Did Paradox do that or were HS not able to renew the Battletech licence?

Agreed on this, I love AskHistorians and even contributed a few times. I miss it a lot.

Ken M, is that you?

This is from Owlcat Games, not Creative Assembly.

So it goes

Seems to me like they’re a mix between the Empire from Elder Scrolls and the United Nations from The Expanse (the books), it kind of depends how you look at them as to whether they’re ‘evil’ or not. I guess there’s also a bit of Starship Troopers/Roman Empire thrown in there too with the whole “become a soldier, earn your citizenship” stuff.

We don’t really know the ideologies of the UC and Freestar Collective yet, so I’m interested to find out if the UC are something like martial authoritarians or a maybe an imperialist democracy. If the Freestar are more like the Rebels from Star Wars I’m siding with them, but if they seem to me like they might be on that usual libertarian I-just-want-my-guns-and-no-taxes schtick I’ll side with the UC (or stay neutral).

I agree with you on the water front, I mean there are meant to be ~1000 planets so at least a few of them have to be water planets, right?

Obviously they’re not going to let you land in the sea, but it’d be nice to see some large bodies of water on at least the goldilocks planets. We did see in the Direct some NPCs lounging on a beach, so I guess there will be at least some shoreline.

Honestly, I just hope there’s more to the planets in general and that there’s enough handcrafted stuff (or procedural but interesting POIs) that we’ve just not seen. The optimist in me hopes that they haven’t shown a lot because they want people to find it themselves (they, and anyone who’s managed to get their hands on it to preview it, keep saying it’s a massive game so fingers crossed this is the case).

I believe the thinking behind the very early preload is so that the download servers aren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of people trying to download the game at the same time on release day. By having the preload over a few weeks it allows for a more spaced out period of time where people are downloading it, meaning less load on the servers.