Lore Question

[Takingdomscosimog]

IIRC Core use ai chips to transfer their consciousness to become machines and Arm are clones in mech suites? Do I have that right?

[Mossman]

Arm are humanity and men who did not want to be machinized, so they multiplied their best warriors with clones. They are not all clones, although the warriors might all be. Core are individuals that are recorded into thinking machines, then copied and multiplied for their fighting machines. So the battle is copies versus clones, yes, but the ones deciding are free humanity and the original copies.

[Mossman]

Sounds so much like communism to me, wanting to lose their humanity and freedom and force everyone else to it too.

[Takingdomscosimog]

Originally posted by Zhikaka:

Sounds so much like communism to me, wanting to lose their humanity and freedom and force everyone else to it too.

Yeah I always considered Core to be evil or the baddies, since it was Core who ordered that any who refused had to be destroyed. So I play as Arm 99% of the time, and if I ever actually play as Core I always fight alongside Arm against Core. Better aesthetics for Arm too imo.

[mltnschroeder]

I think the game offers pretty scant evidence that there is much difference between Core and Arm. They both have practically identical production facilities and tech, which means whether it is clones or chips, the overall result is the same. They both seem hell bent on draining entire planets of all resources (even water) w/o any hesitation in protracting the war, which means even the victor wins a pyrrhic victory at best.

But probably the intended grim illustration is that in Total War, there is no real clear winner.

[Peregrine]

Originally posted by mltnschroeder:

I think the game offers pretty scant evidence that there is much difference between Core and Arm. They both have practically identical production facilities and tech, which means whether it is clones or chips, the overall result is the same. They both seem hell bent on draining entire planets of all resources (even water) w/o any hesitation in protracting the war, which means even the victor wins a pyrrhic victory at best.

But probably the intended grim illustration is that in Total War, there is no real clear winner.

The ARM were trying to save those planets though, and were pushed back, the loss of the natural planets after ARM retreated or were locally destroyed was done by CORE to.

1. Deny the ARM fertile worlds for resources or bases without extensive terraforming.

2. Cause additional morale loss by seeing ANOTHER world rendered lifeless.

It's mentioned that on the worlds Liberated by ARM, that they used their mastery of cloning tech to rebuild the worlds and reintroduce the local flora and fauna to the planets.

[LeonardMT]

Originally posted by Baron:

Sounds so much like communism to me, wanting to lose their humanity and freedom and force everyone else to it too.

Wtf does any of that has to do with communism???

[mltnschroeder]

Originally posted by Peregrine:

The ARM were trying to save those planets though, and were pushed back, the loss of the natural planets after ARM retreated or were locally destroyed was done by CORE

Well, in the intro/backstory to the Thalassean missions (or is it Tergiverse IV?), the planet was drained of so much water that an archipelago of islands was formed. Presumably Core, being machines, don't need water to survive. So it must have been ARM who did that. So I don't see ARM being any less destructive than CORE when it comes to stripping planets of resources.

[Takingdomscosimog]

Originally posted by mltnschroeder:

Originally posted by Peregrine:

The ARM were trying to save those planets though, and were pushed back, the loss of the natural planets after ARM retreated or were locally destroyed was done by CORE

Well, in the intro/backstory to the Thalassean missions (or is it Tergiverse IV?), the planet was drained of so much water that an archipelago of islands was formed. Presumably Core, being machines, don't need water to survive. So it must have been ARM who did that. So I don't see ARM being any less destructive than CORE when it comes to stripping planets of resources.

Or was it core, BECAUSE they dont need water to survive and, I thought Core teraformed planets so that they are purely metal.

[mltnschroeder]

Well, since Thalassean is directly reachable by Gate from Empyrean, one would expect it belonged to ARM for most of the war. So the primary suspects who drained it of water would be ARM, imho.

[LeonardMT]

Originally posted by mltnschroeder:

Well, since Thalassean is directly reachable by Gate from Empyrean, one would expect it belonged to ARM for most of the war. So the primary suspects who drained it of water would be ARM, imho.

Well the Core could use water as coolant for their computers

[Peregrine]

Originally posted by mltnschroeder:

Well, since Thalassean is directly reachable by Gate from Empyrean, one would expect it belonged to ARM for most of the war. So the primary suspects who drained it of water would be ARM, imho.

We don't have direct evidence of who did it, but given that the Core love to make planets they take lifeless and covered in metal..... I'd not put it past them to have drained it once they took it from ARM just to give them the finger and laugh at them for being unable to prevent the fall of the planet.

Also, yes, it could have been used as coolant for their computers, or other reasons.

[Frank Exchange Of Views]

TL;DR : did a bit of in-game and manual-reading research to argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about one side being evil and the other being good. Pick whichever side you like the best.

