Matrixi Internal Warfare

[AnarchCassius]

So far the Matrixi have been portrayed as a very monolithic race, and not just literally, they seem to have far less social variation than the others. They have apparently one true religion and no history of warfare either internal or against an outside foe. This seems, if not implausible, at least inappropriate to the SotS universe.

Why even have spaceborn weapons at the start of the game? They defeated the 'carnivores' of their home world ages ago and their current fear is a nova. If they've seen organic life at game start they've probably dismissed it as easily as we dismiss crystals.

As tendencies these are fine but they may have been taken too far. Surely in the time from sentience to the nova they disputed the meaning of the planet's whispers, fought over rare precious metals and so on. This is important because they have no other reason to have weapons at the game start and they also need a rationale for how multiple Matrixi players work.

Hivers and Tarka are old. Humans had a period of chaos immediately after discovering FTL. Liir could have been transplanted by Suul'ka. Zuul hid for years before being identified. Morrigi are ancient. Every other race can easily justify a lost colony or separate empire.

If the Matrixi civilization is not quite as unified as portrayed so far then the way they gained FTL makes an easy fix. Matrixi still require knowledge and lots of time to make things but they seem less dependent on central infrastructure. Dissidents who disagreed with how the planet was interpreted or those who simply didn't get along with the majority of Matrixi would not have had great difficulty in getting off world themselves.

Any thoughts or other suggestions?

[Coyote27]

Perhaps their military is simply an adaptation of police forces; if they've not gone through a nation-state period they may have no real experience with standing armies so just roll with what they do have - police with massively upgraded armaments to deal with the new and unexpected threats.

[AnarchCassius]

If they can have criminals they can have rebels. Crime is just what the government doesn't want happening so either way we establish the potential for disunity, even if historically it has yet to occur on a large scale.

[Glacialis]

Why do the Cthonics give the impression of a monolithic society? We had discussed small family or clan groupings that compete intensely with each other for limited resources, but now in their "modern age" they've put most of that behind them. Mostly.

I'm not sure how much of that made it into the stickies.

[AnarchCassius]

That didn't make it to the stickies or the wiki that I noticed and my desire to comb through old threads has a limit.

In any case that's about what I would have expected/suggested so I think we're all good. I just wanted to make sure this had been addressed in some way. Kerberos put a good bit of though into making sure each of the originals have a good balance of internal unity and conflict.