EVE Fiction

Maybe you are familiar with a proverb "enemy of my enemy is my friend" Gallente are allied against Amarr with Minmatar thus putting Amarr in political and maybe tactical disadvantage. So id imagine you could see higher officers thinking once the Gallente and Minmatar are finished with Amarr they'd go after Caldari.

As you are aware there are those in Gallente federation that believe Caldari should be intergrated into Gallente federation what ever they like it or not. As a result we have this lovely stalemate, Amarr with Caldari vs Minmatar with Gallente not to mention animosities that go both ways in faction warfare.

Ideologies might not aling but circumstances make being allied far more viable option than standing alone.

You speak sense, but like the guy above me said; Caldari cannot trust the Amarr, but of course, war is complicated.

I guess what really bugs me is that no new lore has come out which explains all this. It doesn't have to be a chronicle. I'd be completely satisfied with a news report written from a New Eden perspective. Let me try:

"ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!

CONCORD has lost its purpose and is no more. Gallente Federation and Minmatar Republic has declared war upon Amarr Empire which is now allied with Caldari State. Jovians has seen it fit to remain neutral, or perhaps they're just not interested. The first launch of attack hit Amarrian shores with a tremendous power and Amarrian retaliation was as swift as it was painful. The battle of New Eden has begun. May the gods bless our ships."

When the Empyrean Age expansion came out, it thought it was made very clear that the Emergency Militia War Powers act - the act which authorized the creation of the militias, and the mechanics we know as FW - was designed to keep the Big 4 pacified by allowing them some border warring and keeping things from escalating into all-out war.

Unfortunately, since then it's essentially been rewritten into some kind of a half-war or war of attrition, with navies rolling out for critical moments of PLOT! such as the battle in Amamake in Templar One, but not deploying their full strength in a reasonable manner (especially since, for the Amarr at least, their war strategy can be summed up as "throw the entire fleet at the enemy until the problem goes away").

This is how I've always seen it as well. None of the factions are interested in an all-out total war. Perhaps because the powers are too balanced, and no faction or alliance has a reasonable chance to achieve a decisive win. Besides that, there's the inter-faction economy to think about. Apparently inter-faction commerce is worth enough to all four factions that they jointly support CONCORD. I think the Interbus is also semi-public project of all four factions. (Correct me if I'm wrong there). Otherwise, how can it be explained that Amarr stations can be found within Minmatar high sec space?

But even with all there trans-border commerce going on, the ethnic tensions are still there (Minmatar hatred of Amarr, Caldari hatred of Gallente). So they allow Faction Warfare as an outlet for the young bucks and the real zealots. Kind of a Cold War situation, but with some skirmishing as an emotional outlet.

Caldari are "A political" and aren't interested in cultural differences. Only trade, research and advances in technology. Not changing another culture to replicate thier own or control another people to create some sort of empire.

The war with the Gallente is personal and has alot to do with their betrayal and destruction of the Caldari's home world. The Gallente started the war. The Amarr started their war by conquering and enslaving the Minmatar (personal).

There are 2 victims and 2 perpetrators. A good question would be; why are the Minmatar and Caldari @ war? The Gallente attacked the Caldari. Same can be said about the Amarr.

The Caldari are not religious and seem accepting of all cultures as long as trade is not disrupted.

Storywise it goes back to the end of caldari gallente war when the amar attacked Jove. The massive and crushing defeat of the amarr allowed minamtar to rebel, with help of gallente supplies.

Gallente were winning the war, economically nothing could withstand gallente juggernaut economy. Amarr feared the federation and the alliance with Caldari was the obvious way to stablize the status quo and send the political message that amar empire was not happy on the prospect of being solo against gallente economy fueling infinite troops from minmatar population with the added problem of a possible grudge from Jove.

Caldari simply needed all the support they could get from the empire.

So basically the main issue is the gallente supoer power not be allowed to push total dominance trough economic prowess.

I've found it interesting as well that the empires seem to fall into two separate camps regarding faction relations - the Amarr and Gallente operate under a seeming obligation to spread their way of life to other cultures (Through force if necessary, though the Amarr are of course more brutal about it), where the big Caldari and Minmatar wars were fought so they could be left alone.

