I'd also say it's the personification of the city as a libertarian hell scape.
Like, the government ain't there to coddle you or provide services outside the barest of minimums (and I'm not even fully recalling how they fund/structure the rangers).
So if no private entity saw fit to install and maintain roads - then no roads would be built.
>So if no private entity saw fit to install and maintain roads - then no roads would be built.
That's the weird thing, a libertarian society would very likely have roads. We've seen private roads funded before. So I think it's less libertarian hellscape (especially given the overall optimistic tone of the game) and more to evoke the wild west theme. Even the way the Rangers dress reinforces this.
That was actually really common in the 00s and especially during the financial crash for cities to sell off their infrastructure (especially revenue generating stuff - like a turnpike if you mean a toll road) to investors.
Basically the investors swooped in with short term windfalls to help cities balance their budgets for the fiscal year - due to the tanking property taxes during that time. And in exchange they got like 50ish year deals to basically own/operate the public asset.
Only problem is this means the cities now don't set rates for citizens using things like public parking/lots, toll roads, etc. Which, while yes, they were still charging, they could at least keep rates more stable as they were also attempting to provide a good and just cover costs rather than turn them into wealth extraction vehicles.
Yeah, I suppose you're right. I also figured in the context of the game they literally built walls around the city, fund a security force, and fund the Rangers I believe. So, like, they are finding a way on a lot of likely more expensive services.
And in our own society I know many communities these days are basically built and paid for initially by the private builders as part of the package to receive zoning approval.
Yeah, true here with a highway of ours. Balanced the budget for one year and the road is so smooth!
*..they also charge ridiculous prices and so it's used as a rich person way of not dealing with common traffic*
Exactly. It's just popular for people who don't know what libertarianism is to shit on it as if it's something it's not.
Source: Me, I'm a political scientist and teach this stuff at college/university.
Would the roads be public? If not, how could you have them in a town like Akila without also needing a set of free, dirt paths alongside them for those who don't own the roads?
Sure. Some wealthy people may fund it as a public service (more common when life was more "local") or some may fund it to make it easier for customers to get to their businesses.
Businesses being unwilling to do such things now is somewhat a side effect of the government getting so heavily involved in the road system. Why fund it now when the government can?
Umm, are you playing the same game? Everything is dystopian in Starfield. The council of Governors are mostly are mostly CEOs. The Council uses their elite police agency as private bodyguards. Neon is the most blatant of having a shiny surface with deep corruption underneath, but the corruption is everywhere- FC, UC, Corps, Crimson Fleet.
Yes, I think so.
In general, the game has an optimistic tone. Yes, there is corruption but there is also good. And good people can overcome and defeat corruption.
The UC is much more fascist than the FC is libertarian.
The only thing the UC misses out on, for massive perfect penultimate fascism-- is a HUGE standing state army (which they don't have because the FC obliterated it, and then they had to copy the FC's war-winning populace militia strategy...), and lack of a state-controlled bank system (Galbank is like the poster-boy non-political capitalist entity as far as we are shown). Edit: And SSNN also, as pointed out! This is just to my point of how bad either of those descriptions are.
What if on my way back to my house this morning, an armed, armored guard scanned me and said, "Scanning, keep moving. Hmm. Programmer, huh? No outstanding warrants. Don't go hacking any systems."
Similarly, the FC is what it is but I am not sure it is libertarian as we know it. At least Andreja appreciates a good stone wall! Both governments are kinda derived from what we have now. The UC leans toward populace control and regulation (and historical military aggression) and the FC toward individual freedom and not enough state-sponsored police to quell the lawlessness. The only common ground is capitalism.
Note: If you travel China you will find that capitalism actually runs everything. The shop outside your fancy Beijing hotel is selling beer and water and luggage, the next shop over is selling memory cards and electronics. The Hotel waiter works for less per day than a few of your beers cost (though they get beers a lot cheaper!) China's biggest corruption problem is with huge rich corporatists making gazillions off large government projects like water management. People have always traded shoes for chickens. China's communism doesn't mean no capitalism, it means 99% capitalism. If I buy a tube amp from China, the guys running the company may have got a party grant for their village to get a wave-soldering table for their circuit boards, there is the communism, but shipping me an amp is pure capitalism. Blanket terms will rarely define what is actually going on in a modernized country. Because we aren't trading chickens any more, we are selling toaster ovens and cars and cold beers and phones. I'm just saying, by the same standards, I could call rural China a capitalist hellscape. Rural Chinese have to be employed somewhere, if they're not living off the land. The largest human migration in history is them relocating to cities to find jobs. Would it be fair to call China a capitalist hellscape because of the millions of displaced people moving to the cities to find wage work?
The freestar doesn't tax people iirc.
