Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I still need to write up the thread on the economics aspect of this game, but I do, at least, want to suggest reading Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book on economic anthropology, especially since the “About” page says you’re working on a game on Alexandria. Especially since Alexandria, depending upon the exact era, is a city forced upon the juxtaposition of pre-coinage and post-coinage societies, the discussion of what, precisely, the effect of coinage was upon society would be something worth discussing in the game. The ultimate short of it is that coinage was a creation of professional militaries to enable the splitting of loot, as a decisive change from societies that accumulated wealth in the palaces and temples, and all the violence and widespread slavery that would entail.
In any event, not everything I’m talking about is a criticism, per se. (Although some of my later sections are something of a criticism, I tried to mostly order them so the more critical were at the bottom.) It’s completely legitimate to make a game that holds pacifism as the highest ideal, but I’m more interested in just saying it gave the strong impression of a pacifistic message, because it’s very difficult to go through the military path without everyone hating and leaving you, but pacifism is easy and has no apparent negative consequence. (Well, I do think you missed a good opportunity for Jainism to be a player religion. Just add in hydroponically grown garlic and potatoes to avoid harming surface life, and you’ve got a pretty good practitioner. Conquering India through pacifism is always a fun challenge in Crusader Kings 2, so I have a bias towards that idea that most wouldn’t have, though…) Looking through threads here and on Steam, there is a completely outsized number of people overtly saying how they go for totally pacifistic run through the game, and people taking a militant path are very rare, or done simply for completionism. The tone of the game makes military seem far less of a legitimate playstyle. (The Alaska Rebellion involves your robot asking you questions about gloating your plans to the captured Mark like you’re Dr. Evil, and you get the option to rule Alaska as a “Whimsical Tyrant”. It’s basically like joining the Dark Brotherhood in Elder Scrolls - it’s comedic sociopathy, but the game spares no punches telling you that you’re a heartless murderer.)
As for humanity, I probably should have put more emphasis on this point, but I’m not talking about what you think, but what impression this game gives. You may not have meant for humanity to be a morality meter, but it very strongly gives the impression of one. The measurement of how good or bad a person you are necessarily comes through the text, and almost entirely comes through the speech of other characters. These are characters who almost universally react positively to you when you have high humanity or take actions that give humanity, and negatively when at low humanity. Many of the choices that drop humanity are obviously evil actions (ordering your robot to assinate people who don’t like you), and humanity-raising actions are often ones that involve text overtly telling you how good a person you are for giving to charity or helping people get jobs. If you take the high-humanity route of sticking by human employees, they celebrate you and you get thank you notes in your old age. If you turn to robot labor, you coldly throw away the Christmas card of an employee you just fired saying “it was just business”.
Because of all that, while there may not be a perfect mapping, there’s certainly a significant degree of good fit if you predict the “moral” actions will also be humanity-raising actions. My point is more that it’s a conclusion that players are likely to draw, even when it’s not obviously unethical to think of robots as deserving of human rights, since the explanation of the difference between humanity and morality isn’t made in the game’s text, itself. The feedback the game itself gives is that low humanity means everyone but your (mostly) always-loyal robot hates you and the game overtly tells you how much you failed to be a good person. When Mark meets you, his reaction to your humanity meter is expressed in how many “people you had to gut to get here”. (Even if the reason you lost humanity was a dream of wanting the singularity to come, and pining for Elly/Eiji…)
In a similar vein, part of what I’m trying to say is that it’s rather hard for one player to interpret the military part of the story one way, and another player interpreting it another way, at least without the players bringing radically different assumptions into the game. The game isn’t written in Hemmingway-esque minimalism where you have to read between the lines to figure out the subtext, the terms you use in the game’s narrative are not neutral or without judgement. The Statue of Liberty crushes the weak underfoot for not being worthy of life, she bites the head off of the character probably treated as the most relentlessly ethical and harmless character in the game, (which was, incidentally, my rationalization for throwing the coin in Irons’s face and starting the Alaska Rebellion in the one game I took that distasteful route…) she demands you sacrifice for her constantly, then destroy your own creations because, specifically because you followed her orders, they have become evil machines of nothing but hate and destruction. After that, the best that can be mustered up in her defense is a statement about how “it was necessary”, when the game clearly shows there was absolutely nothing necessary shown about the Nazi-style Concentration Camps designed to kill your friends, including you if you overtly help your friends. That any of that was necessary is a token, unsubstantiated claim that is directly contradicted by every other shred of evidence in the game. There are no terrorists that America catches to justify the security state. There aren’t any terrorists at all in this game, they aren’t mentioned. As Mark asks, who are you defending yourself from, if you’re at peace?
Outside of grant funding for your education and robot, America never is shown to do anything positive, and the game basically champions fleeing to Canada, which is portrayed solely as a land of tolerance and peace, bereft of any of that meddlesome politics. (They don’t have political parties in Canada, right?) For that matter, education is shown to largely be unnecessary. You overtly never needed help making your robot in any way but having enough budget, tools, and free time to make the robot. In the “everything is made better with robots” grace ending, colleges are largely closed down because there’s “no point in education if you can’t get a job as a manager”. Apparently, there are no jobs and no goals that a college education could otherwise prepare you for besides working as a middle-manager…
If you, mechanically, want to reinforce a notion of greatness versus humanity, then it may have been better to actually show that. Make humanity a score like wealth and fame, and then have an additional (slightly redundant) red/blue percentage bar for “greatness versus humanity”, where humanity’s size of the bar drops as fame and fortune increase. That visually enforces the metaphor you’re trying to impress upon the players. You would also want to actually make fame actually matter in the game, as well. There’s a couple options for fame at the expense of humanity in chapter 3, but they’re found nowhere else, and I don’t think I can recognize any effect of fame in the game at all. (Plus, donating everything to charity is +4 fame and a massive humanity boost, as well as the single most positively reinforced decision you can make in the game, so it’s not entirely consistent…)