u/WhiteSepulchre

The Earth Cult has the aesthetics and such an amazing, looming, mysterious presence in the beginning. Seems it's already consensus among logh fans that their potential was wasted. But man, the first three times you see them is so awesome. Rubinsky talking to one like the Emperor, we see how their priests skip ahead of lines in the waiting rooms while wearing their robes, the amazingly badass mystical temple they have in a pretty hard sci-fi setting.

As I understand, the author was inspired by mystical daoist uprisings in Chinese history. The problem is that Taoism and peasant uprisings being led by wizards preaching the tao and alchemy is very awesome, in stark contrast to the Earth Cult which kind of just worships Earth and returning people to Earth. I understand they may have created a religion around returning control to the planet they directly rule with a priesthood. But it's still lame and kind of unbefitting of their amazing aesthetics along with their mediocre fate. Like it's not as cool as the real life inspiration.

I can't entirely dismiss this aspect of it though because in real life, we have countries being controlled by religions to spend trillions of dollars and wage wars for a similar reason. I just think the Earth Cult is a disappointment.

I'm aware I'm speaking to the choir and beating a dead horse on this. But I feel the need to express this to someone on my rewatch because I love scifi, wizards and secret societies.

Rebellions, khans and other constant war led to this border gore. Though there is peace now, this is a patchwork of closed borders which have made it impossible for anyone to touch these planets for centuries.

My current 4 empires I'm running.

I still don't know what the AI empires are doing to piss off the FEs so much that they burn down the galaxy for 100 years.

What if the Archmage just said "Guys renege the agreement in Ald'ruhn so the Telvanni will let me finish growing my mushroom tower."

It's only 30k fleet power and has killed everything in its path. No you can't disband it.

Finally got a campaign where I don't overpower everyone and have to rely on allies. I fortunately spawned in one quarter of the galaxy that had 4 materialist neighbors to form a research cooperative with along with a few vassals of one neighbor. This research cooperative is locked in neverending warfare against a martial alliance of hive minds and a coalition of spiritualists and capitalists. There is no where to hide in the galaxy. 3 Marauder clans are being paid to attack everyone constantly. I am enslaving and genociding these hive fuckers as much as I can. My allies are about to lose their xenophile ethics as their borders rapidly go back and forth.

HAIL SCIENCE

FUCK HIVEMINDS except the robots that joined us.