Technocratic Combine

Technocratic Combine/Gameplay Faction Archive

Archive 2 (April 2021)

 **Dev. Status** | Lore

*"To right the unrightable wrong,*

*To be better far than you are,*

*To try when your arms are too weary,*

*To reach the unreachable star.*"

- *"The Impossible Dream"* by Richard Kiley, written for the 1965 musical *Man of La Mancha*
The **Technocratic Combine**, also known as the **Combine** or the **Technocracy**, is a faction of the **Red Alert Paradox Expanded Universe** conceived and developed by ProudAmerikan. Central America has risen to spread the word of peace and Utopia, with their words first and their mad science second. Their gilded equipment and old-fashioned strategies is but a cover for the biological abominations, esoteric technologies, and inventions straight of science fiction they bring forth into battle.

## At a Glance

 **Visual Themes** | Art Deco geometric designs and Streamline Moderne curvature, sun and light iconography, team color speed lines, clean and shiny materials, wood paneling, marble stones, plated metals, headlights and spotlights abound. Damaged units have gold flaking off to reveal steel underneath.

## Background

### The Region

The opening half of the 20th century marked interesting and difficult times for the nations of Latin America. The United State's entry onto the world stage as a new imperialist power sparked the evolution of the protectionist Monroe Doctrine into the interventionist Big Stick Doctrine. Revolutions, dictatorships, and the intrusion of foreign companies like United Fruit lead to waves of orderly albeit authoritarian states and chaotic liberal action. The rise of communist and fascism onto the world stage only allowed more political factions into the ring, and when the Great Depression struck worldwide in the 30s the nations of Central America felt its effects as well. Foreign powers that had propped up dictatorships and encouraged infighting pulled out of Latin America to protect their own home industries, and with the loss of foreign intrusion came the loss of foreign benefits: jobs, income, and trade.

The misery of this period, however, would result in two new parties entering Latin America: the Columbia Future Society, and Technocracy.

The Columbia Future Society was a North American regional philanthropic organization, in existence since the mid 19th century and borne out of the Late Enlightenment. An alliance of socialites, entrepreneurs and intellectuals rooted in existentialist and pragmatic philosophies, the largely US-dominated Future Society concerned itself with matters of societal and individual improvement. They championed the marriage of the sciences to the arts and philosophies on a platform of practical application, and espoused that the recurring ills of the world - sickness, poverty, crime and unhappiness - could be solved by a combination of scientific inquiry and sufficient application of technology.

By the 1920s the Society - disheartened and radicalized by the horror that had been World War One - turned to a radical new idea of governance that could address both issues: technocracy. Technocracy advocated for a restructuring of existing economic and political systems, replacing politicians and businessmen with engineers and scientists as deciding forces and abolishing unmanageable wealth with theoretically manageable energy. At heart, it sought to replace the current order of capitalism entirely. And as such, despite the attempts of the Society to popularize it, the movement found little traction in the communist and anarchist-wary western world.

Even as Technocracy foundered as a revolutionary movement in the United States, sympathetic members of the Society - including many Central American figures who had joined the Society - brought it south. It merged and evolved symbiotically with existing movements, incorporating industrial democracy and populist rhetoric into itself until the technocracy of Latin America was a different beast than that which had been proposed in the United States. One state it found traction in was Mexico - where in the 1940s, with American isolationism back in force and forced to rely on its own industries for economic rebuilding, the introduction of liberal and technocratic experiments gave rise to what would later be called the Mexican Miracle.

For the next two decades, Latin America would see technocratic influence spread like wildfire. From Mexico to the Yucatan to even the shores of South America, the Columbia Future Society and native Technocratic Parties would work within and without the local governments to create both stable economies and popular platforms. While World War Two raged overseas, many Central American nations grew their domestic industries exporting first to warring states and then each other, even as foreign companies were gradually forced out. Infrastructure improved, educational funds were increased, and technical schools for the working poor and the rural boomed. Even as the nation-states grew closer together, in relations and economies, their relationships with both the new Allies and old Soviets crumbled. The coldness of Mexican-US relations before WW2; the aborted OSS-backed coup in Guatemala; the replacement of United States puppet Nicaragua with Soviet puppet Nicaragua and the ongoing chaos of La Violencia soured attitudes towards both capitalism and communism. As World War Two gave way to a cold stand-off between the Allies and the Soviets, things came to a head.

On the 15th of January 1959, only thirteen days after Fidel Castro triumphantly entered Santiago as the new leader of Cuba, the ruling presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras came together in a public televised meeting on Telesistema Mexicano. They solemnly announced the formation of a new union between the states, an union open to all peoples and populaces who desired a greater future for the Americas. It would be an alliance of mutual societal, political economic, and military cooperation beholden neither to the imperialist Allied Nations or the oppressive Soviet Union, but to industry for the masses and progress for the people - a grand Technocratic Combine.

