So I need to explain a few things about our lore.
The Cult is a bunch of kids who live in Stanton and play videogames. One day, they stumbled onto an ancient and long-forgotten philosophy book that inspired them to join the Navy, ending up in Squadron 42 etc. After the war they left the Navy and went into business for themselves using as callsigns the names of the players of an ancient videogame clan that they admired from the early 21st-century. So "icycalm" is a fan of 21st-century icycalm, "recoil" is a fan of OG recoil, etc. They have watched countless hours of the streams of the old gaming clan and want to emulate them. And this is where we are. There's no real Cult Empire, but they're all Star Wars and Dune fans so they call each other Emperor and Commander or whatever. They even have the concept of Noble Houses, because in Dune the houses are Atreides/blue, Harkonnen/red and Ordos/green, plus Emperor/purple—exactly the colors we use in Stanton now. And these Stanton Commanders have the biggest fleets because their parents are rich and they bought them all those ships. So they pretend that they hail from noble houses.

I thought it was fortuitous that the Dune houses + Emperor are the exact same number as the Stanton planets, and that the ideal colors per planet are the same exact colors as the Dune houses' colors. And it makes sense that ArcCorp with its planet-size city and one trillion residents would be the seat of the Emperor. I haven't read much of the
SC lore, but it sounds to me that it's the biggest city in the galaxy. I can't wait for it to get the Municipal Works district and dungeons beneath it. Because I will call my bodyguards Elite Sardaukar, as in Dune, and take them in the dungeons for training.
These screens btw are from the first RTS ever:
Dune II. I finished it on release in a complete trance. Didn't do anything else with my life until I finished it. I think it took me a couple days or so. It was the best game I had ever played at the time. I should write my essay on it. Much of what I am trying to do with
Star Citizen originates in that game: I am trying to play
Star Citizen in a way that makes me feel as the Emperor in
Dune II.

In the game, and I suppose also in the books, the Emperor sets the houses against each other, while essentially being a distinct house himself, with his own color and specialized units. Look how even his subtitle font is purple.

When the game starts you choose a house and you get a strategy map that shows the territories, and you choose where to expand. Depending on your choices you come into conflict with one or the other of the other houses.

In the final mission, the Emperor arrives with his Elite Sardaukar troops and you must defeat both him AND the other two houses at the same time! The pic above shows the final mission, and if you look at the minimap at the bottom-right you can see that the player is Atreides/blue at the bottom with red, purple and green arrayed against him at the top.

There also seems to be a mod (pictured above) that lets you play as the Emperor. I didn't know anything about mods in 1992, it must be a new thing.
So that's what I want to accomplish in
Star Citizen, I want to feel like the Emperor who has of course his own purple-clad elite troops, but also several major factions under his command, each with their own characteristics and goals and playstyles, and he gets to send them around the galaxy on basically quests and sees how they do, maybe intervenes if needed, or sends them reinforcements, etc. I am not interested in the inter-house conflict, but I would appreciate some competition between the houses, and the way I accomplish this is by letting the regular players choose which planet to pick as their home, thus placing themselves under one of the Commanders and prioritizing his goals. It will be interesting to see when base-building arrives what projects the different Commanders will undertake based on the resources of their planets and their personal preferences, and to see where players will flock. We're not trying to make anyone feel bad here, and if one Commander lags behind in player numbers I'll send my clones there to bolster him, but it just makes the world feel more alive when our organization behaves more like a real organization with different departments and agendas etc. It's like a kind of narrative emerges out of the interplay of all these different factions and hierarchies. I'll talk more about this in a moment when I get to posting the Pyro Supreme Commander details in the
Cult Commissions thread.
Finally, I am pleased with how we ended up with the biggest spenders having the biggest landing zones/cities under their command, because it makes sense both on an irl level—that the guys who spend a shitton of money should get something extra for their trouble—and also a lore level, because when I build the verse in
Cult Engine 1.5 each Commander will supply his fleet pic to post on his planet, and it makes sense that the Commanders would have the biggest fleets, and that they'd base them off the biggest cities. So everything fell into place in the end by making cool and sensible individual choices along the way, adding up to something very cool indeed.
Related to the above, let me remind everyone that the only reason we have any capital ships at all to play with is because Adjudicator, shubn and ysignal have been cashbuying them. Even my Polaris isn't yet my Polaris really until I pay back shubn who bought it for me. If not for these guys we'd barely even have A2s for
Jumptown, let alone Polarises for
Save Stanton. It would have been an entirely different game we would be playing now. And you can forget about color-coordinating regional fleets into red, blue, green without their spending. So I am very happy with the Dune-borrowed idea of Noble Houses to represent in-game the outsized out-of-game contributions these guys bring to our game, and I hope the upcoming org controls will allow sub-orgs with different names and logos so that we can really try to build these factions in the game and place them under the overall CULT umbrella. I recently rewatched the base-building videos from CitCon and noticed something I had missed on my first watch, that we'll be able to COLOR the buildings any color we want! So Adjudicator will have red buildings in Hurston, shubn blue in Crusader's moons and ysignal green on microTech! If they can also come up with Noble House names and logos, it will be really cool for me to fly around their domains in some imperial purple ship with my bodyguards and inspect the facilities of my vassals, while listening about their plans and giving them directions. Also I look forward to meetings of all the Commanders where they sit around a table, each with their bodyguards behind them etc. And the more players we recruit, the cooler all these scenes will look, and also the more elaborate we can make our real-time operations.