Blueprint for a Better Aegis – The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Lots of people want Aegis back, but if we get it back the way it was, it'll only fall back into the same pitfalls as before. I wrote a post a few days ago highlighting those failures, but in retrospect, that post was excessively negative. While Aegis made mistakes, we can learn from those mistakes, to create a better aegis for the future!

So I'd like to plot the map to a better Aegis, one that can actually succeed where the other failed!

Aegis; why did it fail?

It all comes down to the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the Aegis requirement for Superpowers to share AX technologies they developed.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment, which shows how sometimes the best choice individually can lead to terrible results as a group. Imagine you've been caught committing a crime, and they have your co-conspirator in another interrogation chamber. You aren't sure you can trust them, nor they you, and the Interrogator offers you a choice; if you rat on them, you go free. But if they rat on you as well, you both get 5 years in jail. If you both refuse to rat, you'll both go to prison, but lacking a confession, it's only for 2 years each.

The BEST result would be if you both didn't confess(just like how with Aegis, the best result would be if all the Superpowers researched AX tech and shared it!). But the problem is, if the other guy rats on you, your best choice is to rat on them. If they DON'T rat on you, your best choice, personally, is still to rat on them!

And the exact same thing is true of Aegis. If the Empire researches weapons tech and gives it to the Feds, the Feds are better off investing in conventional forces. If the Empire DOESN'T research weapons tech, the Feds are still better off investing in conventional forces! So in the end, nobody researches weapons tech except a few oddball engineers, and the galaxy languishes for years!

A Blueprint for a new Aegis – Building Interstellar Trust

Now, how can this be turned into a successful new Aegis? The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't immutable. There are ways to beat it, but it takes time and shared effort.

According to the Prisoner's Dilemma theory, trust must be established through Trust Building Exercises, such as escalating, gradual offerings from all sides. This was largely ignored when Aegis was first founded(as they formed it largely out of panic), and the problems of this became immediately apparent, as they were unable to agree on what it should actually do, resulting in it doing very little other than funnel money to the engineers and Independent Pilots, something the powers can easily do on their own without another layer of bureaucracy! (In fact, from my research, the only weapons tech that Aegis themselves actually created was Flak and the AX Multicannons – and even then, only after Liz Ryder first designed the AX Missiles that used the INRA-designed AX Compound!)

Before being formed, the Superpowers need to experiment with small-scale cooperation, building an expectation that further cooperation can succeed, where Aegis failed.

However, even after trust has been established, it rarely lasts long. Powers are always incentivized to look out for the wellbeing of their own citizens first, which means it's generally best to focus these trust-building exercises towards single large goals, such as disarmament, or the formation of independent task forces.

Which is why the new Aegis needs to be a singular event, or series of events, rather than an ongoing treaty. One example might this:

The Aegis Battle Group is formed as a purely military battle group made up of equal allotments of forces from all three superpowers. Each allocation of ships and troops is preferentially earmarked to defend their own territories first, in the event of a conflict. (IE, if Thargoids attack both the Empire and the Federation, the Imperial Aegis forces will defend the Empire first, while the Federal Aegis forces will defend the Federation first. Alliance forces, meanwhile, would be distributed equally.) This would encourage any donated forces to always be top-of-the-line, since the supplying power would know it will firstly look out for the direct wellbeing of their own citizens.

And most importantly, the requirement for sharing of technology needs to be completely scrapped. While Aegis might occasionally fund their own technological advances, they would be smaller, targeted efforts, rather than the large-scale funneling of money and resources they once carried out; these initiatives would instead be funded by the individual powers. With limited funding, they would be forced to use their money exclusively for critical research

Complementing this, there should be an ongoing trust-building exercises for scientific cooperation. For example:

Aegis Technology Symposiums, where each Power shares whatever technology they feel is not critical to their personal national defense, and might instead help them more by sharing than it hurts them by keeping secret, perhaps with caveats that any surrendered tech will firstly be used to reinforce any Aegis AX forces. For example, if the Empire were to discover a way to block Phasing damage from penetrating shields, they might share a weakened version of this technology with Aegis, while keeping the refined and proprietary version to themselves.

These would be a great time for new technology initiatives to be unveiled to the world, creating a schedule for players to get excited about the release of new content, like an AX E3!

By using a combination of trust-building exercises and systems by which Aegis support directly feeds back into supporting their own systems, a new Aegis can be born; one that might not have the same name, or the same mission, but one which has a chance of succeeding into the future where others have failed, and avoiding the mistakes of the past!