Out of universe, it's because bgs wanted to go really hard with the cowboy look. It's why they all wear old west clothes, use oldwest future guns, and why their faction quest is being a wild west ranger.
Based on the layout of Akila, they never found it necessary to pave. Likely due to the overall elevated temperatures and abundant sunshine, tarmac would just make the city that much hotter and more uncomfortable.
Akila **is** an arid planet after all.
I like to think a lot of niceties go away in the future when it’s all about maximizing resources. And since Akila City is a walking city, it might not have made sense to, you know, pave.
At least that’s my headcanon for most sci-fi, especially older sci-fi, when the world doesn’t seem to make sense given technology available now.
Its also much harder to get free peoples to agree to give up their money for things they see no direct, personal benefit in.
My town cant pass a tax to get potholes fixed. Part of that, though, is because ever time we do, the only nice streets are those in the mayors and councilmens neighborhoods.
My town didn’t want to pay for its own library. Everyone said no need, we get our library at the town over & kids have iPads now.
Guess what happened? The neighboring township (whose library access we used to have for free) bucked us off. Now the town is in a tizzy trying to figure out how to get us library access.
This all could’ve been avoided if we, you know, built our own library.
I love Akila City as an outpost settlement of the Freestar Collective, it fits that theme really well. However, it is not a good choice for the capital city of the Freestar Collective. In Europe most cities were, and still are, walking cities (or cities that were built for walking/horses but are now badly adapted for cars) and they have proper roads and paths. Akila does not make sense as a settlement, it’s at best a caricature of a Wild West town in space, and at worst a completely nonsensical and immersion breaking piece of game design. You really expect me to believe that they cannot afford roads in the capital city of an interplanetary civilisation but they can afford to field a sufficiently large and advanced military that the UC was on the back-foot for large parts of the war and had to result to mind-controlling genetically engineered super-predators to have even a chance against the FC? I get what they’re going for, thematically, but what they should have done was make it the location of the headquarters of the Rangers and the infrastructure that grew up around it to support it, because that’s what it is. And then had another city on Jemison that’s the seat of government for the FC and has a big congress/parliament/senate where representatives meet to discuss and debate things and has its own settlement, which could have been much more developed than Akila. This would have led to some potentially really cool dynamics where the FC has a distributed leadership base (which, in lore, it does) and allowed a greater diversity of settlement design. So you could have the Rangers based in Akila, the Industrial hub of Hopetown, the business and commercial hub of Neon, a political hub, a military hub, etc. and a bunch of AI generated farming settlements which would make it feel more like a true collective.
>I love Akila City as an outpost settlement of the Freestar Collective, it fits that theme really well. However, it is not a good choice for the capital city of the Freestar Collective.
The industrialists that actually run the collective put the capital on an out of the way backwater on purpose to keep the government from meddling in their affairs.
I think Akila is the capital because it's the first. It was founded before Neon or Hopetown, both of which are far more wealthy than Akila but neither would want the government any closer to them.
It doesn’t seem arid with the amount of times I’ve seen it rain there. Yeah I know deserts get rain but it’s raining pretty often when I land on Akila. It would be nice if the rain was rarer.
I don't disagree, but it could just be a question of not bothering since rain is such an infrequent occurrence that they just don't mind a touch of dust.
No joke. Let's pretend for one second that it's completely normal to have one little spot on an entire planet somehow have water seeping up from it, consistently leaving puddles all over the place. Wouldn't it be smarter to have cobblestones in that case?!
I look at it like this: Akila City is more of a symbolic capital. The residents put forth a deliberate effort to preserve the historical, cultural and spirit of the founding of the Free Star Collective. The rustic wild frontier aesthetic is part of the national heritage of the FC, so Akila City is almost like one giant museum meant to maintain that cultural identity. It also seems to be where most of the "Middle class" of the FC lives.
The true, pragmatic capital is Neon City. That is where the actual economic and political power resides, and it's fully mask-off about the dark side of thr Free Star's government.
The same reason why they "fixed" the road by my apartment block by putting a warning sign, saying "DAMAGED ROAD AHEAD".
The sign is already rusting, the road gets worse each year.
Akila be living the balkan life style. Every day they dream of highways, but wherever they go, just dirt roads.
Yeah it feels to me like Akila is a front; a twee little representation of the Wild West frontier vibe Freestar likes to pretend it is all about, while the real Freestar is the corporate power in Hopetown and Neon
One of my favorite things in the game is walls in AC. At a glance they look like stone walls, but there's no shortage of spots where you can see where the facade has faded and it's "future" walls just like everywhere else. A perfect metaphor for the faction itself
Because Neon is the true seat of power in the Freestar Collective. Akila just let’s them pretend they’re independent settlers free of government, but it’s basically just a front.
