Mecha Ace: The Q&A Thread

I’d think the Empire offered plenty of opportunities for punitive actions.

Plus, Caz isn’t sadistic, just ruthless.

Part two of the Q&A is up.

I might do one more before release.

In the Infinite Sea series, you have a policy that losses for your men are always avoidable. Is this true in Mecha Ace as well?

@Ramidel
Absolutely. It is possible (though extremely difficult) to get everyone to the end of the story alive. There is an achievement for it.

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  1. Since our squad is smaller than the unit we had in SoI, will we be (or be able to be) on a more personal level with the people under our command?

  2. Will those under our command improve alongside our character?

Will there be a chance to sacrifice one of your squad to take down a particularly tough foe? For example shooting through them to lower the chances the enemy can dodge?

@hahaha01357
Absolutely. While your main point of interaction with the rest of your unit will be your wingman, the rest of your lance-mates will all have a personal presence. They are, however, rather static, and they stay the same over the course of the story, barring a few minor changes (unless, of course, you get them all killed).

@Nocturnal_Stillness
Yes, and unless you can convince the others that it was necessary, the survivors *will* call you out on it afterwards.

Awesome.

@Cataphrak Can we have more information on the a Vedrian system and campaign? Nothing spoilery, just general information.

Precisely what caused CoDEC to rebel?

@Iggles
Vedria is a binary star system with a handful of planets, one of which (Vedria Prime ) is inhabited by approximately 475 million colonists, and has been for some time. The system has also been the main battleground between CoDEC and the Empire for one major reason: several light-hours Vedria’s stars lie only stable wormhole known to humanity, which links Vedria with New Lisbon, 16 000 light years (or about thirty years under military-grade conventional FTL) away. This means that while Earth (and thus, the Empire) is on one side of the wormhole, New Lisbon, Albion, and the other CoDEC systems are on the other side.

Since Vedria joined the CoDEC rebellion, this means the rebels hold both ends of the wormhole. To crush the rebellion, the Empire needs to take Vedria Prime, to use it as a logistical base on the heavily defended Vedrian aperture. CoDEC knows this, and defending Vedria is their top (and really, only) military priority. That has been how the outnumbered and outgunned CoDEC fleet has managed to hold onto the system for so long, by concentrating their forces in the system, and using highly mobile carrier battlegroups to wear down, and eventually destroy any imperial attacks. However, if Vedria falls, the Empire will have a base to attack the wormhole. If the wormhole falls, CoDEC’s core systems are wide open.

@Sneaks
There’s no one real reason, but there are a few major causes. Foremost is the Imperial government’s moratorium on new colonies, preventing those living on the frontier to expand in search of new resources. Almost as important was the Imperial government’s refusal to allow colonial governments to field their own armed starships, meaning that any piracy on the frontier could only be answered by armed industrial armatures based from space colonies (which would have very limited range), or pleas to the Imperial military for aid, which could take weeks, or even months to arrive, if at all. In addition, there was the Imperial government’s insistence on favouring corporations based in Sol or its core systems, which obviously did not sit well with corporations based in the frontier, which had become very powerful during the initial colonisation of the outerworlds (who were also straining against the moratorium). Lastly, there was the fact that while most major colonies had instantaneous FTL communications via very large and expensive ansible facilities, the comm channels were all-but monopolised by the Imperial government (never mind that the ansibles themselves were funded and built at the Empire’s expense), mostly to micromanage the various Planetary Assemblies, which had nominal power, but whose authority could be overridden by any member of the Empress’ court.

On top of that, there are already been minor rebellions and civil unrest. Generally, the Imperial response has been demanding that the “traitors” (who are often not even aware that they’ve been labeled such) to surrender, publicly executing the ones who do surrender, and saturation-bombing the areas where any suspected rebel holdouts are hiding.

Needless to say, this has not made them very popular.

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Why did the Empire impose this moratorium?

@WulfyK
The simple reason that more colonies the Empire controlled, the more diluted the Empire’s power would get. If your government is based on one planet, and has a central power base drawn from maybe four or five other planets, it becomes increasingly difficult to rule more planets without delegating power to governors with more and more independence, or as the Imperials like to call them “rebel warlords in training”.

That means the individual planets are not self-sufficient?

@WulfyK
Every colony needs trade with at least one more colony for the manufactured goods and raw materials needed to sustain itself at its current standard of living. In addition, all colonies need access to the deep-space arrays which produce antimatter to power colonies and starships. However, a single star system might be self-sufficient in this sense.

Nominally, colonies are self-governing under Planetary Assemblies, but in reality, this is far from the case, especially as no colony has the right to field anything more heavily armed than an APC.

How much did the rebellion hurt the Empire’s economy? Is one of the sides now deprived of any valuable resources?

Not sure if this been answered what kind of battlegrounds our MC go fight in? Will we fight in many kinds of places like snowy arctic, desert, jungle and cities or we just end up fighting only in space?

@WulfyK
Obviously, the Empire’s economy is hurt by the rebellion. As in the cases of many empires, the periphery provides raw materials in exchange for the manufactured and finished goods of the more settled (but materially depleted) core. In CoDEC’s case however, this is less of an issue, as the more settled colonies like Albion and Vedria have robust high-tech and manufacturing industries of their own. The real problem is the fact that save for a few defectors, they have no real professional soldiers to rely on, meaning that their armed forces began the war made of everyone willing to fight, armed with second-rate, if not outright makeshift, equipment.

@Azul
When planning the plot, I basically had the choice to make each battle small, relatively inconsequential and shallow for the purpose of having many battles in varied places, or make each battle big and impressive, with lots of possible outcomes and choices. I opted for the latter. As a result, almost all of your battles are in space, and only one is set on a planet, in an urban environment.

@Cataphrak
How did the Empire come into being? I assume Earth had a number of democratic nations as we do now when they first began exploring the stars…

@Cataphrak
How did the Empire come into being? I assume Earth had a number of democratic nations as we do now when they first began exploring the stars…