Lore:Cliques/Chart

Inter-Clique Relations (0-100)Each row represents a clique, and each column in that row shows how that clique feels about the vertical clique. The feelings are rarely mutual.

	Center	Unity	Frontier	Trade	Production	Progress	Plasma	Monarchist
Center		20These Unity clowns are risking SolFed lives in pointless conflict, and more importantly, SolFed resources!	10These are the little guys. They're a drain of resources, producing little for SolFed. And if they ever grow up? Rivals!	60We want all the control, they want to make free trade, that's us giving up control. Still, it's nice they're getting us stuff.	70They're against the Trade Clique? They encourage us to make our own things, thus holding power over our own things? Sure, but do they also have to encourage our rivals to do the same? It's harder to crush someone under your boot when they're self-sufficient. All the same, we're gonna keep making normal stuff too.	30We're all for kick-ass technology, but they have this thing called "ethics" and we keep "breaking it"?	10Moralistic assholes. The more Plasma we have, the stronger we can be, and they're trying to cut us off? Limiting us to only "what we need?" Fuck these naive shitheads but we will take their Plasma anyways.	60These are nice strawmen to show that we could be worse. We have Democracy on our side, compared to these rigid, power-hungry bastards. We mostly do the same things, ethicswise, except we have enough leaders moving around that there's no individual to blame for how shitty we are. Monarchs, you love to hate 'em.
Unity	0These cowards pulled us out of a war we were about to win! Our comrades' lives were thrown away for these pencil-pushing bureaucrat assholes to piss on. We wouldn't cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire.		95Sweet, innocent Frontiersmen. We were once like you, before the anvil of war galvanized us into necessarily-focused ruthlessness. We do what we must so that Frontiersfolk like these never have to know hardship. Forgive us for what we must do.	70A useful pawn sometimes. A foreign power who's dependent on SolFed shipping routes is a power powerless to harm us. At the same time, a foreign power who uses SolFed shipping routes to grow stronger is a foreign power who's able to resist joining SolFed.	80They don't get in our way, and it's nice when SolFed gets stronger.	60Conquest needs innovation, but they've stonewalled us a few times for "immorality" and "not respecting the sovereign rights of other states?" That's what we do, we bring folk into SolFed through peace or in pieces. The ends justify the means, so give us that fucking laser already!!	30The perpetual war effort is costly, and the Plasma Clique often deems our efforts "excessive," thus charging us a strong premium for the plasma necessary to keep SolFed safe and secure.	50They get in our way about as much as they help us. Sometimes we can pitch conquest as a honorable glory and draw them into our fights, but like, these folk don't entirely buy into the idea of SolFed to begin with so like, once the entire galaxy is under SolFed, we might turn our sights on these folk?
Frontier	20They're the coreworlds and don't give a rat's ass about the little guys in the fringe. A lot of their policies, which they have the power to enforce, make it harder for Frontiersmen.	65They're fighting for us, but they're also putting us in the line of fire. Some of us are on good terms with our foreign neighbors and don't want the boat rocked.		70Rather dependent on their whims; a Frontier colony lives and dies by the cargo shuttles coming its way. They don't always act in our interest, but what can we do?	95To be important enough to SolFed to defend, a Frontier colony needs a hook, a gimmick, something unique. The Production Clique is all about helping nations specialize into something unique.	80The social contract between folk is thinner in the Frontier, where you do what you gotta do to survive. The Progress clique takes advantage of that, doing social experiments and prototype tech out where there's less cultural baggage to deal with. Given their choice of ethics, though, this rarely turns out poorly for the frontier nation, and whatever downsides are usually worth the ongoing support. But there's also a lot of Synthetic Life in the Frontier, which can get awkward to address.	85They give us cheap plasma so we can thrive, and their ethical mandates aren't too awful. But if anyone has us by the balls, it's the Plasma Clique. Plasma's like the only reliable power source when you're far enough from a star, so colonies in deep space are effectively Plasma Clique vassals begging for their charity. Luckily, they're known for charity.	45They don't particularly care about small fries like us. Sometimes a Monarch will decide they want to "adopt" an impoverished frontier nation, either taking it as a pet project for a few years, or building a vacation home to abandon. Either way, their attention is disruptive, unwanted, and unpredictable, but rarely harmful.
Trade	80Bunch of consumers. Good buyers, but it's always a fight for control over shipping rights, etc. Not ideal customers but they're a good chunk of SolFed.	90Rule of Acquisition 34: War is good for business.	40They're a captive market, sure, but they're also not the richest customers. There's a lot of space to cover with them, and not a lot of profit to be made.		20These communists are actively trying to discourage dependence on trade!! But at the same time, they're encouraging the development of unique products, which elitists will pay a fortune to source.	70Any advancement is a product waiting to be sold, but the prejudice against AIs is... shutting out valid paying customers.	40They don't mess with us as much as they could. Yeah, it'd be nice to put Plasma, the greatest commodity ever, on the free market, but letting them have the one market means they don't interfere with the rest of galactic trade. Besides, they use our shipping lanes and they sell to us too.	70These guys are always buying something weird. The advantage of having a single head of state is that there's only one person to con into a big sale. On the other hand, they're notoriously unstable, changing heads every 50 years or so, and whims much more often than that, so securing a reliable trade relationship is a rare thing indeed.