----

I think it misses the point to try and pin blame on anyone here. The game very heavily emphasises the idea that nobody is innocent in (this) war. Both sides are completely genocidal, and the question of who are the "bad guys" in this a scenario is moot.

The issue of who drained the water from Tergiverse IV is kind of beside the point, though the Core are described as draining an underground lake there in the Arm campaign. In the Core campaign we see Nigh Pilago, a former water world, which has been fully drained of its water explicitly by the Arm since their pilots need it, but that also doesn't really mean anything. One of the early Arm missions talks about the Core developing a huge industrial base on Empyrrean by destroying an important local ecosystem; but in the final Arm missions they explicitly go after the immense power-generating facilities supplying large parts of Core Prime, a world peopled entirely by intelligent machines who need that power to survive. Both sides have, for thousands of years, been stripping the galaxy like locusts and lighting the resulting spoils on fire with their mutual hatred, so whataboutism and tit for tat don't really work well here.

To be clear, the Core are definitely more "villain coded", by which I mean traditionally in fiction some traits which are associated with evil are the same traits that Total Annihilation associates with the Core, which makes it easier for players to imagine them as evil if they want to. The Core are consistently styled as an "empire", especially in contrast with the Arm being styled as a "rebellion", which is an easy way for a piece of media to clue in readers/viewers/players that one side is supposed to be bad and domineering.

Industrialism is also an easy form of morality coding, like nobody reading (for example) the Lord of the Rings was confused about whether Saruman's mind of metal and wheels was supposed to be better or worse than Gandalf's love of the halfling's leaf. Pastoralism and ruralism are often associated with positive virtues while urbanism or industrialism aren't, so the Arm's homeworld being a lush natural environment and the Core's world being a massive Jupiter Brain can be seen as playing into those tropes.

For what it's worth, it's never said in the game or the manual who "struck first", or who brought push to shove. I've heard a few different people in a few different places comment something along the lines of "the Core were the aggressors, they made it so that anyone who didn't get patterned would be slaughtered", but that's not actually true. It's said nowhere in the text of the fiction.

What we know is that the Core were originally a benevolent galactic government, and that the period before the war was a golden age of prosperity and peace. We know the Core issued a mandate for everyone to get "patterned" into sentient machines (when the technology to do so was invented) because they thought it would benefit public health and safety since nobody would get sick or injured or suffer the ravages of ageing. We know that the buildup of hostilities was gradual, and that war was never officially declared (the manual states this).

We know that the Core forces are made of their greatest military minds duplicated many times to enable the mass-fabrication of intelligent war machines, and the Arm responded to this build up by cloning their best soldiers and bioengineering them to make better fighters.

It's not clear what Arm clones look like these days, whether they're still guys in mech suits, or what. One Arm mission describes pilots normally having their pain receptors turned off, and the spider tanks are described as being piloted by brains that have been transgenically hybridised with spider genes. A Core mission describes Arm bots having "organic components", so it's, again, unclear whether these are humans in suits (which the Core might just perceive as "organic components") or actually just brains/organs in vats, controlling the machines cybernetically.

It's also unclear how many non-cloned humans exist still. The manual, game, and intro (especially the manual) emphasise that the main part of the war is over and that almost all or all of the civilian infrastructure for both sides is gone. Both sides are described as having their "civilisation" long since destroyed. On the other hand, one of the final Arm missions indicates that the "thoughts of all Empyrrean" are with the Commander leading the final assault on Core Prime, so there's obviously some humans hanging back on safe planets doing something that isn't fighting.

The same is mostly true of the Core, too: the closest we directly get to see of them having civilian people hanging around (aside from the non-militarised transports we see in an early mission of their campaign) is Core Prime being home to Central Consciousness: basically hundreds of millions of communally-linked minds whose collective knowledge and skills lead the Core. It's described as having numerous "mind clusters" and "partitions" that have various jobs and responsibilities, and people get shuffled around within Central Consciousness (or added to it from outside) when it's believed certain tasks need a lot more people working on them (like security or industrial planning or whatever). God I feel like I've worked there.

It's also worth pointing out, to those who are quick to label the Arm as the good guys, that the second last mission of the Arm campaign is about destroying Central Consciousness, effectively killing what would today be a large country's worth of people. In fact the last mission specifically states that the Arm go out of their way to exterminate all sentient machines on Core Prime, out of the fear that if any survive the mere continued existence of their minds could be the seed to reproduce the Core civilisation in the future. The Arm are every bit as genocidal and indifferent to their enemies' basic personhood as the Core are to theirs.

