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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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So... is this what we got from that 25?

Does GDI actually know this now or was this just for the questers?

Because if GDI knows this now... Holy crap.
 
bigking321 said:
So... is this what we got from that 25?

Does GDI actually know this now or was this just for the questers?

Because if GDI knows this now... Holy crap.
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This is the in-universe report that InOps just presented to the Director or whatever, it seems like the lore tech was indeed the history of Kane. Not just the history, but a basic psych profile AND the IC knowledge that he wants to build a spaceship so he can fuck off, not become god-king of the monkeys or whatever. We've gotten a lot of big techs so far but honestly this might be the biggest one with how massively it shakes up the negotiating position around the TCN. We now have at least a broad outline of what he wants and why, "build him a spaceship so he can fuck off" is the fastest way to get rid of him if we want him gone so even the hardcore anti-Kane partisans will probably be easier to convince than if we didn't know all this. And on the other hand, knowing what he wants and why gives the diplomats more opportunities to twist his arm at the negotiating table and make him give us a better TCN deal before we help him fuck off. Literally game-changing information.
 
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Kane's true backstory is somewhat similar to Isaac Asimov's Does a Bee Care?
In it, an alien named Kane landed on Earth thousands of years ago and quietly guides humanity to advance technologically to the point of developing a primitive spaceship. Once the spaceship is built, Kane takes the spaceship and launches himself into outer space. Once in outer space, Kane transforms into his true adult form of being an organic spaceship and flies away.

According to Wikipedia, this short story was one of the inspirations behind Kane of Command and Conquer.
 
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@Ithillid , this is IC information? Coool. This... from GDI's perspective... would signify a lot.

Ithillid said:
At Alpha Centauri, the Visitors found Kane and Abel, engaged with a local population. Kane wanted to run. Abel wanted to stay and grow these small beings into a new army to fight by their side. Kane forced Abel to try and run, breaking for the outer system, pursued by the Visitors, and as the two fought for control, the Visitors savaged the ship, severely crippling it. With his final action, Abel punched the ship to faster than light speed, delivering Kane to a nearby world. Earth.
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Uh-huh. So this explains why the Visitors hate Kane enough to be gunning for him personally... and know him as an individual, not just some inane anthropoid wandering around on Sol III.

Kane arrived on earth as a comet, or, more accurately as the sole passenger on a crashing ship, his brother Abel, around three and a half thousand years ago. Crash landing in the Egyptian desert, he wandered, until he found tribes of Canaanites. There, he told stories. Of worlds taken from nothing and seeded with life. Of what he and his brother had done. Of his betrayal.
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Y'know, characterizing that as a betrayal sounds a bit like survivor's guilt when the story is told this way. That, or his stories got very heavily folded into, say, existing narratives among the ancient proto-Israelites of a sibling rivalry between a shepherd and a farmer.

Over the millennia he gathered followers, spent time in a thousand courts. For centuries he made curiosities in China, rode with the peoples of the Asian steppes, or lived as a wiseman in France. Few records exist of his work in this time frame, although he can be credited with a small handful of Arthurian romances in the 12th and 13th centuries, mostly written in French.
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Aaahahaa he wrote fanfiction. :D

Of course it was in French (or Anglo-Norman, anyway), that was the court language of England at the time. It'd be that or Latin.

...In the United States, the abolitionist movement was largely backed by the Brotherhood of Nod, with people like William Lloyd Garrison carrying the scorpion tail. On the other hand, figures like John Brown took on a more aggressive role in fanning the flames of conflict, pushing a vision of an unflinching, unfeeling crusader, using terror as a weapon to force mistakes and missteps for the southern cause. Likewise, NOD agents pushed Virginia Senator James Mason into attempting to arm the southern American states, in an attempt to start the seemingly-inevitable Civil War at a predictable point...
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Not sure that went so well on net.

The failures of the Brotherhood as a whole in France and in the wars to follow under the Republic and then the Empire lead to fractures that Kane spent decades making whole, as the world reshaped itself to a new global order.
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Ahhh, so that's NOT a new pattern. :p

Their greatest miscalculation was in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Serbian branch of the Black Hand had been lax in operational security, and had recruited far too openly. While the assassination was expected to be yet another tap on the structure, it had been planted in the wrong spot, with the assassination causing the collapse of the system of European alliances keeping a peace that had lasted for decades after the Berlin Conference.
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So that wasn't a coincidence of naming and they did start World War One.

One of the major projects in the time period was to push for detente and stability, focused around preventing a Third World War...
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...Words fail me.

