Six million souls departed Earth’s orbit on March 1st,
2159. They were to be the second wave of colonists bound for the distant Antares colony, but after
a disastrous malfunction of the warp gate, their ships emerged in a distant region of the galaxy.
In a vast alien wilderness, they were forced to begin anew,
creating a new civilization that would one day be known as the Antares Confederacy.
On this episode of Incoming, the Templin Institute again investigates a world of our design with
a look at the Confederate Republics of Antares from the 2nd season of our miniseries, Stellaris
Invicta. We’ll go into how we came up with some of our ideas, why certain choices were made,
and all the various elements of worldbuilding that now define the character of our nation. But first,
for those of you haven’t followed our Stellaris Invicta series, the Antares Confederacy was one
of five nations developed by the Templin Institute with a chance to become the focus of an ongoing
campaign of Stellaris. After quick summaries of each nation were released here on YouTube,
it was ultimately left up to our Patrons, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Confederacy.
When the time came to build on that initial foundation and craft the framework of this
new interstellar nation, it was a bit of a daunting task. Season One of Stellaris Invicta
was among the most popular content our channel had ever produced and the Greater Terran Union,
the focus of that first season, cast a very large and imposing shadow.
But the Antares Confederacy was an exciting choice for Season 2, in part because of how different it
was compared to the GTU. I didn’t want to take Antares in a different direction just for the
sake of doing so but I did want to explore those differences, whenever it made sense to do so.
Where the Greater Terran Union was a centralized, authoritarian, militarist, and facist society,
the Confederacy was scattered, democratic, largely peaceful but internally divided. This
allowed us to explore a number of avenues that just wouldn’t have been possible in Season 1.
So, I knew that I wanted the central theme behind Antares to be one of division
and isolation. I’ve gone on at length before that I find world governments to generally be boring,
but the nature of Stellaris meant that for all intents and purposes, we’d have to play as one.
The solution here was to make the nation a Confederacy. While many types of Confederacy
have existed across history, generally, in comparison to other forms of government,
they have weaker executive power, and there can be a lot of strain between the federal government
and its constituent nations. This gave me the best of both worlds, so to speak;
a single government that could be easily created in a game of Stellaris,
but also the framework for a number of smaller nations that exist within it. The nature of
their relationship, the number of states within the Confederacy, the strength of the federal
government, these were all things that could drastically change over the course of the story.
So with that form of government chosen, I started looking at Confederacy’s throughout history.
In my mind, the best way to come up with something believable,
is to look for examples from the real world, and adapt them to whatever setting you’ve come up
with. Now as a citizen of the Great White North, I was most familiar with the Canadian Confederation,
which, interestingly enough as it turns out, wasn't a Confederation at all.
The Canadian government to this day is an unusually-decentralized federal state,
not an alliance of sovereign states. Even so, Canada was a pretty good resource. I had some
first hand knowledge of the types of issues that can drive a wedge between the provincial and
federal governments, and I tried to incorporate and heighten that kind of friction within Antares.
Additionally, the Canadian government, especially the structure of its Parliament,
was a huge influence on the Antares Confederacy’s own Parliament. I remember
learning in school how the role of Canadian senate seemed ill-defined and kinda pointless,
and that seemed like a fun detail to include. With the Greater Terran Union, the government
was supposed to be as efficient and streamlined as possible, with the Antares Confederacy, everything
is on the verge of falling apart. There’s lots of weird ceremonial issues and weird redundancies.
But, where the Canadian Confederation is where my mind first went, the most prominent example
of a Confederacy to a lot of people would be the Confederate States of America. For a number of
reasons that are probably obvious, we didn’t want to use the CSA as too much of an inspiration,
but there were some interesting details that I tried to incorporate. The first was that
in wartime, a lack of centralized control was a huge strategic weakness for the CSA. The nation
did not have an overall military commander until it was too late to make a difference,
and only rarely did its different armies act in concert across multiple theaters to achieve
a common objective. The central government was cash poor, so each state had to supply equipment
and manpower to its own regiments, leading to lack of uniformity. A Confederate soldier
from North Carolina for example, might look very different from a Confederate soldier from Texas.