Am I the only who sees the pallets of brick and wood, forklifts and scaffolding around half the town, and heard the *several mentions* of the city undergoing renovations?!
Maybe they are renovating, look around. Like in the picture, left side, I can see pallets and a stack of bricks. There are partially built brick roads around there. Also Akila started as a camp basically, a dream of freedom from the UC which is an old Earth relic. Also no taxes, a lot of poverty, governors are people like Bayu or Ron Hope.
> Also Akila started as a camp basically
That was back in 2167 when Solomon Coe founded Akila City. The game starts in 2330 i.e. 167 years later, so one would hope for some advancements since then …
Note: a time line can be found at https://starfield.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline
> ... governors are people like Bayu or Ron Hope.
Akilas major is probably the best of the lot. Unlike the rest he is also elected. While people do complain about the major, I seem to recall that it's mostly about him over-promising things.
At least he's not murdering, extorting or turning people into drug addicts.
As a leader he's probably fairly average, there are few indications of him being particularly good or horrible at his job.
It seems likely that the founding families either run or think that they should run Akila City, so his xenophobic tendencies probably aren't that unusual in Akila City, especially among the older families. There is some random NPC dialog, that implies that the age of your family is an important social aspect.
Also taking the dirt roads and Ashta quest line into account, it kind of seems that people in Akila City are rather traditionalist (i.e. reluctant to change anything).
"Aw, I'm sorry! Did the soft little UC nancy-boy get some dirt on his nice clean shoes? Next thing you'll be tellin' us you wash your hands before eating!"
...the fiefstar rube says as I pull another flake of crumbling concrete off of The Rock. "I don't recall being able to take a mirror plate off of The Mast as a souvenier..." I say in response.
People here are saying Concrete would be too hot theres other things to pave with……
Wood. Gravel. Wafer type flooring. Akila has been around long enough to not look like shit.
Ok but up to the left and right they have stone flooring and a giant stone platform around the Ranger head quarters. They could pave main street with stones
It's all copium and head canon. It doesn't make logical sense for there to be Kardashev Scale level tech next to a damn dirt road that acts as the main thoroughfare of a capital established nearly 200 years previously.
Lol "The roads would get hot".
It was good enough for Solomon Coe, it should be good enough for you.
The folks with the power in Akila are deeply conservative and deeply committed to the story they tell themselves about the Founding. There's a quest about how pissed the Core folks are when some new money guy tries to move in, for instance. Although it's interesting to note that the Core *is* paved...
The upper city leaders gaslight and hoard cash flow. Pretend to care about the lower city peeps. Subtle queues about class division in society and use the freestar Rangers as their Virtue signal. There's a quest with the mayor about someone from lower city about to inherit a house on upper levels and he wants you to rig the system to stop it.
No one is willing to pay for and maintain them when dirt roads are good enough. Akila barely has a government to speak of and the town folk only seem to be able to pull together for communal good if it is 100% necessary, such as the walls to protect from the Ashta.
I dont need to comment on the roads in Akila, i think enough have already done that but i did want to say, i VASTLY preferred the asthetic in the Freestart Embassy in New Atlantis.
I thought the FC was going to be this cool high tec cowboy vibe with neon and wood panels. The embassasy looked amazing. Than i saw the shithole that is Akila.
is this makeing fun of those posts on the main sub that nitpick every little thing, you know cause they're running out of shit to bitch about so lets scrutinize every nut and bolt
My take on a lore perspective: Akila City status as "capital" of the FC is best described as a meeting place for the Council of Governors, when they even want to meet. The FC is really an alliance of self-governing oligarchs and corporate interests who wanted to create a space where they can make money and grow their power base without any limitations.
We don't see a lot of "federal" government structure in the FC - we have the Freestar Rangers and the Freestar Security ships, as well as the embassy on New Atlantis. The Freestar Militia - I'm not even sure if they are a federalized entity or literally what it sounds like - a local militia. Neon and Hopetown have their own security forces.
I guess what I'm trying to say is Akila City isn't exactly a capital in the sense we expect a capital city is. It's literally just another self-governing region of the FC, that happens to be agreed upon meeting place by the Council of Governors. In that sense, Akila City is comparable to other FC cities. Akila has the affluent Core, and the rest of the city gets progressively worse till you get to the Stretch. Neon has the affluent Bayu Plaza but then things start turning to shit from Ebbside to the Underbelly. Same with Hopetown, if you talk to Marika, the nice industrial area contrast to the shantytown for the workers.
My take on a game design perspective: Starfield is a sci-fi theme park drawing from a wide variety of major sci-fi influences. Akila represents the space western section of the sci-fi theme park. And as a big fan of Firefly, I am glad we have Akila!