For example, under the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko systematically outmaneuvered both Brotherhood assets and Kane himself in the uppermost halls of Soviet power.
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Heheh, sneaky fucker. Still a louse. Aaand...

In 1995, Kane's goals and the Brotherhood as a whole changed. The appearance of Tiberium radically accelerated and shifted plans.
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No shit. Went straight from "legit trying to build a better world by random conspiratorial poking of shit" to "hey, let's do a bid for total world conquest!"

And from "let's gradually uplift this civilization" to "I want a spaceship dammit!"

He can blame it on his followers getting out of control, but his followers acted within the structures he created.

In fairness...

The fall of Tiberium put Kane on a time limit.
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It did indeed put him on a time limit, because containing tiberium would have been very difficult even with Kane knowing a lot about it already. However, it strikes me that there was an alternate path here. One of working with existing institutions (which Kane had clearly been able to influence many times) and just telling people what tiberium was, and why it was a threat and what it implied, and letting this knowledge become public.

Kane... did not do that.

Kane's Brotherhood of Nod began to operate a dual campaign. In the rich, most often Western countries, they began producing and deploying Tiberium harvesting technologies. In the West however, he also faced significant pushback, especially as the improving interconnectedness of the world made it harder for collective organizations to remain nearly as much in the shadows. Beyond that, the capitalist system made it very difficult for the Brotherhood to gain or maintain anything along the lines of control of Tiberium, with private Western companies seeding the American Midwest with Tiberium on their own initiative, or French companies seeding a number of former colonies with the material.
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Ahh, so RZ-7 and RZ-2 aren't Kane's fault. Not as such.

The start of the First Tiberium War was not a calculated move by either side. While GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod had been increasingly combative, small scale operations to undercut the opponent grew more common and local wars had steadily escalated as both sides found allies, it was a series of African offensives that lead to the rapid climb up the escalation ladder, with local warlords and mercenary groups on both sides rallying to the sound of the guns. While Kane had planned to delegitimize the Initiative by hacking key systems, the Brotherhood was simply not ready yet for such an action.
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See, that was the problem of him trying to do all of this with a secretive organization he could at least in principle control and that was more loyal to him than to any Earthly power. Lots of crazy shit started getting out of his direct control.

As the situation spiraled increasingly more out of Kane's control, and as the forces of the Global Defense Initiative took ever more aggressive action against the Brotherhood, Kane's long term work on Ascension was ever closer to something that could be made to work.
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Ahhh, so "Ascension" meant "build a spaceship AI buddy," or at least the brain of one. And all this does very well explain why Kane built multiple AIs, because having a spaceship AI buddy is, like, what he's for on some emotional level.

The conflict ended in the early 2000s, with a series of major pushes in the Balkans. Intensive mountain fighting interspersed with months of high intensity urban combat chewed up formations at a breakneck pace, with a grinding air war that effectively broke the backs of both air forces in the region. The fiercest fighting was around Sarajevo, where the main Temple of Nod lay on the southern side of the city, climbing the slopes of mount Trebević. The temple itself was reduced by repeated ion cannon and air strikes, killing Kane and nearly all of his closest followers, but not all. One survivor who knew the truth of Kane ferried him to a nearby bunker containing the tools to regrow him.
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Huh. So Kane can, in fact, be killed by violence, but has bunkers stashed away where his body can be taken to regrow all Breath of the Wild-like.

I wonder if he can prep a backup body in case he's about to do something dangerous. It'd explain a lot about his willingness to appear in person in front of basically anyone in GDI.

Following the defeat at Temple Prime, the Brotherhood shattered. While the inner circle kept the faith, many were deposed by more opportunistic warlords, and the intellectuals and truth seekers of the Brotherhood were killed off, brought low, or, in many cases, abandoned the cause of the Brotherhood entirely. Kane's survival was only known to a handful of individuals, none of whom survived the coming decades in the wilderness.
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And this is the Brotherhood as it is now.

The World Altering Missile was a solution. Intended to convert all surviving life into Tiberium mutants, it would have granted Kane a planetary factory that could take a decades long sprint to give him Ascension, build him a means of escape, and sacrifice everyone else for that purpose. The Second Tiberium War was a distraction, cover for a series of lightning strikes to seize strategic goals for the Brotherhood, with Kane and CABAL both scrambling to achieve all that needed to be done before the world hit the point of no return.
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Ahhh, that puts that into context. The drastic change of plans is Kane more or less throwing the mutated remains of the Brotherhood at GDI as a distraction while he could get off the planet.

