Most of the Persean Sector probably has no idea the factions exist

Here’s a thought that hit me after replaying the bar historian stuff and looking at the “decivilized” tags on half the map:

It’s completely plausible that the majority of humans in the Persean Sector have no idea who the Hegemony, Persean League, Tri-Tach, or Sindrian Diktat even are.

The core we actually play in is hilariously small. A couple dozen systems with a handful of functional colonies between them, plus some stations and outposts. That’s the entire “civilized” political stage of the game.
Population-wise, these are:

- A few major planets (A slim majority of the core worlds entire population lives on Chicomoztoc alone)

- Some mid-sized colonies

- A lot of glorified company towns and orbital platforms

Even if you’re generous, you’re talking maybe a few hundred million, just barely over a billion at absolute most, actually living under the banner of the big factions. Stack Jangala, Kazeron, Sindria, Nachiketa, a couple of big League and Church worlds on top, and you still end up with a population that feels “big” only because everyone left who can fly a starship is crammed into this tiny pocket of space. That’s the population the factions count, tax, recruit from, propagandize to. That’s the population the game UI shows you numbers for.

The bar historian implies that the “unofficial” population of the Sector, the people living on decivilized and regressed worlds outside the core, is massive. These are planets that still have power, technology, radio, and some kind of society, but no shuttles, no yards, no central government and most importantly no way off the rock. The Domains colonization seeded a lot of worlds. Most of those colonies never had the industrial base or luck to keep a viable space industry after the gates died. They dropped out of the interstellar economy but not out of existence. Their people didn’t just evaporate. Give a half‑functional industrial society two hundred years and it will still be able to feed, house, and breed–even if it can’t build a single shuttle. That’s how you end up with decivilized planets that can ping your ship yet have no way off the ground.

Meanwhile, the core powers we deal with in gameplay absolutely did not fall that far. They lost the gates and a ton of infrastructure, but they still had functional fleets, hyperspace capability, and enough industry to rebuild an interstellar network on a smaller scale. The Hegemony, League, Tri‑Tach, the Diktat, the Church, for them, the Collapse was a disaster they survived.

For decivilized worlds, the Collapse was the literal end of history. If even a fraction of those lost colonies held on with populations in the tens or hundreds of millions, the tally of humans stuck groundside absolutely buries the headcount of the core. It’s not crazy to imagine a sector where 70, 80, 90 percent of all humans live on worlds the Hegemony, League, Tri‑Tachyon and the rest haven’t meaningfully interacted with in generations. 

So when we talk about “the Sector” as if it’s the Hegemony vs. the League vs. Tri‑Tach, what we’re actually talking about is a tiny crust of spacefaring aristocracy sitting on top of a huge submerged mass of forgotten humanity. When we zoom around thinking about who “controls the Sector,” it’s worth remembering: the people playing that game are a weird, hyper‑technological minority.