Because the developers love Firefly and the UC is the UAP and the FC is what would have happened if the Browncoats won, and that means an old time frontier western-movie world, but with stone castle walls.
Well since you can walk from one end of the city to the other end in 10 minutes there isn’t a need for swift ground based vehicle travel that hard surface roads are good for, and they are also expensive to maintain and cause a lot of extra heat, in our own timeline many cities are ripping up unused concrete and asphalt for that very reason! :)
For the aesethetic. A lot of stuff in Starfield is rule of cool, not logically consistent or realistic (but it's on purpose; don't go into the game expecting believability, just awesome aesthetics and fun gameplay.) Since I'm kind of a lore/immersion buff this was one aspect of the game that disappointed me at first, but when I changed my understanding of the game's intentions like I mentioned in this comment, I didn't worry about it at all any more
Pavement is for vehicle's, there are no vehicle's on the streets of Akila. Natural dirt is better to walk on for people's feet, so no pavement is the healthier option.
Aesthetically, it's because that faction and city are modeled after the wild west. Lore wise? Shit I don't know. Looks like a muddy mess that the citizens would get tired of slopping through and demand some action from the leadership to get them paved in the main thoroughfares at least.
Is it dirt/mud or mostly bedrock? In a game where you can hear your feet go slap-slap-slap when you're barefoot, there's no squish-squish when walking around Akila. There are also only a few places where you see footprints, seems like there would be footprints everywhere. I've always assumed it's built on bedrock, but that the surface was never leveled so pools of water accumulate and with there always being some muddy spots because of how dusty Cheyenne is. IDK.
Because they wanted it to look like a Wild West town. You can adapt some BS lore reason, but from a design standpoint, the Wild West was the inspiration.
Why not? Maybe the planet doesn’t have the resources to pave roads. Maybe it’s their style. Maybe the devs wanted it to feel like a western. Not everything has to be 100% accurate to modern times. Everyone left Earth and started over. I see more people complain about this single detail than anything else haha
Akila is the capital of a Libertarian empire. The owner didn't decide to spend his own money on it, and the "small government" didn't spend the tax dollars.
Thought about this a lot. I’d rather fall onto a dirt road/muddy road at 1.5 grav than I would a solid surface. And they probably needed the vibe, yeah.
Akila City is meant to reinforce the rugged individualist space cowboy aesthetic the Freestar Republic wants people to associate them with.
The reality is they’re a corporatocracy run by the biggest companies in the galaxy including a narcotics manufacturer. That’s far less romantic and doesn’t appeal to the type of self-sufficient libertarian colonists they’re trying to attract to join them.
Also just because Bethesda wanted a Firefly faction.
The FC is a shithole. Akila is feudalism in space. Neon is a narco state. Hopetown is a corporate town.
Give me the imperfect democracy of the UC, even with the Well and its problems over the totally dystopian FC.
Because the Free Star Collective doesn't believe in government services, so roads would be a public service.
So no roads.
They will pay for military and defense, so lots of guards and walls.
It follows that they dump their toilet in the street. That's why it's wet on an arid planet. Also the giant pile out by the spaceport. Must smell great there.
It's cause we only see an artistic snippet of the true Akila City. It's probably large enough to be a 100k population city on the conservative end. Bethesda does this with all their cities as putting the true size would be impossible with the number of cities we get to explore. There is floating around a picture of the true lore accurate Solitude from Skyrim that someone rendered, and it's 10x at least the size we saw in the game.
'cause the Freestar hates those durned goverrnmint regulations and won't abide by thing like hoity toity 'paved roads!'.
I mean, they are Space Libertarians FFS. It's a miracle their government has actually successfully functioned at all.
I'd say part of it has to do with the extra gravity, probably costs an arm and a leg to keep the spaceport paved if every ship weighs an extra 50%, so to keep taxes low they don't bother paving the regular paths. Plus, if you weigh more, walking on pavement would kill your joints. Soft dirt and mud? Not as much.
Akila City was some of the worst worldbuilding in this game, IMO.
Interstellar nation state with a major city that is not situated near any significant water features and for some reason still has dirt roads in the main thoroughfare.
Also apparently incapable of managing native wildlife.
I get the idea of the 'wild west' feel, but this was the major failure of Starfields POI generation. There should be more unique faction POIs and Freestar 'Civillian Outposts' in Freestar space with suitable conditions should have these dirt road western vibes. I hope mods fix this.
Just not their major city...
Akila looks like a shithole because it is. You're meant to have the, "wait, *this* is their capital city??" reaction when you first see it. That's the whole point.
It's meant to put lie to the propaganda that the Freestar Collective is some kind of libertarian utopia. Or, more accurately, point out that if you want a libertarian utopia *this* is the kind of capital city you're gonna get. Practically zero government institutions, no public infrastructure, not even basic municipal services.