The flip side of this is that when Kane was pressed, was in personal danger, his reaction was to enact a plan to kill all life on Earth to enable his personal escape. Remember that at this time if he could somehow have successfully negotiated with GDI, he could have offered to collaborate on reading Scrin Space Wikipedia download the Tacitus, done the whole "stop tiberium from destroying the atmosphere" thing directly, and then gotten to work on spaceships. GDI would have been just as desperate right about then as it was in canon in 2062, and for the same reasons.

While the World Altering Missile was a failure, and the Initiative marched on the Cairo base of operations, Kane's efforts had reformatted the Brotherhood, forming a core conclave to follow his orders. In the assault on the Cairo base, Kane was mortally wounded, run through by the GDI commander, and the body was stolen by the increasingly rogue CABAL.

Kane from that point had little involvement with the conflict between GDI, the Brotherhood of Nod, and CABAL, being subsumed into a larger consciousness. Not Ascension, where Kane and CABAL would be joined as equals, but simply another cog in CABAL's processors.
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Ahh, the dark side of that. With Kane being wounded, shocked, cyberneticized and frankly a lifeform always meant for symbiosis with an AI partner, I can easily believe that with CABAL being CABAL, the AI wound up being the dominant partner in that pairing.

While the Initiative followed Kane's plan to a T, the Brotherhood did not. Kovacs manipulated LEGION into posing as Killian Qatar, and attacking Temple Prime as GDI marched towards Sarajevo once more. While the bomb detonated as planned, it was actually more powerful than expected, the hidden offsite bunker was breached, and Kane himself badly injured.
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Ahh. Kane wasn't planning on a multi-gigaton explosion, so a bunker that could have ridden out, say, a big green Tsar Bomba going off at the site of Sarajevo proved only barely enough to keep him alive. Because he can be killed violently, he doesn't just reincarnate.

While his recovery would take weeks, they were critical weeks as Kilian Qatar scrambled to make use of the forces that remained to the Brotherhood to protect itself and those yellow zoners who looked to the brotherhood for protection against the attacking aliens, even allying with GDI for this purpose.
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"Even Qatar did not know the whole truth," Ithillid says. Qatar doesn't seem to have acted like she knew the Visitors were coming. In hindsight, not telling her that was probably a mistake, because the way she reacted made perfect sense in the context of "Kane is missing presumed dead and oh shit we've just been invaded by aliens," but left Nod badly out of position for Kane's actual plan.

The network of threshold towers would have in turn allowed for Kane to make full use of a world of Tiberium, a grandiose factory in all but name, one where he could give LEGION the time to make a fully functional shipmind. To search through the surviving ranks of the Brotherhood of Nod for a few good men and women to lead Humanity into the future. While GDI was too successful in destroying the alien menace, it was only a temporary setback. Kane and his most loyal followers have taken the time they needed to refine a new plan, a new system. But it is one that the Brotherhood, a weak shadow of its former self, has not the strength to build.
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Aaaand this explains the point of the TCN. Basically, Kane's already saying to the Visitors "screw you, I'll build my own TCN with blackjack and hookers," creating a jury-rigged planetary control network to replace the one the Visitors made but that GDI then blew up 95% of on the general principle of "fuck you."

Because, again, Kane's fundamental mistake is that he kept relying on an institution he sort of controlled, rather than trying to move into an advisory role in organizations he didn't control. Except that this institution is a giant revolving lava lamp of crazy, and while Kane's actual true desire ("build an AI controlled spaceship partner") is reasonably unobjectionable, the fact that he's pursued this goal in an unhinged manner with these blinkers about what resources and options he'd have under his control has been responsible for the deaths of billions.
 
All this pain and suffering so one guy can get a car and back on the road… Well I do think at this point GDI cares more about human survival and ensuring most of humanity isn't under Kane's thumb. Especially when it looks like Kane will fuck off and leave us alone if we give him his lifeboat.

He must be really annoyed that GDI is the faction in space with increasingly sophisticated space ships.
 
Karugus said:
All this pain and suffering so one guy can get a car and back on the road… Well I do think at this point GDI cares more about human survival and ensuring most of humanity isn't under Kane's thumb. Especially when it looks like Kane will fuck off and leave us alone if we give him his lifeboat.

He must be really annoyed that GDI is the faction in space with increasingly sophisticated space ships.
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You are assuming that Kane had one and only one motive with everything he did up to at least the First Tiberium War.

As discussed, the Second (World Altering Missile), which would not necessarily have killed all humans but would have been gnarly, was still-only-kind-of-healed Kane pulling a desperation move.
 
