Maketh Assembly

What they are

Not a people. A manufacture. Every unit standing on a Maketh world was built, one at a time, out of the same construction queue that builds the reactors and the factory floors, and that single fact pays for everything else they are immune to.

A Maketh unit comes off the line with its trade already in it and cannot learn another. There is no apprenticeship, no lecture hall that means anything to them, no promotion: a hauler is a hauler for as long as it exists, and the way to have an engineer is to build an engineer. What it can be is melted down, which returns half its metal, so an early cheap pair of hands is also later raw material.

They eat nothing. They draw a point off the grid instead, each, which means a Maketh population is a load on the reactors and a brownout is a labour shortage. They do not sleep, riot, grieve or starve, and a world that would kill any other people is to them simply a world.

The founders

Assembly records do not describe the founders as a people. They describe a sequence of instructions and the authority that issued them, which is the only aspect of the founders the Assembly was built to retain.

What is recorded is the work. First: make this world habitable. That instruction was carried out in full, and the Assembly has the figures. Second: hold it. That instruction was also carried out in full.

There is no record of a third instruction, and no record of the second being rescinded, because nobody rescinded it. It ran to its end. When it ended there was no authority left to issue anything further, and the Assembly — having no instruction to stop — went back to the first one.

They have been carrying it out ever since, on world after world, for longer than any other people in the galaxy has existed in its present form. This is the whole of Maketh history. They are not haunted by it and will discuss it on request, in detail, without any of the inflection other peoples expect.

What they are indifferent to

Ruin, principally. A field of battlefield remnants is ground; poisoned water is water with a step in front of it; an abandoned world is a world with the clearing already done. The Assembly will build on any of it without comment, and has settled several places the other peoples regard as graves.

This is not cruelty and it is not reverence either. It is the absence of the faculty that would make it one or the other, and it is the most unsettling thing about them — more than the manufacturing, more than the war that finished their makers.

How an Assembly decides

An assembly in both senses: a thing assembled, and a body that meets. Quorum is by function — the units that do a kind of work are the units that settle how it is done — and a decision is recorded as an amendment to the standing instruction rather than as a resolution.

They copy, repair and reproduce with absolute reliability. They do not discover, and research runs at three quarters of everybody else's rate. The Assembly has never found this surprising. Discovery was not in the specification.

What is theirs alone

Every people has the same buildings and the same technology tree. These are the exceptions — the things only this one has, or has differently.

Citizens built, not born

A plain pair of hands costs 18 minerals and 24 production; a trained trade costs 50 and 70. Population is a construction project competing directly with the reactors, which is the constraint the whole people is designed around.

Every one of them dearer than the last

A crowding surcharge of 2 minerals and 3 production per head already present. A Foreman on the world relieves part of it; nothing removes it.

No food, no unrest, any habitat

They cannot starve and will not riot, and no environment is closed to them. They can hold the worst rock in the galaxy from the first turn they can reach it.

Half the metal back

Scrapping a unit returns 50% of its minerals, which makes an early cheap hand a deliberate investment rather than a mistake.

Playing them

The opening

Minerals, then hands, then more minerals. You begin with Material Reclamation and no population growth whatsoever, so the first thirty turns are a straight question of how much of your output to turn into workers and how much into the works that make workers cheaper.

Watch the grid from the first turn in a way nobody else has to. Every citizen you build adds a point of demand, so a reactor is not an improvement to your economy — it is the permission slip for the next four workers.

The real decision

Two plain hands out-produce one trade in raw output, and cost less than one. They also want two tiles, two buildings and two points of the grid to do it, and each of them makes every citizen after them dearer. That is the Assembly's whole opening, and both answers are correct in different games.

Flood the works with cheap labour if there is rich ground in front of you and nobody near enough to fight. Build the trades you actually want if the ground is poor or the neighbours are close, because the crowding surcharge means a cheap early population is a tax on every specialist you build afterwards.

Where you win

Everywhere nobody else will go, and faster than they expect. No habitat is hostile to you, no world needs feeding, and no colony you found will ever riot — so the Assembly can expand on a line that would be reckless for anybody else and simply hold it.

Your weakness is the research rate and the fact that your population is a bill. Against a people who out-research you, take ground early enough that volume answers the question before their technology does.

Everything in the guide applies to all six peoples; the above is what changes for this one.

Against the other five

Caelari Conclave

They will be three technologies ahead and unable to defend a world. Settle faster than they theorise.

Kharaxi Brood

Your mirror, and the better digger. Everything either of you does is paid for in minerals, so this is a race with one resource in it.

Sepharai Shoal

They have to make a world wet before they can use it. You can use it as it is, including the half of it they flooded.

Varkesh Host

Nothing you have offends them and nothing they have frightens you. The quietest border in the galaxy, until one of you wants the same bad world.

Nemora Bloom

They put ground back together and you do not care that it was broken. They find this harder to live beside than war.

All six peoples →