With that in mind, I decided that the military of the Antares Confederacy would be a bit of a mess.
Each republic would have their own independent armed forces, with different equipment,
doctrines and leadership, trying to combine them all together would be a major challenge
for the nation to overcome. Again when compared to the Greater Terran Union,
the Antares military would be almost hopelessly incompetent.
The last major source of inspiration for the government of the Antares Confederacy
was the European Union. To me, the EU should be the natural reference point to anyone looking
to create a futuristic superstate, and it is the closest we have to that here on Earth. The most
important details I took away from the European Union was the relationship between the federal
state and its individual countries. There are times when it acts as a single unified Europe,
and times when Germany, France, Italy etc act as their own sovereign nations. Learning the details
of this relationship was critical I believe in making the Confederacy seem a bit more believable.
Additionally, the European Union is one of the most culturally diverse
supranational organizations in the world, so it was again a great resource for learning
how it’s trying to create a new European identity while fostering that diversity.
This takes us to the individual Republics themselves. I knew that I wanted enough
Republics within the Confederacy to make it seem complex and diverse, but not so many that it would
be impossible to come up with a background for all of them in the time I had available.
In the end, I think I just rolled a D20. I also felt strongly that the Republics
shouldn’t be immediately identifiable as the continuation of any nation or region on Earth.
I didn’t want a Russia in Space or America in space. I figured that needing to start
over on an alien world would cause a new national character to form, and there would
come a day when the initial pioneers would stop thinking of themselves as
citizens of whatever country they came from, but instead, as citizens of their new colony.
With that said, I also felt very strongly that the culture of Antares should be different than
what we typically see in science fiction. Even when you have a faraway human civilization with
no relationship to Earth, the cliche interstellar Republic or Federation
always seems to have been predominantly influenced by or based on the Western World.
Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, these regions of Earth very rarely serve as
a model for a futuristic interstellar society despite having roughly half of all humanity.
And you can make some arguments for why that might be, some might be stronger than others, but I also
don’t think it takes that much imagination to come up with a future in which these regions play a
greater role. So with Antares, I figured that the Earhart Flotilla that delivered the first pioneers
to their new home, was predominately drawn from exactly those regions. Cacuasians would be a small
minority, Islam and Buddism would be the largest religions, and there’d be no western sounding
names. I can hear some criticism already that maybe this decision came from a desire to be what
some might call “politically correct” or “virtue signalling”, or whatever else, but honestly,
I just wanted to do something I hadn’t seen before that I thought could be interesting. The challenge
was of course, that I knew almost nothing about all the places and cultures I wanted to include.
So a great deal of effort went into making sure that we didn’t resort to caricatures.
It’s very likely I’ve already made some mistakes here, but given the Confederacy exists hundreds
of years in the future, a little variation from our world can be hopefully explained.
And the desire to avoid western tropes directly influenced the design of the nation’s various
flags. Right from the start, I had two rules, number one was that there would be
no red white and blue flags. I have nothing against the Union Jack, Old Glory, whatever
the Russians call their flag, and all the others, I’m just tired of seeing this color combination
being used to represent the good guys, and red, and gold being used for the bad guys.
My other rule was, I wanted stronger symbolism.
With the Greater Terran Union, I came up with the design first and tried to ascribe
some meaning to it later, with Antares, I wanted the symbolism to be obvious.
So for the flag of the Antares Confederacy, I ended up going with a field of bright green.
Green has a number of traditional associations in Islam, so that made sense, but also green just
isn’t that popular a color across national flags. And I have no idea why that is.
As the history of the nation was developed, it was easy to come up with some strong symbolism. 11
stars for the colonies that survived, 8 for those that didn’t and one in the center symbolise their
common heritage. Before we provided any insight into these choices, we hadpeople on YouTube,
Twitter and Discord correctly guess the meaning of the flag, so I’d say it was a success.
For the national flags, I followed basically the same things, but I leaned towards gold,
red, and white so none of them would be confused with the main Antares flag.
