There are several things to be said about this:
- Much as some people don’t like it, the behaviour of the Factions is pretty historically accurate: [MOD-REQUEST] Stop the faction war on each other
If you think about it for a moment, NJ are a bunch of Human Supremacists and Anu are batshit Alien-cultists built around a medieval heirarchy - they are bound to try to kill each other, no matter what you do.
Where I used to agree with you was Synedrion. I couldn’t get my head around the disconnect between their Anarcho-Syndicalist worldview and their hostile actions towards the other Human factions. Then I remembered how the Anarcho-Syndicalists behaved in pre-War Italy and the Weimar Republic (they spent more time fighting one another than the existential threat of the Fascists - at one point the Italian A-S’s even sabotaged the last desperate attempt to form a coalition against Mussolini, rather than co-operate with ‘Class Collaborators’), and I also recalled the less-than-glorious history of the only true democracy the world has ever seen. The Ancient Athenian Republic was so aggressively imperialist that it eventually forced its rivals in the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues to band together with the existential threat of the Persians to bring them down. Then, once the Athenians were out of the way, the Spartans and the Thebans turned on each another, until the even bigger existential threat of the Macedonians came along - by which time they had weakened one other so badly that not even the united front of Athens, Sparta and Thebes could stand against Phillip’s army.
So I’m afraid the history of our species suggests that we are more likely to team up with the Aliens in an effort to get rid of our ideological rivals than we are to unite against them.
- Even if that weren’t the case, I strongly suspect that the Faction Wars are a game mechanic, designed to thin out Recruits & Resources in the run-up to the endgame. It turns the engame into a desperate race for survival with dwindling reserves, rather than the Long Walk to Victory of the United Allies.
That’s likely to change when the ODI gets replaced by a Human Population Counter (can’t find the Canny Link atmo, but it’s on Canny somewhere), but I suspect Snapshot will always want some way of thinning out the Pop to add tension to the endgame.
- I did once propose a DLC/Mod that would give people the opportunity to at least slow down Faction Warfare, if not halt it completely: [DLC/MOD REQUEST] The Path of the Peacemakers
But it never got much traction on Canny, so I suspect the Devs are content that Faction Warfare is only a problem to a tiny minority of players.
If it really bugs you that much, I suggest you look for Sheepy’s ‘Stop Faction Warfare’ Mod on Nexus, which lets you set a bunch of parameters and (I believe, though I’ve never used it) even turn the Faction Wars off completely.