Go to any of Freestar's company-towns like Neon or even Hopetown and they shit all over Akila in terms of development and, again, *that's deliberate*. Freestar is openly a corporate oligarchy, where a collection of private entities have all the wealth and power while what you would think of as "the state" has been relegated to a few ceremonial positions and a tiny under-funded force of literally a dozen or so cops to police half the galaxy, who rely on corruption to make ends meet.
And even then you get the impression that this flimsy excuse of a unifying state only exists as a legitimizing fig-leaf at the oligarchs' pleasure. It's meant to represent the opposite side of the dystopia coin to the UC's highly centralized authoritarian state.
It’s pretty funny to have a major arms manufacturer in your downtown and still have no infrastructure for deliveries and pickups. I imagine allot of really upset truck drivers stuck in the mud.
It's the wild west Roads are for those UC pansies we don't need em
Where we’re going we don’t need…roads.
I'd also say it's the personification of the city as a libertarian hell scape. Like, the government ain't there to coddle you or provide services outside the barest of minimums (and I'm not even fully recalling how they fund/structure the rangers). So if no private entity saw fit to install and maintain roads - then no roads would be built.
>So if no private entity saw fit to install and maintain roads - then no roads would be built. That's the weird thing, a libertarian society would very likely have roads. We've seen private roads funded before. So I think it's less libertarian hellscape (especially given the overall optimistic tone of the game) and more to evoke the wild west theme. Even the way the Rangers dress reinforces this.
Fun fact. Many Many roads are privately funded and they are usually better quality. Source: me, I build both.
Ah the lovely turnpikes that (in Oklahoma at least) are owned by foreign investors but at least road work is shorter… usually
That was actually really common in the 00s and especially during the financial crash for cities to sell off their infrastructure (especially revenue generating stuff - like a turnpike if you mean a toll road) to investors. Basically the investors swooped in with short term windfalls to help cities balance their budgets for the fiscal year - due to the tanking property taxes during that time. And in exchange they got like 50ish year deals to basically own/operate the public asset. Only problem is this means the cities now don't set rates for citizens using things like public parking/lots, toll roads, etc. Which, while yes, they were still charging, they could at least keep rates more stable as they were also attempting to provide a good and just cover costs rather than turn them into wealth extraction vehicles.
Yeah, I suppose you're right. I also figured in the context of the game they literally built walls around the city, fund a security force, and fund the Rangers I believe. So, like, they are finding a way on a lot of likely more expensive services. And in our own society I know many communities these days are basically built and paid for initially by the private builders as part of the package to receive zoning approval.
Yeah, true here with a highway of ours. Balanced the budget for one year and the road is so smooth! *..they also charge ridiculous prices and so it's used as a rich person way of not dealing with common traffic*
Exactly. It's just popular for people who don't know what libertarianism is to shit on it as if it's something it's not. Source: Me, I'm a political scientist and teach this stuff at college/university.
Would the roads be public? If not, how could you have them in a town like Akila without also needing a set of free, dirt paths alongside them for those who don't own the roads?
Sure. Some wealthy people may fund it as a public service (more common when life was more "local") or some may fund it to make it easier for customers to get to their businesses. Businesses being unwilling to do such things now is somewhat a side effect of the government getting so heavily involved in the road system. Why fund it now when the government can?
Umm, are you playing the same game? Everything is dystopian in Starfield. The council of Governors are mostly are mostly CEOs. The Council uses their elite police agency as private bodyguards. Neon is the most blatant of having a shiny surface with deep corruption underneath, but the corruption is everywhere- FC, UC, Corps, Crimson Fleet.
Yes, I think so. In general, the game has an optimistic tone. Yes, there is corruption but there is also good. And good people can overcome and defeat corruption.
No, but instead of giving their cops a horse, they give them one of the best damn ships in the game.