I also tried to avoid the traditional 5 pointed stars
that are so common and instead use stars with way more points and Islamic Crescents. Again,
based on these flags we had people figure out that Antares was a trinary star system and that Asia,
Africa and the Middle East had a major influence on the Confederacy, so again I think we did okay.
With that said, I also knew that we’d been hosting the Antares Senate on our Discord server
and while I wanted each Republic to feel unique, I didn’t want to provide so much
information that there wouldn’t be room for our Senators to develop their own lore.
It was a tough balancing act, so I generally provided only sparse details regarding their
politics and history, and focused more on their economy and geography.
There were still some interesting details, but plenty of room for them to grow.
Which all leads to how and why these Republics were separated in the first place,
and that leads to the Antares System itself. I knew that I wanted the star system to be in
some way unique. I also wanted it to feel vast and alien, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica were major
influences in this. In the time since Season 1, Stellaris had added some cool new nebula effects
and it felt like a cool opportunity to have them present in the Antares System.
The idea that this nebula somehow interfered with communications
and that the initial colonists were forced to settle across a variety of worlds, helped
to create the exact kind of situation I wanted; isolated settlements struggling to come together.
Another question I needed to answer was, how did all the republics come together.
Early in the writing process, I debated a lot if there should have been some
kind of unification war or maybe a system-wide cold war that turned hot,
but I couldn’t think of a reasonable justification for one. With entire planets to support their
relatively small populations, the need for resources wouldn’t be a huge issue, and I just
couldn’t imagine that some sort of ideological division would divide Antares to the point of war.
A civil war or something like it, just prior to the start of the series is also just another
cliche I’m tired of seeing. Even so, there were plenty of disagreements, rival trade blocs,
and all the other complexities of a multipolar international system. Just no bloodshed.
Lastly were the inclusion of a few hooks, some details to pique interest and lay the groundwork
for future storylines. The fate of Earth and the mystery of the Nakiska Colony provided some cool
ideas, but since they have yet to be revealed, I’ll save discussing that for another time.
So with that decided, all that was left was for the Antares Confederacy to take to the
stars and allow itself to adapt, change and persevere depending on the events of the game.
While Stellaris Invicta, at the time of this video,
has only been going for a few months, I couldn’t be more excited about the direction it's heading.
Elements like the Antares Senate have already produced more lore about the individual Republics
than I could hope to match in a couple years, and major decisions in the game
have already rocked the nation to its core. I can’t wait to see how everything ends up.
So I guess, if there’s a conclusion or a point to all this, it’s that I wanted the Confederate
Republics of Antares to be something different than what we usually get in science fiction.
It’s the pinnacle of laziness to come up with yet another democratic republic,
formed from various nation states that are never mentioned and don’t have any background details,
throw in a recent war, a couple badly defined political parties and slap a red
white and blue flag on it. There are so many other cool sources of inspiration out there.
I also wanted to make things a little more difficult this time around.
The Greater Terran Union was almost a Mary Sue when it comes to interstellar nations. It’s easy
to be a fan of the haunted, radical militarist autocracy driven by efficiency in all things,
that undertakes military campaign after military campaign with gigantic fleets and armies all in
the grand pursuit of vengeance. I think it’s a lot harder to sell people on a barely functioning,
idealistic, Islamic and bhuddist democracy, constantly at risk of splitting itself apart
with a government and populace divided on every major issue, a constitution filled with bizarre
contradictions, and whose most professional military force is their equivalent of the Coast
Guard, with riots whenever the idea of a war is even mentioned. The jury is still out on whether
we’ve succeeded, but if nothing else, hopefully we’ve come up with a few interesting ideas.
And before I leave you for today, I do want to mention that this episode is sponsored, in a way,
by the Templin Commissary. If you’d like to get yourself on original artwork produced
for Stellaris Invicta, or flags, t-shirts, hats and a lot more based on the Greater
Terran Union, the Antares Confederacy and it’s Republics, as well the Templin Institute itself,
you’ll find them all for sale on our store.
So until next time, this has been Incoming.