What exactly is it that the user is supposed to be doing in the game?

I suddenly gave some thought to the fact that it's not really a game about living armies destroying each other.

The "factories" are not like the factories on earth, manned by people.

Same can be said of the "units"... It doesn't seem like it would be correct to imagine that all of the little ships are actually manned by people.

So, if I can be tongue-in-cheek for a moment,  this is really a game about playing with enormous manufactured tonka trucks, at a distance of a few thousand/million lightyears, all for the purspoe of control of a planet???

I like the game very much, and I do like the pretext of for the combat when it is contextualized in the grand-scale posthuman story, and their struggles for control, and need for turinium, and the "human" and ethical questions that surround the treatment of the genuine AI that is superior in nature.

But in terms of excitement of battle, and stuff that gets the blood pumping, the pretext/theme for the actual combat is a bit lackluster, no?

I mean, there is ultimately nothing on the line, nothing really at risk -- just a bunch of non-sentient machines on a planet.

There isn't really a lasting economics to using the machines. The player just sort of makes them in the context of the game. 

This is about as exciting as playing a game of chess at a distance of 60,000,000,000,000 (60 trillion) miles, with the end result being that the owner gets to claim the whole (otherwise uninhabited) planet... which amounts to winning a big pile of rock and minerals.

You don't even get to enslave any virtual species.

Again it is great as an abstract game, exactly as that metaphorical game of chess would be too..

But, at the same time, the pretext/theme for combat definitely doesn't blow me away.

It's unique, I'll definitely grant that.

But it isn't like the (many) other games, where the survival and/or liberation of the entire human race is imminently at stake.

Rather, this war, even in the story line, is sort of secret and quiet.

I dunno... you think this might have an impact on the game's "grab"????

Each match is like a game of marbles with potentially cosmic impacts on the human race... but on the other hand, not so much significance at all.

Even in the context of the story, possession of a single PLANET doesn't seem to move the needle very much for any of the posthumans.

Uh... so.... Joy? I won?

I mean, I am a gamer at heart, and can have a lot of fun playing the most abstract stuff.

I really don't care what the theme is, as long as I am challenged to achieve the objective, and I am finding it fun.

But as a guy with a background in cultural studies.. who has spent some time looking at psychology of videogame play... I also appreciate the importance of "player identification" in game sales and success.

I mean.. you'll note that the show "robot wars" never really took off either (although it did make it all the way to PBS at midnight on Sunday morning, where I lived at the time).

Am I nuts?

Is this something that could possibly be refined and improved?