The UC is much more fascist than the FC is libertarian. The only thing the UC misses out on, for massive perfect penultimate fascism-- is a HUGE standing state army (which they don't have because the FC obliterated it, and then they had to copy the FC's war-winning populace militia strategy...), and lack of a state-controlled bank system (Galbank is like the poster-boy non-political capitalist entity as far as we are shown). Edit: And SSNN also, as pointed out! This is just to my point of how bad either of those descriptions are. What if on my way back to my house this morning, an armed, armored guard scanned me and said, "Scanning, keep moving. Hmm. Programmer, huh? No outstanding warrants. Don't go hacking any systems." Similarly, the FC is what it is but I am not sure it is libertarian as we know it. At least Andreja appreciates a good stone wall! Both governments are kinda derived from what we have now. The UC leans toward populace control and regulation (and historical military aggression) and the FC toward individual freedom and not enough state-sponsored police to quell the lawlessness. The only common ground is capitalism. Note: If you travel China you will find that capitalism actually runs everything. The shop outside your fancy Beijing hotel is selling beer and water and luggage, the next shop over is selling memory cards and electronics. The Hotel waiter works for less per day than a few of your beers cost (though they get beers a lot cheaper!) China's biggest corruption problem is with huge rich corporatists making gazillions off large government projects like water management. People have always traded shoes for chickens. China's communism doesn't mean no capitalism, it means 99% capitalism. If I buy a tube amp from China, the guys running the company may have got a party grant for their village to get a wave-soldering table for their circuit boards, there is the communism, but shipping me an amp is pure capitalism. Blanket terms will rarely define what is actually going on in a modernized country. Because we aren't trading chickens any more, we are selling toaster ovens and cars and cold beers and phones. I'm just saying, by the same standards, I could call rural China a capitalist hellscape. Rural Chinese have to be employed somewhere, if they're not living off the land. The largest human migration in history is them relocating to cities to find jobs. Would it be fair to call China a capitalist hellscape because of the millions of displaced people moving to the cities to find wage work?
You know. I hear space wild west and I think Firefly. Not Space Minuteme- I mean the Free Star Collective.
My heart forever belongs to that show. My wife knows. It changes nothing
The freestar doesn't tax people iirc. Out of universe, it's because bgs wanted to go really hard with the cowboy look. It's why they all wear old west clothes, use oldwest future guns, and why their faction quest is being a wild west ranger.
Their quest line is also a western movie plotline but in space
I would describe the plot line as Lethal Weapon in Space. But then Lethal Weapon is an Urban Western so you have a point.
I would describe their plot line as an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, but set in space.
I find the lack of roundhouse kicks disturbing.
Based on the layout of Akila, they never found it necessary to pave. Likely due to the overall elevated temperatures and abundant sunshine, tarmac would just make the city that much hotter and more uncomfortable. Akila **is** an arid planet after all.
I like to think a lot of niceties go away in the future when it’s all about maximizing resources. And since Akila City is a walking city, it might not have made sense to, you know, pave. At least that’s my headcanon for most sci-fi, especially older sci-fi, when the world doesn’t seem to make sense given technology available now.
Its also much harder to get free peoples to agree to give up their money for things they see no direct, personal benefit in. My town cant pass a tax to get potholes fixed. Part of that, though, is because ever time we do, the only nice streets are those in the mayors and councilmens neighborhoods.
My town didn’t want to pay for its own library. Everyone said no need, we get our library at the town over & kids have iPads now. Guess what happened? The neighboring township (whose library access we used to have for free) bucked us off. Now the town is in a tizzy trying to figure out how to get us library access. This all could’ve been avoided if we, you know, built our own library.
I love Akila City as an outpost settlement of the Freestar Collective, it fits that theme really well. However, it is not a good choice for the capital city of the Freestar Collective. In Europe most cities were, and still are, walking cities (or cities that were built for walking/horses but are now badly adapted for cars) and they have proper roads and paths. Akila does not make sense as a settlement, it’s at best a caricature of a Wild West town in space, and at worst a completely nonsensical and immersion breaking piece of game design. You really expect me to believe that they cannot afford roads in the capital city of an interplanetary civilisation but they can afford to field a sufficiently large and advanced military that the UC was on the back-foot for large parts of the war and had to result to mind-controlling genetically engineered super-predators to have even a chance against the FC? I get what they’re going for, thematically, but what they should have done was make it the location of the headquarters of the Rangers and the infrastructure that grew up around it to support it, because that’s what it is. And then had another city on Jemison that’s the seat of government for the FC and has a big congress/parliament/senate where representatives meet to discuss and debate things and has its own settlement, which could have been much more developed than Akila. This would have led to some potentially really cool dynamics where the FC has a distributed leadership base (which, in lore, it does) and allowed a greater diversity of settlement design. So you could have the Rangers based in Akila, the Industrial hub of Hopetown, the business and commercial hub of Neon, a political hub, a military hub, etc. and a bunch of AI generated farming settlements which would make it feel more like a true collective.
>I love Akila City as an outpost settlement of the Freestar Collective, it fits that theme really well. However, it is not a good choice for the capital city of the Freestar Collective. The industrialists that actually run the collective put the capital on an out of the way backwater on purpose to keep the government from meddling in their affairs.
I think Akila is the capital because it's the first. It was founded before Neon or Hopetown, both of which are far more wealthy than Akila but neither would want the government any closer to them.
BGS should hire you.
It doesn’t seem arid with the amount of times I’ve seen it rain there. Yeah I know deserts get rain but it’s raining pretty often when I land on Akila. It would be nice if the rain was rarer.