----

Ultimately it's just a SciFi game with a particularly well-narrated excuse plot in which you get to pick the side you want to help. If you can most easily see yourself as fighting a SciFi war to defend humanity against a evil robots, then I'm sure the Arm seem like the good guys to you. If you're the kind of person who hears about Core people patterning themselves into computer networks and thinks that sounds neat and might be something you'd try, then the Core probably feel like the more relatable faction and the Arm probably seem a bit more like a legion of crazies who want to wipe people out.

Or at least, maybe you can pick a side based on whose galaxy you'd like to live in once the war was resolved in their favour: a galaxy of humans devoid of intelligent machines, or a galaxy of intelligent machines devoid of humans? It's SciFi after all, what future seems cooler/more interesting to you?

[Peregrine]

I hate TLDR, I feel it has no place in a discussion about in depth topics and is the bane of meaningful discourse.

That said. Many people don't seem to understand that "Total War" means they kill everything. It is the complete elimination of that civilization, literally to the last man woman and child. Subjugation is not enough, and there is no mercy for young, old, servicemember or civilian.

The Core Contingency does address a few of those points.

But overall, I like the way you presented your statements and provided a lot of information.

In the end, the ARM won (Because the CC story wouldn't have been made otherwise) and we saw them rebuilding the various ecosystems across the worlds and restoring them with their cloning tech.

Given that their war was 4000+ Years of "Total War" and constant horror, and honestly, we don't know how long the conflict had been ongoing prior to that, it's very understandable that there is such hated and so little innocence to be found in their ranks. They were brought to the very brink of annihilation, and FINALLY the war was ended. In such context, their fear is perhaps not justified, but it is understandable. They finally had the chance to end the threat and prevent the war from continuing, thus saving future generations from having to fight a literally endless war where losing meant that everything you ever cared about ceased to exist.

And after the war ended, they turned to rebuilding and healing themselves and the various worlds, as well as advancing tech to improve quality of life. I think that does show they cared.

[Frank Exchange Of Views]

Originally posted by Peregrine:

And after the war ended, they turned to rebuilding and healing themselves and the various worlds, as well as advancing tech to improve quality of life. I think that does show they cared.

True true: I'm actually not attempting to argue that the Arm are the bad guys, I'm just arguing against a simple equation of Arm with good and Core with bad. One of the reasons I've actually always liked the Core, going way back to when I was a kid playing the game for the first time, was that a galaxy rebuilt in their image would have been different than the galaxy rebuilt by the Arm.

I've always loved SciFi that explores what really alien species or life forms would be like, or even just very different forms of society and culture, so the idea of a galactic civilisation in the likeness of disembodied synthetic intelligences sounds strange and fascinating to me. A galactic civilisation ruled by humans is... something we've seen a bunch of before in other SciFi. Not a bad outcome, but to my mind a less interesting one, if i had to vote between them.

I think the crux of it is just that Total Annihilation goes out of its way to ensure that there's just enough to both factions that if you want, you could see yourself rooting for either of them, so I'd like to present a reading of the game that resists the notion that the Core are just... SkyNet, deciding to nuke us to glass right out of the clear blue day. There are games out there that present this sort of setting explicitly, AI War for example. The machines gain sentience, they decide to kill us all. I'm more interested (as an SF fan) in the world of a game like, say, Cogmind: a machine world populated by forms of non-human, inorganic sentience.

Originally posted by Peregrine:

I hate TLDR, I feel it has no place in a discussion about in depth topics and is the bane of meaningful discourse.

I actually like TL;DRs because I have a tendency to be very verbose and you never know if somebody's going to read what you wrote and decide it wasn't worth their time, but if you have a point to make, they might still appreciate a summation of what you felt your central idea was. I mean if I hadn't signified it with "TL;DR", it'd just have been a thesis summary!

[mltnschroeder]

Well, one thing is for sure: whomever are issuing orders to the Core Commander are ♥♥♥♥♥... DO SO NOW. At least Arm High Command issue orders w/ professional courtesy. This could possibly imply that Core units do not actually have free will, rather are issued run commands that force them to execute tactical sub-routines programmed to kill.

So while individual self-conscious machines might agonize over the unending violence of the war and need psychological counseling, they don't actually have a choice but to obey.

Originally posted by Frank Exchange Of Views:

It's not clear what Arm clones look like these days, whether they're still guys in mech suits, or what. One Arm mission describes pilots normally having their pain receptors turned off, and the spider tanks are described as being piloted by brains that have been transgenically hybridised with spider genes. A Core mission describes Arm bots having "organic components", so it's, again, unclear whether these are humans in suits (which the Core might just perceive as "organic components") or actually just brains/organs in vats, controlling the machines cybernetically.

This sounds a lot like the Cylons in the newer version of Battlestar Galactica - which it should be pointed out are initially the bad guys in the story (though in later episodes it gets complicated).