4Game

You may have heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The concept is pretty simple. You have two prisoners, who committed a crime together, being interrogated in separate rooms. The interrogator offers them a choice; if you rat on your friend, you'll go free and they'll go to prison for ten years. HOWEVER, if THEY rat on you, too, you'll both go to prison for 5 years, and if neither of you rat on each other, you'll both go to prison for 2 years.

The Standard Prisoner's Dilemma.

So you have four potential outcomes; which should you rationally choose? For each individual, the best choice is always to betray; if they stay silent, your best choice is to betray, and if they betray, your best choice is still to betray, even though if you cooperate, it rewards you the most on a holistic level.

This is borne out in real life regularly, especially when it comes to rival Superpowers. Perhaps the most famous example was the Cold War. The superpowers had two choices; they could arm, or disarm. Now, the best choice for both of them would be to disarm, and save massive expense and the chance of invasion, but again, if they disarm, then if you arm, you win. If they arm, then if you disarm, you lose, so the only rational choice is always to arm.

But how does this come back to Aegis? Simple. You see, the member states of Aegis were compelled by the treaty that formed Aegis to surrender any AX tech to Aegis they might research on their own. But researching AX tech is expensive! So you have a similar sort of square. In this case, researching new tech benefits both you AND your allies(+3), but not as much as investing in conventional forces benefits you personally(+5).

The Aegis Prisoner's Dilemma.

So you can see that while if everyone researches tech, everyone ends up in the best spot overall. But since you can't trust the other Superpowers, the best result for each Superpower individually is if they invest in conventional forces, while allowing other Superpowers to invest in tech, that you then benefit from for free. Regardless of whether the other Superpowers research or not, the ideal choice is always to focus on conventional forces.

Which is exactly what we saw take place! It would be logically foolish for anyone to actually invest in better AX tech! This leaves only Aegis to carry out the research, and unfortunately, that, too, was fundamentally flawed; Aegis could only be controlled by a majority, and the Superpowers could never agree on anything, leaving bad actors like Professor Alba Tesreau to freely siphon weapons research funding away to her pet projects. Not only is its control structure destined, by design, for corruption, the pact that created it virtually strangles any and all independent research by the Superpowers, leaving it to relatively tiny groups, like Ram Tah or Azimuth, to carry out almost 100% of the vital weapons research keeping the bubble safe!

This is why Aegis is fundamentally flawed, and why it was Aegis itself that led to the inevitable consequence of Azimuth taking the fore, something they never could have accomplished had they needed to compete with the massive, dedicated, and well-funded tech divisions of the individual militaries.

This is why Aegis as a whole should never be reformed, at least, not in the form we last saw it. It must be in a form that encourages technological progress, not one that cripples it. Until an entirely new vision for Aegis can be made, it will be forever doomed to failure.