I'm fine conquering a planet just as I am overthrowing the Home government to install our own brand of Junta or whatever we install. I just think all this stuff about it detracts from the game itself.
The unfortunate fact is that like real politics, a lot of the military decisions we as players are making in Home's local volume are influenced by personal beliefs. Also, to put a fine point on it, we could easily conduct effective economic "imperialism" and a trade empire through our existing system-just because we have the option for war doesn't mean we should take it. Stellaris, for all its depth, doesn't have the capacity to simulate the blow-by-blow of the SWS doing COIN work in S'taxu for the next 25 years. But because this game is run by real people, that is a real option that can be done, that we will then have to deal with!
EDIT: I mean, if a Democratic Interstellar Republic encounters us an instantly declares war out of some kind of crusade of Righteousness are you guys just gonna argue we roll over and die because it's a "good" nation conquering us?
No, because any democracy that instantly declares war on a foreign power they've just me for anything less than blatant crimes against humanity isn't a nation I'd want to be a part of. I fully admit that my IC sympathies lie with the anti-Council factions, but that's because I like the interpersonal drama of a character serving the mission of a system or institution and watching their "out of step" nature become full-blown regret, or sympathy for an opponent becoming support.
Of course, let's not forget that they also blew up every station they could - explicitly including ones that didn't bombard the planet, and in fact actively opposed those, giving them unrestricted control of the orbitals!
To gently push back on this, the information we have, while incomplete, indicates that the PMC fired on any orbital that was shooting at anything else, because the majority were being used either to bombard the planet or target PMC and SWS craft in the inner system. As grim as it is, it's totally buyable that they shot anything that was shooting back, because every missile fired could either hit them or contribute to the genocide on the surface. There's no outright indication that the PMC had any desire to seize the orbitals, even though I agree that their closed-mouth attitude on how much they knew about the strikes is mildly suspect.
Like, yeah, it was a war crime that the Dynasts nuked their own planet, they do in fact deserve to be punished for it. But that was a dead hand in reaction to their capital being vaporized and most of the senior leadership being consumed in nuclear fire - an event that the PMC obviously had foreknowledge of.
Again, I think part of the increasing OOC stress and tension in this thread is due to interpretational differences like this one. From my own reading of our incomplete intelligence, the initial strike on the Capital Dome may have been nuclear, or even conventional, perhaps a SIED or VBIED. This was followed by the Dynasts activating their dead hand, presumably on the assumption that this decapitation strike was the prelude to a full PMC or Cassalon invasion. The PMC had, to our knowledge, vague warnings of an "event" set to take place that they felt they needed to try to intervene against-I do not think they would willingly allow a nuclear holocaust of the type we're dealing with even if it had given them the de facto dominance of system affairs they now have. However, I am assuming good faith because it seems logical
to me that most militaries in proto-democratic civil conflicts tend to support the people-see the Arab Spring IRL for a few successful examples, or the Romanian and Euromaidan Revolutions
. In turn, others are assuming bad faith by the PMC, and even outright genocidal conspiracy, for reasons of their own ideologies, both OOC and IC, and hence the tension ratchets up.
TLDR: I am still anti-conquest because I feel that will be a Hoover-powered drain towards the exact kind of instability and violence we witnessed in S'taxu. Also, it's worrying how heated things are getting here.
