Discovery Gaming Community

Hi, I'm relatively new to the mod (played it briefly ages ago) and I'm trying to get myself into the current lore to allow for some meaningful RP. I have a handful of characters by now that have a straightforward list of friends and foes and then I have a Gaian character.

Now, I found a bunch of conflicting information with respect to Gaians' allies:

• The wiki page on the NPC faction names the Corsairs and a brief cooperation with the Kusari Naval Forces.
  
• This wiki page names Corsairs, Hogosha, Farmer's Alliance and some sympathy for the SCRA.
  
• The Transponder Spoofer names only the Liberty Seperatists as allies while Corsairs, Hogosha, FA are completely neutral.
  

I tried to figure it out myself but this left me with some questions:

1. What's the lore with respect to Gaians' (former?) alliance with the Corsairs?
   
2. Why would they prefer Hogosha over the Junkers? If there is one other eco-friendly faction out there, wouldn't it be the Junkers?
   
3. I can get somewhat behind allying with the Farmer's Alliance since they oppose Synth Foods but on the other hand they don't quite resemble an organic farming collective having planted "customized seeds" from Samura laboratories in the past.
   
4. Who even are the liberty seperatists and what have the Bretonia/Tau based Gaians to do with them?
   

Then, there are the lists of Gaians' many enemies which are similarly inconsistent, though I can't give a complete comparison of all sources here. Just as an example, the Transponder Spoofer says Natio Octavarium are neutral, my GaianI-IDed character is somehow almost allied with them and yet the Gaian base in Tau-31 gives me a mission to kill them. That's just confusing.
Regardless of which data I'm looking at, the common theme is that Gaians have a lot of enemies well beyond their ZOI and in many cases I just don't know why they are supposed to be foes or not. Is lawful Rheinland just an enemy because they are deemed too industrial while Kusari are apparently not harming the environment as much and wouldn't care for a bunch of eco-terrorists crossing their border? I'm absolutely willing to read up on all of this but is there a coherent set of resources that I can trust?

There is no single, cohesive source that one can use to catch up with the Gaian history and alliances over the past few years. All of the links you have are thoroughly outdated by at least a few years. I'll try to summarise your points the best I can.

1. The Gaian - Corsair relationship is pretty shaky at the moment, owing to the fact they took opposite sides during the Gallic war. This led to Gaian/Corsair skirmishes when the latter was aiding GRN during their invasion, and in turn put some Corsairs (like Custodi) at odds with the then only Gaian faction (Gaian Guard) flying about. Nowadays, both C:: and GG- are defunct, so the relationships between groups and individuals is more on a case by case basis.

2. The Gaian-Hogosha alliance comes from well before I first hooked up with the Watchers in 2014, but I feel confident in saying that it's largely got to do with Hogosha and Gaians having a mutual ally in the Corsairs, as well as some ancient dealings between some ancient Gaian groups and Kusari Naval Forces, back when the Bretonia - Kusari war was in full swing. Both Hogosha and Alliance were actively supporting their military, and with Gaians having beef with the Armed Forces, folks back then decided to join forces with them. The cooperation outlasted the conflict, and it's now more of an economic and trade partnership.

3.The alliance with the Alliance (heh) likely came alongside that of the Hogosha. Mutual friends, mutual enemies, somewhat similar causes.

4. The Separatists (now the Insurgency) are LN defectors that holed up in Bering. They first came in contact with the Gaians of Atacama (in Vespucci, also part of the defunct Gaian Guard), most of whom are ex-Legion (now also the Insurgency) opposed to the corporatisation of the then Hellfire Legion. Separatists sent out an SOS, Gaians came in contact, some loose economic cooperation followed. With Separatists sitting in Bering, the Gaians also came to work with the Unioners, who were also cooperating with the Separatists at the time. Their relations broke down later on, Separatists fired on Gaians for taking the Unioner side, and, ironically enough, the only ally shown by the spoofer ended up a hostile after just a few months.

As for the Natio, I suspect this has to do with some old IFF hostile to the Gaians being recycled into that faction, thus ending up on the target list on Gaian bases. Kusari, on the other hand, follows the cooperation mentioned in paragraph 2. Rheinland is something I honestly don't know about. Perhaps it's a remnant of the brief period of time the Gaians had a presence in Stuttgart, having absorbed remnants of the disbanded LWB.

I realise this is a little bit of a chaotic summary, to say the least, so if anything requires more elaboration, don't hesitate to ask.

That's much more detailed than I could have hoped for, thanks a ton! Now this explains why a Corsair I had encountered told me that "who's truly an ally is decided on the battlefield." I thought that was just a Corsair's martial way of talking.

When I picked up the character I had hoped there would be at least a couple of factions with ideological bonds that one could RP around. It's unfortunate that Gaians seem to exist in a political vacuum and have only had strategic alliances so far. Doesn't help that only the enemies made along the way prevail.

Since you are so kindly offering, I do have two more questions:

1. What exactly are the guard factions and why is it possible to be e.g. friendly with a main faction but hostile towards its guard?
   
2. Slightly off-topic: Is there a way to drop reputation with other factions apart from attacking their NPCs? I had actively tried to become IFF-allied with factions that I thought I should be allied to. (To be honest I'm confused why non-generic IDed characters can have arbitrary friends and foes in the first place, that seems to be making things unnecessarily complicated and ambiguous.)
   

1. Guard factions used to be a way of implementing "secure areas" for various groups - think of a secret facility nobody but that particular faction would have access to, like Juneau in Alaska. They were given Guard IFFs, ensuring nobody but the owners could dock on them. Gaian Guard was such an IFF for the Gaians, back when we had our own private corner in the form of the Faroe system. In my post, though, 'Gaian Guard' refers to an official faction going by the same name.

2. Other options include doing missions, giving bribes and some ID swapping shenanigans, although I'm no expert on how to use the latter to gain rep with a particular group without messing up your sheet entirely.

And yeah, sadly. The Gaian goals and philosophy doesn't quite match that of any other faction. Strategic alliances with someone who partially shares their objectives is the best they'll ever get.