to come up with, (the knight has a huge weak point in the centre of the body which causes it to explode way too easy, and both of the large ships for the factions have huge blind spots) they have one thing that other factions won't.
Numbers
We've already seen in the feature videos and the dev space battle that the bases which the Kingdom and Empire start with have plenty of equipment to start churning out fighters and larger ships at a faster rate, and the dev space battle even shows being able to simply purchase pre-made armed ships from a terminal when the previous one gets destroyed.
Given the amount of money that factions are going to be able to get from mining operations, I wouldn't be surprised if, with good coordination, the Empire or Kingdom could have a navy over 3 times the size of any other faction by the end of the first month.

Obviously, as time progresses these two factions are almost definitely going to loose influence, and we're probably going to look back in a year and laugh about how anyone could think that they were in any way a threat. However, I still think that they're going to be able to make much more of a mark than I think most people expect.

Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Naija]

I agree pretty much. I think the dev factions serve a useful role for introducing players to the game and they will have a constant influx from players starting the game. The main weaknesses of the dev factions is their size, things will be hard to organize, there will be insiding etc. The other main weakness is that I anticipate as players get better at the game, they will figure out what they want to do in the game and many experienced players will leave the dev factions. So lack of organization and skill will keep the dev factions at medium power level. The devs may greatly affect this if they help their factions by perhaps maintaining a megastation for free or ship buiding services etc. But as a whole I think player factions over time will rise in dominance as players get better and due to more organized structure.