If I want to join in on the war as, say, a policing faction or a militant one, not necessarily a pirate or a corporation, like an NPC military organization going to participate in the war, would I be able to do that?

Well, I think you definitely will be able to join an organization. If there's an organization fighting another organization, and they're open to having people join, you can join them. We're planning that there will be missions that you can take, sort of mercenary missions that will be supplementing UEE actions. So, for instance, maybe there's a push against the Vanduul in one star system, and missions will be out there: we need 10 pilots to join the fleet to take out this station, stuff like that. So that's already part of the plans. And we also do have plans for various factions or organizations to be in conflict with each other, based on the way the economy simulation works. Maybe let's not call it an economy simulation; a universe simulation would be the best way to talk about it. It's sort of a meta universe simulation, and it simulates 20 million or whatever AI agents, and that's the one that's deciding what these organizations are up to, what the big goals are, and then that basically trickles down to what you see on the game side.

Yeah, and one other important point to add to that is that this whole universe simulation is not something we're setting up and then just letting it run according to its own devices. We're actually investing quite a bit of effort on the back side, such that we will actually be able to visually inspect, see what's going on, and monitor what's happening in every system at a kind of godlike level. And part of the reason why we want to do that is to see when things are reaching levels such that we basically want to step in as designers and institute some kind of change. For example, you may have a system that's completely quiet, with very little in the way of conflict, and we notice that it's been like that for the last 12 hours. It's reached a nice state of equilibrium. And so then we can go into the simulation and throw in a big Vanduul swarm that invades that area. That's going to wind up having all sorts of ripple effects, not only on that system but on neighboring systems. And that would wind up playing out, affecting everything from commodity prices to the availability of ships to what missions are...