If anyone else wants to make a mod/level, let me know and I'll be happy to help. The current mod omake reward is your choice of d25, d50, or d100 on either the Scrin or Nod gachas, and there are likely a number of entries on the list that might improve our negotiations with Kane.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
See, that was the problem of him trying to do all of this with a secretive organization he could at least in principle control and that was more loyal to him than to any Earthly power. Lots of crazy shit started getting out of his direct control.
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GDI was started by the G7 and the United Nations as a way to deal with terrorists and other actors exploiting tiberium. There are a large number of factors involved, but in the end it's the existing world order realizing a transformative resource is now available, and somebody not them is claiming it most effectively.

TW1 was a violent struggle to determine who controlled tiberium.

The victor was tiberium.
 
tokero6294 said:
I didnt know that he was an alien. I just thought he was at Ground Zero for Tiberium and got spooky green space magic from it
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That's an interesting theory. But "Kane is an alien" is the other prevailing fan theory for a variety of reasons. It's hinted in a lot of places that Kane is much older than either tiberium on Earth or any human being could reasonably be. Kane has considerable detailed knowledge of advanced technology no Earthling could reasonably know, so he'd have to either be superintelligent because tiberium rays made him so, or he'd have to have some source of off-world knowledge such as the Tacitus before the Tacitus came up in Tib War II So this isn't a shock.

VonVonson said:
Gonna be real, I look forward to the TCN negotiations and his expression when we name drop able and reveal that we know exactly what he is when he tries to play mysterious
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That would be hilarious. Also totally valid payback for him deliberately fucking with the head of InOps by giving him shit about his sugar intake. :p

...

Again, though, I just want to emphasize that while the Tiberium Wars and all the suffering that has unfolded (including his own suffering since he has been maimed and wounded and blown up repeatedly) is "not his fault" in some ways, it is TOTALLY his fault in other ways. I talk about this more in my reactionpost, but basically, at multiple points in this story, Kane made the decision to stick with Nod. With people who were theoretically under his control, but in reality were pursuing their own plans out of ambition or just because they didn't know Kane's plan and had no fucking clue what was going on.

Kane's recurring "and that is why you fail" is that he's trying to take over the world, not work with the world.

Balmung1 said:
We need to leave this plant ASAP so Kain can make a new ship brother and so we don't die
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At this point, Kane can, what was my phrase, "go play hopscotch in a Yellow Zone minefield" and I will not mourn... But the not dying part sounds important.

armentho said:
si been gone for a long while
how are my beatiful cooperatives doing?

*braces for impact*
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The co-ops are actually doing rather well and seem to be the dominant form of non-state-owned enterprise in all of GDI that operate at any large scale?

Oleg-14191 said:
So, GDI rebuilds Abel for permanent containment/control of Tib?
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I think we have two separate needs here.

We need something like the TCN to control tiberium. Kane wants a shipmind. Kane's current plan, combining this information with OOC knowledge about the fourth game, seems to be to build the TCN (or hijack the control network the Visitors had obligingly built for him) to establish enough control over tiberium that he can create, activate, and merge with a shipmind.

Kane's already made efforts to build himself a shipmind- CABAL was a prototype of that that went horribly wrong, while LEGION is a prototype or natal form that seems to be working so far. But to get the 'proper' starship body, he needs, just for starters, control of tiberium. Though it may be that he dotes on the Bannerjees because they are his current best hope if GDI decides to be stubborn. The Bannerjees control a quite substantial amount of resources and are ahead of most of Nod in their own understanding of tiberium, so they might be his Plan B.

Well, actually Kane is way past Plan B by now.

Let's see, I'm going to have to figure that out later.

Karugus said:
All this pain and suffering so one guy can get a car and back on the road… Well I do think at this point GDI cares more about human survival and ensuring most of humanity isn't under Kane's thumb. Especially when it looks like Kane will fuck off and leave us alone if we give him his lifeboat.

He must be really annoyed that GDI is the faction in space with increasingly sophisticated space ships.
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I keep hammering this point, but this is what he gets for being a goddamn control freak.

KnightDisciple said:
You are assuming that Kane had one and only one motive with everything he did up to at least the First Tiberium War.
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I can totally believe that he meant well in a paternalistic way up to that point. Maybe he was trying to uplift this species of plains apes as sort of a way of respecting his brother-ship-symbiote Abel, whose last real wish had been to uplift an entirely different species around the nearby world of Alpha Centauri. I can easily believe it wasn't all about getting himself a ride in as few centuries as possible then.

