a little discrepance between players and lore - yet again....
food from fp9 to crete. - yes, it happens... each day... thousands of tons of food go from zoners to the corsairs. - you don t see them? - well.... each day... millions of tons of consumer goods are moved all across the inner sphere. - you don t see them?
maybe you gotto dive deeper into the imagination of roleplay there. - the lore says that it happens. - so it happens. we do NOT count playerships actually trading - those are only specific but not representative for the NPCs factions actions. ( remember when i wrote that the military we see in the houses is by far not what the military represents by lore... )
so when we assume that for example .... bretonia as a whole house has a military larger than what players represent. ( and i am sure we agree with that ) - how comes that we cannot agree that zoner food shipments to crete is the same?
we claim that "we see no zoner players taking food to crete - and so we say... it does not happen" - yet - at the same time we say "the players in a house military are only a small fraction of what the house actually deploys"
game mechanics prevent us from adding too many NPCs....
but it would be easy to place zoner NPCs doing regular flights to crete with food - would that constitute as enough reason to "be good with corsairs"?
the above is but a small example of what you need to base your opinion on - either playerbased and player represented ( but then - try to apply it to everything ) - or lore based ( but then - again.... apply it to everything )
but when you pick lore based here - and playerbased there.... it gets the uneasy feeling of being unfair.
or in short - zoners are neutral, cause they get thousands of tons of food to crete each year - and without zoners the corsairs die to starvation... the fact that you don t see them is game mechanics and your point of view.
if we thought that players are all there is .... zoners would move into kusari and take over the empire, cause the KNF is but a fraction of the size of zoner playerships.... won t happen... - why? - cause we assume that the KNF is still a little larger and more powerful... even if we do not see them.
the population of each faction goes in the tens of thousands at least - sometimes millions or billions of people. - players and their ships are but a very small fraction of that and hardly represent, nor shape the faction at all - even if many a players take up "leading" roles. sometimes - in special occasions or epical events - players can change the face of a faction, but it takes about as long as taking a container freighter at high sea from max speed to a full stop.
if the game COULD do it - it would populate the space with millions of small ships ( ever looked at the traffic on city screens? - they re buzzing around like cars - now imagine the same travel of NPCs in space )