### The Combine

Three months after the formation of the Combine, the first anti-technocratic coup began.

While the Allied Nations (particularly the United States) had reserved concerns over the declaration of the Combine as a security threat and potential destabilizing domino event, most members were content to avoid confrontation given the group's lack of communist leadership and past rejection of pro-Soviet trade agreements. Several organizations however - including the ACIN-affiliated Office of Secret Services and the private Syndicate Para-Intelligence Division - saw the increasingly protectionist and interventionist trends of the Combine's member states as a danger to both the regional market and stability in the Western Hemisphere. With the Cuban Revolution throwing a Caribbean power into the Communist Bloc and La Violencia raging unchecked in Colombia and Venezuela. at a time when both the Allied Nations and the Comintern were engaged in a build up of arms to keep the other power in check, a loose cannon so close to a major Allied Nations member could not be allowed to flourish.

On the 30th of March several senior generals declared a coup d'état against the Mexican government, backed by rightist revolutionary groups and renegade military bases. On the 14th of April, Honduras President Morales narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when his assailant's MAP-11 blew up in their face. On the 2nd of June Guatemala City was rocked by explosions as an unmarked Phoenix suicide bombed the National Palace of Culture, followed by claims of responsibility by the nationalist Guatemalan National Liberation Front. Within a year, the member states of the Combine found themselves less an alliance of economic and political progress but a survival pact as guerilla groups, political assassinations, and renege military commanders spread. From 1959 to 1963, the region would find itself caught in the Technocratic Civil Wars.

Although Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras were the original three members of the Technocratic Combine, they would not be alone by the end of the Civil Wars. Costa Rica - which had enjoyed a decade-long period of peace and prosperity after a brief but bloody civil war - had been the first to join, less than a month before the attempted Mexican coup d'état. In 1961 headlines were made when the impoverished Salvadoran government joined after a bloodless Technocratic coup, after which their first action was to seize and repatriate the newly built La Canela Sprawl whose exclusive resource rights had sparked outrage in the general populace. Nicaragua, under communist rule since World War 2 and a dictatorship of one ideology or another since the mid-20s joined the fighting with the rise of the Sandinista Technocratic Liberation Front. Even far off Ecuador inexplicably applied to the Combine in 1962, its citizenry having grown tired of paralyzing governmental instability. And still, the Combine held as both Technocracy and war spread through Central America. Honduran FU40 Buccaneers dueled with mercenary WP-501 Stallions over the Caribbean; Salvadoran peasant militias with Mexican .45 Obregons and newly-made M1961 Tecnocracias stormed BeanTil black plantation sites; Sandinistas in captured ICV-3s raided Loyalist T-55 Anvil columns.

When the last of the MLNG laid down their arms in 1963, the Technocratic Combine emerged bloodied but victorious. The OSS could no longer afford to sustain what had become an increasingly apparent loss: technocracy had shown itself resistant to overthrow, and South America looked to instead be the next hotspot of possible Communist influence. What had started as three nations in an alliance of interests had become something more: a union of six nations, their military forces and economies and populaces intermingled through war and necessity, who had fought back to back against soldiers of the old ideologies and in the process sharpened their own.

The United Technate was an idea that had sprouted in the Technocratic Civil Wars and came to fruition in the rebuilding period afterwards. It was the idea of a Pan-American state, and to some radicals a Pan-Global state. It was an end to the wars and conflicts that had been regular life for Latin America, and the creation of a superstate where quality of life and progress was key. It was the acknowledgement of technology as capable of causing great harm - but the greater belief in technology as tools for better living. And with the idea of the United Technate came the idea of Utopia: a future state that the present generation was incapable of reaching for now - but a state that could be reached by others, if only people stepped up now and took action to ensure it.

And action the Combine took, in the rebuilding that had to be done. Militaries were reformed and re-consolidated. Schools, factories, and churches were rebuilt. Laboratories and the scientists in them no longer operated in ivory towers, but pressed their research and their projects to the task of remaking industry and infrastructure. Great automated machine-factories allowed entire villages to begin automating their farms, mines, and mills, while educational and entrepreneurial subsidies soared. Laborers and soldiers broke new construction ground by day and pursued degrees by correspondence in the evening. Stranger stories still began to come out of Central America: reports of mysterious unknown species appearing in the wild, a sudden interest in certain exotic materials and metals, grainy films of backfiring gauss accelerators and vivisection on anesthetized coyotes. When the Soviets invaded in 1965, the self-proclaimed United Technate declared neutrality and retreated behind their increasingly ornate and imposing defense perimeters. Aside from the export of materials for the war efforts in nearby nations, the Combine's position on the war was one of guarded ignorance. Their neutrality only officially broke with the invasion of the Galapagos Islands by the Empire of the Rising Sun.

