Hello! Jorden, again, with another dev blog that I'm totally not writing as a means of procrastination because the scenario I was working on ended up being more complicated than expected and now I need time to think. I'm just doing my job, my obligation, which requires me to write a blog post on every other Monday and conveniently that happens to be something I can do other than work on The Crystal Raiders.

Anyway.

I thought I'd talk a little about the setting of Rank: Warmaster and how the player fits into it. Last post I talked about how the economics of Earth in our game are dominated by huge mega-corporations, some of which are more powerful than even a first world government today. Like corporations today, most mega-corps started as a smaller business that focused on a few areas of interest and grew over time to be the titanic forces they are when the game starts. We've mentioned that players take on the role of corporate settlers but what does that mean exactly? Well, when the Centralized Earth Government ran up too many debts to the megas, they tried to just use military force to seize the assets they wanted. This was a bad choice, since most of that military force was designed by those same megas and the resulting war was cataclysmic. In an attempt to gain a secure upper hand the megas took control of Earth's defense satellites, put in place to prevent asteroid impacts and out of a general sense of paranoia, and turned half of them inward so that whenever the network detects a threat and fires the lasers, half of them are actually firing down at the planet. Thus was outside help to Earth prevented and a stalemate ensued. Just before taking control many corporations launched settlers out into the solar system, again from a general sense of paranoia and being smart enough to ask "what if this plan doesn't work out?" You, the player, play as one of these settlers and you've just barely escaped The Isolation. By default you've chosen to settle on Mars, though there's been a lot of discussion about allowing players to choose a different starting planet once there's more content in the game. As a corporate settler you have access to everything you need to start a new empire (and they are empires even if we're calling them corporaitons). Where the different corporations come in is in a series of bonuses and penalties that you will be able to select when designing your own corporation to be a representative of. These bonuses and penalties are, in terms of story, based on what those corporations originally started out doing and represent areas of expertise as well as places where company standards have hindered progress. As of now all of these qualities are applied to ships and not to buildings.

In our story, the varying styles of ship building were developed during the Asteroid Engagements. The Asteroid Engagements are a period shortly before the war when the first faster-than-light drives were still pretty new and there was a rush to get out to the asteroid belt and claim the free-floating resources out there. Although piracy was, of course, still illegal corporations engaged in constant sabotage and conflict to try and gain prime access to resources. Many corporations ran ad campaigns to convince other corporations or the government to make use of their ships for securing resources.

Over the next few blog posts I'm going to be covering some of the pregenerated corporations that I've written up, both the descriptions I've written which are a sort of advertisement for them as well as a little more detail about their place in the world of Rank: Warmaster. When the game is released these corporations will be options for players to pick if they don't want to create their own corporation. Right now there are five corporations but I might add a couple more before I'm done covering them all.

That's all for now, see everyone in two weeks for a look at Sherwood Industries!