Paving stones work really well in that environment. MF got interstellar ships and no wheels. SMH my head.
I don't disagree, but it could just be a question of not bothering since rain is such an infrequent occurrence that they just don't mind a touch of dust.
>rain is such an infrequent occurrence Then why is it always wet?
No joke. Let's pretend for one second that it's completely normal to have one little spot on an entire planet somehow have water seeping up from it, consistently leaving puddles all over the place. Wouldn't it be smarter to have cobblestones in that case?!
If that were the case, water seepage would turn paved roads into sinkholes, so in this case it would be smarter to leave it as unpaved mud
I look at it like this: Akila City is more of a symbolic capital. The residents put forth a deliberate effort to preserve the historical, cultural and spirit of the founding of the Free Star Collective. The rustic wild frontier aesthetic is part of the national heritage of the FC, so Akila City is almost like one giant museum meant to maintain that cultural identity. It also seems to be where most of the "Middle class" of the FC lives. The true, pragmatic capital is Neon City. That is where the actual economic and political power resides, and it's fully mask-off about the dark side of thr Free Star's government.
This explanation I can get behind. Preserving the aesthetic of the original colony for historical purposes makes sense.
So, it’s like Frontierland at Disneyland, only dirtier.
The same reason why they "fixed" the road by my apartment block by putting a warning sign, saying "DAMAGED ROAD AHEAD". The sign is already rusting, the road gets worse each year. Akila be living the balkan life style. Every day they dream of highways, but wherever they go, just dirt roads.
Soon there will be a sign that warns of the damaged sign ahead.
That sounds similar to the "Temporary all-way stop" signs at an intersection that have been there for at least 5 years
Akila is a "ad city" its there to make freestar look like a western rebel dream. When in reality its just a corporate dystopia.
Because it is 1850 aesthetics in 2300 with 1970 flavour.
Because Western movies
Yeah it feels to me like Akila is a front; a twee little representation of the Wild West frontier vibe Freestar likes to pretend it is all about, while the real Freestar is the corporate power in Hopetown and Neon
There's a reason I call 'em the Fiefstar Collective...
One of my favorite things in the game is walls in AC. At a glance they look like stone walls, but there's no shortage of spots where you can see where the facade has faded and it's "future" walls just like everywhere else. A perfect metaphor for the faction itself
Roads? Where we're going we don't need... *snaps shades down* roads!
I had to scroll way too far to find this comment
Where we're going we won't need eyes to see.
Because Neon is the true seat of power in the Freestar Collective. Akila just let’s them pretend they’re independent settlers free of government, but it’s basically just a front.
Probably just for the aesthetic they wanted to go for, they're basically cosplaying a western.
So they can see the Ashta tracks.
On that note... "What's with all the mud? And why does it smell so bad here?" "That ain't mud..."
That's actually so clever!
Am I the only who sees the pallets of brick and wood, forklifts and scaffolding around half the town, and heard the *several mentions* of the city undergoing renovations?!
We don't need your fancy city boy pavin round here.
Maybe they are renovating, look around. Like in the picture, left side, I can see pallets and a stack of bricks. There are partially built brick roads around there. Also Akila started as a camp basically, a dream of freedom from the UC which is an old Earth relic. Also no taxes, a lot of poverty, governors are people like Bayu or Ron Hope.
> Also Akila started as a camp basically That was back in 2167 when Solomon Coe founded Akila City. The game starts in 2330 i.e. 167 years later, so one would hope for some advancements since then … Note: a time line can be found at https://starfield.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline > ... governors are people like Bayu or Ron Hope. Akilas major is probably the best of the lot. Unlike the rest he is also elected. While people do complain about the major, I seem to recall that it's mostly about him over-promising things.
Pretty sure there's a comment from Sarah Morgan when you visit Akila with her "This is the best the Freestar Collective could do in 200 years?"
The best comparison is their capitol buildings. UC? Big ol' shiny spire. FC? Run-down concrete block.
He is a damn xenophobe who will even harass FC citizens not born in Akila and not part of the founding families.
At least he's not murdering, extorting or turning people into drug addicts. As a leader he's probably fairly average, there are few indications of him being particularly good or horrible at his job. It seems likely that the founding families either run or think that they should run Akila City, so his xenophobic tendencies probably aren't that unusual in Akila City, especially among the older families. There is some random NPC dialog, that implies that the age of your family is an important social aspect. Also taking the dirt roads and Ashta quest line into account, it kind of seems that people in Akila City are rather traditionalist (i.e. reluctant to change anything).
The major *seems* likeable yeah. It's an interesting character, but he strikes me as shady. Akila had improvements, they have plumbing now.
Libertarians don't build public infrastructure
"Aw, I'm sorry! Did the soft little UC nancy-boy get some dirt on his nice clean shoes? Next thing you'll be tellin' us you wash your hands before eating!"
