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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2908 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 11, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Brigador is, if anything, a little edgy to the right. Overall it's a cynical, fairly realistic and well-realized slightly-hard sci-fi setting. I believe this used to be called "gritty". So not pozzed at all, I'm happy to report. It's the anti-battletech.

The devs are somewhere between apolitical and right wing (though they do try to hide their power level). The writer of the books is a full-on anglo nationalist. It's a franchise that prospered by keeping people in the dark about its creators' poltics, and most of the fanbase is, funnily enough, very woke.

The devs love their pet universe and do excellent worldbuilding work with it, and the writer is respectful of it and does, in my opinion, a very good job. Perhaps more craftsmanlike than literary genius, but he makes it work.

...

In Brigador, there are three categories of vehicle:

  1. Mech: Anything with legs.
  2. Tank: Anything with wheels.
  3. Agrav: Anything that flies.

And indeed the heaviest can be found in the tank category, where you find mobile fortresses and entire artillery batteries crammed into single vehicles the size of city blocks, armed with various very large weapons including GAU-30s and naval artillery. It's perhaps not quite battleships on treads, but let's call it frigates and we're in the right ballpark.

Isn't that the ground-based homeworld game that came out a while back? The one they sandwiched into what could have been a cool desert planet salvage setting. Then again, knowing what the studio did with homeworld 3 it probably wouldn't have been...

Deserts of Kharak? Yeah. They got the aesthetics down pat, but the gameplay was uninspired and the story was outright trash.

And then came Homeworld 3. Oh man. Oh man. I didn't think it possible, but that was easily the worst game I ever saw.

...

Wait, really? I heard a five minute summary of the story and instantly assumed they were trotskyists, what with the whole "lenin betrayed the people's revolution" plot

Currently listening to the audiobook. It sounds like they're pulling a David Drake and writing from the perspective of the details of ideology being largely irrelevant. It's a perspective I personally endorse, so I'm happy to have more of it. I'm still in the first couple chapters, but so far it seems excellent.

I'd say they pass the ideological turing test. Don't take everything they write as a manifesto of their own beliefs.

Unless you actually found a manifesto and that was in there.

Fascinating, and encouraging. I might have to take a harder look at the Brigador games and these novels.

Brigador games

Now, there might be two novels, but so far there is only the one Brigador game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/?curator_clanid=5608422

A sequel is in the works, and its setting parallels that of the second novel just like the first did with the original game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

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