In 1959, the nations of the Combine had fought with the foreign guns and foreign weapons of a war they had not been a part of. In 1967, as whirling cyclocopters swept Naginata decks with grenade net barrages and enormous landing ships disgorged troops onto invaded environmental sites, the outside world could see what Technocratic war looked like. It was anachronistic and unsettling: barrages of gas interspersed with leaflets imploring surrender, infantry-portable particle accelerators employed alongside upscaled anti-tank rifles, ostentatiously decorated soldiers riding on monstrously large crabs the size of a truck, and more. After the horrific death of the invasion's regimental psychic and Imperial retreat from the island, the Combine retreated back into neutrality - but not into isolation.

As 1969 drags on, the Technocratic Combine spreads its wings and opens to the world. Pictures and images of the Technate pour out in magazines and brochures and on the news channel, showing gleaming skyscrapers and pneumatic tube tunnels and parks containing natural wonders never before seen by men. Powered networks span the length of Central America, giving electricity to the masses. The tools of industry and economy are built to produce and given unto the masses, giant machines and mobile factories married to equitation distribution models designed to ensure no one goes hungry, sick, or unhoused. Every week new papers and new patents emerge, devices of the future to improve the home and experiments to test theories that could revolutionize biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics. Gilded hotels open up to admit new foreign tourists, and monuments to the spirit of truth and humanity are lit up with spotlights at night. And when peace is threatened, the Humanitarian Guard is brought out: a brilliant display of armour, technology and aesthetics mobilized in defense of the Technate and all humanity itself.

Now it is the United States in civil war. Now it is the Allies finding themselves beset by guerillas and revolutionaries in Latin America. Now it is the Combine's time to take its place in the world: to show them the light, through words and deeds and science.

## Unique Faction Mechanics

### Specialization

The Combine's Archives Tower can be built from the start of the game with a Refinery, and allows the Combine to specialize in one of three possible technological branches that reflects the results of Technocratic experimentation and improvisation. Only one Specialization can be chosen at a time, but they can significantly change the tactics of forces in the field!

- *Rhetoric:* Psychological tech that augments morale at cost of range.

- *Communications:* Radio tech that augments.

- *Eugenics:* Biological tech that augments area control at cost of defense.

- *Exotic Materials:* Material tech that augments.

- *Metaphysics:* Weird math and strange physics that augments offense at cost of sanity.

### Technocratic Mandate

The Technocratic Mandate is a form of thinking that tells the Combine's forces not to take one step back, for when they fall in battle they by proxy cause the world to fall. Combine units gain increased armour bonuses when stationary and increased morale when in combat.

### Trench Systems

All Technocratic structures automatically generate a complete square of Trenches in a radius around themselves: different trench systems that overlap each other will link up into a larger system. Infantry have improved speed and count as being in Light Cover when utilizing the trench systems, conventional defenses can only be placed in the Trenches, and while they may be destroyed they cannot be demolished - friendly engineers can repair them given time.

## Soldiers Of Utopia

*"It's all hearts and minds with the Technate. Everything. I saw tank drivers putting blackboards on their tank treads so children could draw chalk flowers and animals on them while they refueled. Saw soldiers clear a village of guerilla fighters by day and sit down to have a community dinner with that same village at night. Saw them drop aid packages over the MIR camps they were fighting and mount speakers on their cars to tell Inkarri suicide bombers to stop because they had families who loved them. Of all the forces gathering in the Americas...it is them I am the most worried about."*

- Allied correspondent Pratibha Joshi, after a trip to the State of Guatemala
### Buildings

All Combine buildings are Towers: huge, hulking behemoths, quite literally skyscrapers on treads. They crush foes when mobile and on the move, but once deployed into position cannot be packed up while the battle still rages.

### Field Defences

When the Combine march to war, they seed the battlefield ahead of them with all manner of emplacements and defenses to cripple anticipated counterattacks. Most are laid by infantry and specialized vehicles, but others are deployed ahead of time.

### Defences

Conventional defenses, notable only able to be built on Trench or Wall sections.

### Auxiliary Forces

While not formally incorporated into the military structure of the Technocratic Combine, Auxiliary Forces may appear in the battlefield under specialized circumstances - normally being unlocked as part of a tech structure.

## Behind the Scenes

The Technocracy's overall design inspiration comes from Decopunk.