Some did, some didn’t - I refer you to Merv and the Tangut Kingdom of Xi-Xia.
in any case, that hardly matters if what’s really driving this is the Pandoravirus.
I completely understand why NJ want to eradicate Disciples to the last one of them… or why Disciples want to eradicate/capture any other living human. Just a NJ terminating Synedrion is not completely logical or Synedrion erasing any other faction from existence may be not completely logical.
I don’t think destroying havens by a faction literally means genocide of all population. As I can see it they just destroy faction-specific infrastructure and (possibly) execute the settlement leaders. After that the settlement remains as neutral or maybe people start migrating to some other place or maybe Pandoravirus gets them.
If you read Phoenix Point lore you will see that neither of the faction ideologies is bloodthirsty enough to order mass-executions.
Pay attention to population counter next time…
Yes maybe they pack their stuff and go live in the mist somewhere.
Why make excuses for something that shouldn’t exist in the first place? Heavens should be occupied by factions and eradicated by pandorians.
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That “shouldn’t exist in the first place” is an approach more suitable for New Jericho faction. And I prefer allying myself with Synedrion because their “learn to coexist” approach is more appealing to my life style 
All factions genocide heavens anyway.
The grand idea was probably that amount of usable heavens goes down as campaign progresses, either by player unable to defend them by pandorians or faction wars. Fine, but this is where desired game mechanics just goes against believable world. What’s make it worse is that such policies are not acknowledge by either of the factions.
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Only if you believe that a) humans are far less genocidally tribal than history demonstrates them to be and/or b) this behaviour isn’t being triggered by the PandaVirus.
Personally, I think the only thing that’s ‘wrong’ here is the fact that the in-game story boxes don’t spell out what’s happening a little more clearly.
Things changes significantly since industrial revolution. In modern times, even if genocide happens, the industrial complex would be still occupied instead of outright destroyed. This was one of the reasons why nuclear war never started - it makes absorption of industrial capacity rather difficult.
We’re not playing a game set in modern times though, it’s an apocalyptic future. Judging any faction’s action based on our current society is like The Victorians judging our ‘modern times’ based on the morals of the late 19th century by which probably most of us here would be a lunatic asylum.
The factions aren’t trying to expand, they’re just trying to survive, and the rival factions are a perceived threat to that survival, so yes they would try to wipe out each other’s havens.
Populations of factions may disperse rather than be exterminated, we just don’t know (though the fact that thoes haven don’t appear again later in the game points to the 2nd option.
And the reason that the conquering faction doesn’t move in, could be as simple as that they don’t have the resources to shift that many people from one haven to another and/or they’re not at their capacity for production in their existing havens.
So you are assuming that they wipe out everyone because people in other heavens are so indoctrinated that they live by ideals and not by day to day life so it’s impossible for them to change faction they belong too. If they disperse then where do they disperse? Why they don’t just stay and work for new factions? If luck of people is what prevents expansion, then we would should see such dynamics reflected in heavens when they are building up. Meaning there should be a surplus of X population before new buildings start to pop-up. Does that really happen?
TBH, I don’t care how it can be explained, the point is, this is like 5th discussion on the subject of this behavior looking like illogical or at least contrived. It means that to many players it doesn’t make much sense. To me personally it doesn’t, the game doesn’t provide enough lore or interaction foundation to establish that this is how faction war should be. Coming up with some outside of the game stories is like trying to explain new trilogy of Star Wars bus some comic books - it’s irrelevant to most people.
Nope, I’m assuming that they wipe out everyone in other Havens because they are driven to by the mass-hysterical mania induced by the Pandoravirus.
We are not operating in a sane or balanced world here (quite frankly, given all I’ve learned about the Second World War in the last 2 series I made, I’m not sure the world ever was balanced or sane, but that’s another matter). We are operating in a world where people randomly attack one another for no readily apparent reason because they’ve had weird dreams or got an infected cut.
Normal rules don’t apply here - and even if they did, they’re just as likely to engage in mass genocide rather than any vaguely rational behaviour. The last time history witnessed the level of massacres that became commonplace in the Twentieth Century was at the time of the Mongols. That is not a good foundation in which to base an argument about people behaving rationally.