The point about Caldari generally not caring about religion/culture is correct in that business comes before cultural considerations, but it also must be remembered that the average caldari is xenophobic as hell (see the Caldari/Gallente war and the story behind the founding of Mordu's Legion). Thus it makes a kind of sense to be allied with the Amarr, as the idea of a unified culture with a powerful hierarchy is more 'Caldari-like', while the highly independent Minmatar and multicultural Gallente probably seem like active threats to the Caldari way of life.

Also, there is the fact that the Caldari are literally the only empire the Amarr didn't try to subjugate, so there's no bad blood there. The Gallente, by contrast, bombed their homeworld into a radioactive cinder. The Minmatar, while probably reasonably respected by the Caldari, are nonetheless allied with the people who bombed their homeworld into a radioactive cinder, which I can only assume makes things awkward at diplomatic functions.

Also, a cool way the game reflects the respective size and power of the empires is through territory (probably obvious to most, but it took awhile for me to notice =/) Amarrian culture (counting Khanid and Derelik) has a huge sphere of influence, something like 9 regions. Gallente is second, with 6 (I think). Then the Caldari, who only have 4 and the Minmatar with 3. Since more territory indicates (or supplies) more resources and power, it's easy to see that the Minmatar and Caldari, though more inclined to see to their own affairs and ignore galactic politics, had to recognize that an enemy alliance could mean the end of their dearly-bought independence.

Also, since the Caldari are so ruthlessly results-focused, they are the only empire that might turn a blind eye to the whole 'brutal treatment of the lower classes' and 'massive, institutionalized slavery' thing. The Amarr, for their part, probably find the Caldari notion of 'results first, people/culture second' much more agreeable than the Gallente and Minmatar tendency to call them out on their innumerable human rights abuses.

The empires seem to be relatively evenly matched, so none of them can dominate the others on their own strength.

The Gallente give a lot of development aid the Minmatar and supplied arms to them during the rebellion and after. The gallenteans also seemed to have had a big hand in the early development of the Republic, and a lot of Republic institutions were modeled after Gallentean ones. There are also a lot of Minmatar residing in the Federation, making it a big voting bloc. This alliance seems more natural than that of their enemies, though it is implied in the lore that there is at least some resentment in the Republic who consider the Gallenteans to be somewhat overbearing. It seems that under Shakor the Minmatar are currently rediscovering the culture that had been so brutally been robbed from the by the Amarrians. I think that gradually they will make their own way into the world and their paths may diverge. Maybe we'll even see a revival of the Minmatar Empire as it was known before the Amarrians destroyed it. That would be a formidable force I think. In the meantime the Caldari have alienated themselves from the Minmatar by trading heavily with the Amarrians. The Caldari are unashamed and openly profit from Amarrian slavery and even take it to the next level through innovations like TCMC's. Some of the more interesting player RP developments I've seen recently illustrated this when Ishuk-Raata tried to reach out to Republic loyalists and this proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.

The Amarr and Caldari on the other hands have joined forces out of necessity. The only things that bind them are the militray threat posed by the Gallentean-Minmatar alliance and the highly profitable trade between the State and the Empire and it's satellite states. The Amarr are described as being the most powerful in the military sense, but they also have a huge Empire to protect and suffered humiliating defeats in recent centuries. They are still in a collective shock after the Jovian war, which totally changed their approach of: "when opposition is met, hammer it until it dies". Now they start to understand the need for patience and restraint, but their ultimate goal of reclaiming the entire cluster hasn't changed. Their methods are becoming more insidious now, like freeing slaves in order to flood the republic with educated immigrants who have never known anything but the Amarr Religion as unwitting missionaries. The Caldari fully understand that the Empire would turn on them the very moment they would gain the upper hand, so their military doctrine seems to be based on being able to taking any of the Empires on at any given time.

The struggle between the four empires is what interests me most about the lore, but what irks me is the role that Concord plays in it all. I had secretly hoped that the attack on their HQ in Yulai at the beginning of the Empyrean expansion would see it gradually destroyed, and replaced with Empire inspired "super police" forces with the same powers but a different coat. But I suppose that this would have been a lot of effort and overly complicated things...

This^

Also. Caldari and Amarr are not allied. Thier just not @ war with each other.

Amarr and Caldari is not allied.

"Enemy of enemy is my friend" is quite accurate to describe their relation.

Don't forget when Khanid splited from Amarr, Caldari is more "allied" with Khanid Kingdom. Despite the relation between Khanid II and Caldari, Caldari dun want Amarr growing too strong from their point of view. I think their relationship is not that close.