Production	35They're willing to invest a little in making unique products, but afraid to take risks and rely on others, so they're never going to really understand. They'll co-opt our ideals and steal the best products from our folk.	65A war effort needs a lot of gun factories. Still, as soon as the conflict ends, there's a lot of gun factories with no one to sell to.	75Frontier colonies love the idea of self-sufficiency and are willing to specialize if it gets our aid. They've got to take risks to survive, and focusing on a single product is a huge risk. We're providing them more aid than they're giving back, but it's worth it for our ideals.	25They want a dependent worker-class who can't survive without their oversight, their routes. And god damn it, they've won. As much as we can fight to have folk self-sufficient, if they're going to prosper on a galactic scale, they need to sell to someone... and the Trade Clique's the only someone out there big enough. They're assholes, metaphorical slavers, the devil to deal with, but damn if they're not too big to ignore.		95Every new innovation could be the next big product that can drive an entire planet to greatness. It takes a scientist to make a new product, but it takes the Production Clique to turn that into a new industry.	75They're an instrument for power production. Relying on the charity of a pious plasma prick isn't exactly "self-sufficient," but it's usually easier than building your own power grid - which they will help with anyways for some reason??	90Monarchs love it when they have a claim to fame. They're practically champing at the bit for a niche industry to monopolize, and are quick to invest great deals of cash into things they don't understand.
Progress	35"Technological progress at the expense of everything but morals." The Center Clique enjoys the data showing how they can retain power, but they value power over progress. They'll regulate threats to them holding power, and if the data shows that they're not the best power-holders for the situation, you can expect a smashed laptop and a death mark, not progress. Still, it's a good look for them to at least pretend to like you, even if you do have this thing called "ethics" that they keep breaking.	80Their heart's in the right place: peace is good. The data shows that the leading cause of war is having two nations, so the math technically supports going to war to fix that, and it strongly supports going to peace to make two nations into one.	50Folk who are willing to take risks and support technology, but also folk who are really sentimental about their homelands and aren't willing to take risks. It's entirely a grab bag and it averages out to "indifferent."	70The Free Market is inherently a rational, mathematical science. Economics is science. The Progress Clique should be their biggest glazers, but it's also economical to be unethical.	90It's nice to have an idea and be able to watch someone make it into a reality. It's less nice to watch them butcher your intentions for cost-cutting or sentimental reasons.		40They abhor excess. Science is about trying things that aren't always viable. They get pissed when we "throw away" good plasma at learning something new. They always want to judge the quality of our intentions, always fighting against our proposals, always denying us enough plasma to see this next experiment through... It's an uphill battle, but at the end of the day we do need their Plasma.	70It hurts to lie, but a good statistician can make any graph say anything. If a graph has more than 4 colors and 5 lines on it, the bozo King'll almost always throw enough funding and manpower at us to make it a reality. Still, these kings rule extremely inefficiently and it's downright painful manipulating them into doing the right thing sometimes.
Plasma	60They're the biggest customers, but also the most likely to breach our ethical demands. When they listen to us, everyone listens to us.	50Conflict is a great way to burn through a lot of Plasma, but the neighbors they fight already aren't listening to our decrees and regulations, so honestly the Unity's goals are the fastest way to get these neighbors to listen. Even if a lot of plasma is wasted in warfare, our message follows them into battle.	60Whiny little shits. Never agree with our assessment of what a "necessary" amount of Plasma is. But there's only so much resistance you can put up when you're this isolated from SolFed. They grumble, but they kneel all the same.	40They earn their standing through encouraging excess and lavish lifestyles, but they do respect our monopoly on Plasma.	70Self-sufficiency is good, but these folk never stop and settle down. THE FACTORY MUST GROW means demands always grow. Always more power needed. If they can harness renewable powers like nuclear or solar, great! But they never do.	90Incredible innovators! Every single new transistor they invent is a great power savings for the entire galaxy, which means the galaxy needs less plasma. Every so often, we fight over the direction their research goes, how they're wasting good energy on useless prospects, but there's not really anyone else in the galaxy who truly understands the ethics of great power and great responsibility.		30These Monarchs are prone to waste and are the very definition of excessive lifestyle, but their peasants are perfectly fine and certainly deserve the charity we fight to bring them. Besides, no King is large enough to disobey us outright without starving their people into an uprising.
Monarchist	70We could be worse, we could be these guys. It's nice to have someone to point at and claim democracy doesn't work, so we can keep our Divine Mandate or whatever. They don't bother us much, and there's always a few "elected" officials who want to party with us.	70They're out there squashing threats to our power? For free? And if we help their efforts out, sometimes we get some free vassal states? Their ideas don't make sense but working with them does.	60Mostly beneath us, but it feels so Noble and Kind to go out and uplift some of these poor, pathetic, defenseless dirt-farmers, so we can show the galaxy how Benevolent and Deserving Of Power we are.	80We pay for things, they bring us things. With so much deception and treachery, it's refreshing to have a straightforward relationship with someone.	90We're prepared to offer you 500,000 credits and an entire moon for 80% of your business. And - snerk - a royalty deal, 50cr for every product sold.	90Sometimes you just need a Trusted Advisor to tell you you're doing a good job.	30Enough with the preaching and get back to the tithing! Hand your Plasma over.

Each row represents a clique, and each column in that row shows how that clique feels about the other cliqueSo Center feels 20 about Unity, but Unity feels 0 about Center.. The feelings are rarely mutual.