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[on a second thought, don’t want to get into this kind of discussion]
Maybe there’s nothing to come back to, maybe they head to another heaven that aligns with their existing faction, or maybe they’re just preferring to go it alone and not be shackled by any faction this time.
Not really, building something new in your own safe territory isn’t necessarily driven by the same need as travelling somewhere new and dangerous would be, and the fact that the factions are still able to build new buildings within existing factions means that there’s no need to try to do it elsewhere.
It’s all assumption at the end off the day, but then so are the reasons being given as to which people wouldn’t do that. The genre of sci-fi as a whole is speculative fiction, for any game that takes place within that genre, and especially for one who’s world unfolds in a future setting it doesn’t need to deal with what today’s people are most likely to do, but rather just what will people in that speculative setting choose to do.
And that’s where I can agree with you. What I’m inferring about the Pandoravirus is very heavily implied by the lore and the in-game ‘Dream Text’, but it is never explicitly stated - or it hasn’t yet as far as I’ve got into my first playthrough. And I think it needs to be, otherwise it makes people like you who want to believe in the best of human nature feel very uncomfortable.
I feel the same way about the way Synedrion behaves in this game. It sticks in my craw that the first thing they ask me to do is sabotage another haven - and I’ve said so on several occasions. I can take it from NJ or Anu, 'cos that’s how I expect them to behave, but Synedrion is supposed to have risen above this.
Now if the in-game text ultimately explains to me that the human race has gone stark staring mad because of an alien virus, I can live with that - that’s what I’m fighting to prevent. But at the moment, the lore doesn’t lay it on thick enough for me.
As I’ve said before, at some point I’m going to post a long post proposing a Path of the Peacemakers DLC (or mod), that both spells this out and provides a set of Missions to counter it, but at the moment, work’s too full-on to create the time for it.
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I get that. It’s not a nice thing to have to come to terms with. It’s something I find myself confronted with a lot in my job, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
I hope my previous post to this goes some way to making the rationale more palatable for you.
You don’t know what I believe in, so please don’t assume.
Huh? They way you wrote you previous post, implies that multiple genocides done during WW2 was just some “crazy irrational” stuff. Which is something you can believe in but it’s not what actually happened and motivations where very pragmatic, just as with mongols. Mongols didn’t randomly set fires to cities, they gave clear ultimatums and acted on them. Most nations “joined” empire without shedding any blood.
Most of the mass murders in WW2 where motivated by thinning out population of Europe as mass production of food was not a thing for the next 30 years. People found the way to scale industrial production but lack of the same principals for food production was hindering any potential growth of the manpower of the nation. As simple as that. Just want to remind you that there where about dozen instances of famine in Europe and Central Asia between 1900 and 1937 alone. Signing off such atrocities as just products of a “irrational” mind is not really making it any better.
That’s not what I said, nor what I implied. But as this conversation seems to be upsetting you, I don’t intend to go into any further detail.
What I did say is that the Faction Wars in this particular alternative reality is, to my mind, caused by the hallucinogenic properties of the virus that has destroyed civilisation.
And I will leave the conversation there.
Why would conqurred heaven be “somewhere new and dangerous”? Wouldn’t the military expedition itself be way more dangerous?
Yes but you need some basis for such changes. Sure, one can just say - in feature the civilization is like this and that. Fine, it would be better if material can show and explain why. Even Sharkanado had explanation for it’s main plot point 
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the influence for the dynamic between the factions within Phoenix Point came from such as this.
In 2013, a nuclear war forced a large amount of Moscow’s surviving population to relocate to the city’s Metro system in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the “Rangers of the Order”, to the neo-Stalinist “Red Line” faction and the neo-Nazi “Fourth Reich”, to the more powerful factions such as “Polis”, which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the “Hanza” regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power.
As these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. As the war raged, the stations who refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hanza regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states. Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout. While most of the stations were controlled by the three main factions, some stations formed an independent alliances, including the station VDNKh (“Exhibition”). Within that station, the events of Metro 2033 unfold.
It’s an uncomfortable read in parts certainly, but the authenticity of the world that exists with Metro and the desire of The Red Line and Fourth Reich to entirely wipe each out despite a common enemy existing around them in undeniable. Is it realistic for humanity to act like that in that situation? Maybe, maybe not, but either way it’s the world that has been built for that work of fiction.
This I agree with however, and that’s the difference between PP and Metro.
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