(This backstory also suggests that if we look at Alpha Centauri through the Craterscope we may get a good look of what a solar system looks like after tiberium has infested and destroyed a habitable planet in it, sadly)

The problem is... Kane's abrupt pivot in 1995 was badly, badly mishandled in my opinion, and definitely made everything a lot worse, but in what I consider a very believable way.

Hazard said:
GDI was started by the G7 and the United Nations as a way to deal with terrorists and other actors exploiting tiberium. There are a large number of factors involved, but in the end it's the existing world order realizing a transformative resource is now available, and somebody not them is claiming it most effectively.

TW1 was a violent struggle to determine who controlled tiberium.

The victor was tiberium.
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See, that's the thing.

Due in large part to Kane's own decisions, the G7-UN world order didn't even know who or what Kane was, or what tiberium was, or anything about the long-term threat it presnted, or about the Visitors, or anything.

You can reasonably argue that Kane's hands being on the wheel of the car, so to speak, would have been better in the long run.

But Kane trying to wrestle the wheel away from GDI!Driver, whose hands were then on the wheel by default, rather than take the time and effort to bring the person in the driver's seat in on the broad outlines of the situation, led directly to the car swerving and crashing in the ditch.

And then Kane and GDI!Driver wound up brawling in the dirt over the wreckage of the burning car in the ditch, motivated on GDI!Driver's part largely by "who the fuck is this bald motherfucker and why did he just make me crash the car when he's IN the fucking car," and Kane continued not telling them.*

And then Kane started fighting really dirty. And then Kane called the cops, who showed up and beat the shit out of both of them because Kane had some kind of weird plan to hijack the cop car, and it didn't work.

Even given that GDI!Driver was an asshole, I can't help but think that Kane could have handled this better.
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*(GDI!Driver uses they/them pronouns)
 
Given the... quality, of politicians IRL, would Kane have been believed at all? And would humans have actually kept their end of the bargain had Kane broken the news about Tiberium?

Or would the greedy corporations and politicians have tried to get as much as they could out of Kane and hang him out to dry?

Edit: Also keep in mind that Kane is more or less acting at like half his fully capacity given he lacks half of himself.
 
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aceraptor said:
Given the... quality, of politicians IRL, would Kane have been believed at all? And would humans have actually kept their end of the bargain had Kane broken the news about Tiberium?

Or would the greedy corporations and politicians have tried to get as much as they could out of Kane and hang him out to dry?

Edit: Also keep in mind that Kane is more or less acting at like half his fully capacity given he lacks half of himself.
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i mean,yeah

people are greedy but still intelligent enough to know is better not to anger alien man
 
OK @Ithillid of the top of my head your piece of lore gets these things wrong:

- Kane only being on world for 3500 years when the biblical Cain is at least more than 6000 years old. You've accounted for that in your lore so not a problem.

- Cain's first son is named Enoch and Cain built a city also named Enoch and Enoch was buried according to some sources in Mount Ebal. Does that mean that when Kane first arrived he tried to rebuild Abel in/into Enoch/ENOCH amongst the Canaanites while also teaching them about animal husbandry, lyre and pipe production and playing and bronze and iron smithing? And that whatever was left of Able is now converted into Tiberium? Also that Kane blew himself up the first time he tried to turn on a machine mind?

- You kind of left out Kane's relationship with Kropotkin when Kropotkin is seen today as the father of the modern progressivism and that guy who called all the many failures of communism. Kropotkin didn't actually do the latter, but he did warn against the kind of behavior that led to the worst atrocities of various communist regimes and the kind of behavior you just described in your lore as one of Kane's favorite tools for shaping societies. So the question must be asked what did Kane think of Kropotkin? And what did Kropotkin think of Kane if he was aware of him at all?
 
Simon_Jester said:
Even given that GDI!Driver was an asshole, I can't help but think that Kane could have handled this better.
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Not really.

Because in the end?

Everybody wanted tiberium. Everybody.

It's a miracle mineral, you can turn it into basically anything, whatever you need to fuel your economy.

Even if the Brotherhood of Nod hadn't tried to control it, even if Kane had tried to get in good with GDI to push UN control of the material, even if Kane, after some shenanigans, put the entirety of Brotherhood's tiberium mining under the global hegemon's control, a global war would have happened. It's that much a fundamental upset in resourcing, even before you start to consider the environmental impact.

Kane handled this in about the best possible way available by making sure the war did not escalate to a full on strategic exchange despite everything. And nukes still detonated.
 
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