wbino

From what I understand you can do so but you would gimp yourself. That may change soon though.

Initially we had planned to go this route, but it proved to be confusing to testers.  As such, you must now choose to be rebel or loyalist during game setup.

so, if it's during game setup (before play starts), it sounds like we should be able to set the sub-faction for AI's then, which was a popular request.

The one's who just choose to stay out of it must be the neutral militia's and, well, you know what happens to them.

Seriously? Am I the only one who wanted to be able to scout the map before choosing a subfaction?

Could you make it where the sub faction that you chose is random instead of choosing specifically cause that would be cool

Not happy with this, was hoping to determine which faction to choose mid game depending on my enemies strengths and weakness.

You need smarter testers

Isnt this what beta's for?

They must have some pretty dumb testers...sins is very user friendly to begin with, choosing sides IN game is WAAAAAY better then choosing sides BEFORE the game.  This change dampens my enthusiasm a bit as this is a dumbing down of sins, a game that has an easy learning curve if you don't play multiplayer.

Is there any way there could be more dialogue about this? I know the community has vastly varying opinions so maybe it might not be beneficial, I don't know. It just seems like a 'choose your own tech tree' worked well in games like Age of Empires III where you could rebel against your homeland and gain access to new units while losing access to others.

I've got to say (at the expense of sounding like I'm 'whining' [e digicons]:'([/e]   which is unsettling in and of itself) that I had hoped that we could have something like where you would play through Tier 2 research and in order to get to ANY tier 3 research you had to choose rebels or loyalists or something like that. That way you could at least take the map configuration into account before you committed to a game choice.

I understand that there is probably balancing issues with having three factions per race but at the very least I was hoping for a limited in game window of time for scouting and jockeying for position before I nailed down a race and research tree I wanted to select.

...

Outside of that, everything that we've seen so far and the answers to the interviews have been awesome so, keep up the good work and keep us in the loop! Thanks!

edit: Plug for possible Sins roleplaying game.

Okay, back to OP

Pretty sure that's the definition of a plug Draak.

Before it sounded like loyalists and rebels had two separate tech trees, and the moment you researched one, you were locked into that tree and could no longer research anything on the other. Under either system, the loyalists are no more the default faction than the Rebels are, as you need to either consciously research the a loyalist tech (old system) or choose the loyalists before the game starts (current system).

Seems my fingers didn't get the 'L', meant to say "plug". Thanks for the clarification though.

I'm torn...

I liked the concept of declaring your a rebel or loyalist in game. From a strategic standpoint it just seemed like good fun to determine if you could rebel (i.e. be aggressive IMO) or stay loyal (standard path IMO). 

That said what would be the impetus to declaring yourself a rebel or loyalist during the game? What would the difference conceptually have been between a loyalist and the neutral stance?

Why would you rebel mid-way through the game? It's your empire after all. 

I kinda get why it was changed to declaring up front whether you are Rebel or Loyalist when I step back and look at it a bit.

From a modding perspective I'm pretty happy with the decision as it simplifies what I need to account for, but still get to take advantage of the two main features of Titans and Corvettes...

The question though is "How moddable will rebellion be?". Of which I'm not too concerned until a public beta starts up.