I fully Agree. I just want to further suggest that players are simply fatigued with every choice having no good options, and are reaching a point of apathy. It makes even player agency feel really low. There's no ability to think outside the box, there's no point where we genuinely feel like we got a win, just a less bad loss.
Yeah. But that's war.
We're not playing Luke Skywalker, or even one of his squadron mates Red-X. We're not the Rebellion that's going to obliterate the Divine Empire with pluck and space operatics. We're Britain.
In 1940, when the Nazis and their allies had taken damn near all of continental Europe and the Battle of Britain was raging, the RAF bled over a hundred pilots a week. Usually around half were wounded, half were killed or missing. In the worse weeks it got up to two hundred. And that's just pilots, not including gunners and bombardiers. In total deaths RAF Bomber Command was hit far harder than the fighter pilots. British cities and airfields were pounded by bombs despite the best efforts of thousands of pilots and gunners and civil defense and radar operators and weather reporters and hundreds of other vital jobs that would fill a book. Britain was one little speck on the edge of Europe, fighting alone.
We say the British won the Battle of Britain of course, but that's partly hindsight isn't it? Their great victory was being the only country in the war
not crushed under the Nazi boot. Even when the bombers stopped coming, Britain's main ally would stay out of the war for another 13 months. They didn't gain anything except time and the names of 1,497 dead to put in the little book in Westminster Abbey. And it'd take more deaths to buy more time, too. Hundreds, thousands of merchant mariners, British as well as American and Norwegian. 1,418 crewmen aboard the
HMS Hood, dead in three minutes when she sank in the Denmark Strait.
None of them had a choice. Well, that's not true. They had a choice, but they never would've taken it. They could've stepped away, but it's just not right. So you go to war, industrial war, knowing the odds aren't on your side, and you don't get to choose after that. Sometimes you scramble and the radar tells you it was a false alarm; sometimes you're sent into a ball of enemy fighters that fills the canopy from bar to bar. Sometimes the floatplanes find a submarine, and sometimes they find the
Bismarck. Heroics happen, but they don't change the strategy and they don't make it into the history books.
Petals is the best war story I've read on SV because it understands that and works with it perfectly. It isn't pointless. Everything we do matters. England expects every man to do his duty. But our choices just tilt the scales a little, mess with the timeline a smidge. History doesn't move because one person asks it to. We're not winning the civil war here, we're living Amani's life and doing her duty. And she moves little icons around on a map.
If we win, Titan and the Empire will still exist. Thousands of people will die for that victory. The war will continue. And that'll be all. The details haven't been worked out yet, but that's the gist of what'll be in the high school history books. Maybe the zealot Empire will collapse from within, or maybe we'll manage enough strength to push back, or maybe things'll just stay like this for forever. Stronger countries beat up weaker countries, until the weaker one
becomes strong. Amani can't grab history and twist it into something else, but she can certainly control
some parts of her life. This is the greatest adventure of her life, the moment that will stay with her forever.
And I think what matters to me - what might be some little consolation to Amani, for all the friends she's already lost and likely will lose soon - is that they're fighting to protect the people of Titan, just like those pilots were on Earth. And almost 80 years after the Battle of Britain, the Brits still remember the Few.
I think Titan will take good care of them
and us.
also man I'm in a sappy mood right now huh. sorry for dumping this on you.
] Resolve the problem with a weird workaround, you're good enough