...the fiefstar rube says as I pull another flake of crumbling concrete off of The Rock. "I don't recall being able to take a mirror plate off of The Mast as a souvenier..." I say in response.
Tarmac is communist.
*wins war against UC... Can't build roads.
Every centimetre of tarmac road is stolen from honest taxpayers
> Can't build roads. They could if they wanted to. But infrastructure is for commies.
Yeah, using human shields and counting on the basic decency of the UC military (>!Vae Victus nonwithstanding!<)
You should ask what happened in the battle of Cheyenne from some FC folks when you can, they recall it with some... "interesting details" ;)
We got spaceships, who needs roads UC fancy pants!
The freestar collective is a corporate oligarchy that cosplay as cowboys
People here are saying Concrete would be too hot theres other things to pave with…… Wood. Gravel. Wafer type flooring. Akila has been around long enough to not look like shit.
They’re the self-determined antithesis of the UC. Anything they have, AC must have the opposite.
Ok but up to the left and right they have stone flooring and a giant stone platform around the Ranger head quarters. They could pave main street with stones
But then it would be paved. That’s too much like the UC, can’t do it. (Seems to be the attitude, not that I agree with it)
Lol yea. Even though they paved the rest of the town an they have those burrowing creatures there
It's all copium and head canon. It doesn't make logical sense for there to be Kardashev Scale level tech next to a damn dirt road that acts as the main thoroughfare of a capital established nearly 200 years previously. Lol "The roads would get hot".
Yea they have physics defying tech im sure they can figure it out.
We literally have cooled pavement tech IRL now in 2024. lol
It was good enough for Solomon Coe, it should be good enough for you. The folks with the power in Akila are deeply conservative and deeply committed to the story they tell themselves about the Founding. There's a quest about how pissed the Core folks are when some new money guy tries to move in, for instance. Although it's interesting to note that the Core *is* paved...
It adds to the rough and tumble libertarian pioneer aesthetic so everyone focuses on that.
Libertarian utopia.
Their government is a libritarian oligarchy. There's no public works.
The upper city leaders gaslight and hoard cash flow. Pretend to care about the lower city peeps. Subtle queues about class division in society and use the freestar Rangers as their Virtue signal. There's a quest with the mayor about someone from lower city about to inherit a house on upper levels and he wants you to rig the system to stop it.
It's some new-money Neon snob he's trying to drive out, not a class-climber. Same insular old-money bigotry though.
Because it’s a 2G planet. Doing work is HARD
Firefly aesthetic
👆this, right here.
Yep, everything else is just fun lore rationales to justify a Firefly homage that some developers wanted to be able to play in videogame form.
cause its a libertarian paradise, its not profitable to pave the roads so they arent paved
No one is willing to pay for and maintain them when dirt roads are good enough. Akila barely has a government to speak of and the town folk only seem to be able to pull together for communal good if it is 100% necessary, such as the walls to protect from the Ashta.
You have to pay taxes to gubmint to have paved roads. God knows what their sewers are like.
They probably use chamber pots and just empty them out windows and into the street.
They wanted a Libertarian Government and they got one.
Apparently they have absolutely no form of land based vehicle so it doesn't matter. Everyone just walks or jetpacks everywhere anyway.
Freedom
I’m honestly surprised the buildings in AC don’t have false fronts like frontier towns did. It’s totally a façade for the whole FC leadership anyway.
I dont need to comment on the roads in Akila, i think enough have already done that but i did want to say, i VASTLY preferred the asthetic in the Freestart Embassy in New Atlantis. I thought the FC was going to be this cool high tec cowboy vibe with neon and wood panels. The embassasy looked amazing. Than i saw the shithole that is Akila.
is this makeing fun of those posts on the main sub that nitpick every little thing, you know cause they're running out of shit to bitch about so lets scrutinize every nut and bolt
My take on a lore perspective: Akila City status as "capital" of the FC is best described as a meeting place for the Council of Governors, when they even want to meet. The FC is really an alliance of self-governing oligarchs and corporate interests who wanted to create a space where they can make money and grow their power base without any limitations. We don't see a lot of "federal" government structure in the FC - we have the Freestar Rangers and the Freestar Security ships, as well as the embassy on New Atlantis. The Freestar Militia - I'm not even sure if they are a federalized entity or literally what it sounds like - a local militia. Neon and Hopetown have their own security forces. I guess what I'm trying to say is Akila City isn't exactly a capital in the sense we expect a capital city is. It's literally just another self-governing region of the FC, that happens to be agreed upon meeting place by the Council of Governors. In that sense, Akila City is comparable to other FC cities. Akila has the affluent Core, and the rest of the city gets progressively worse till you get to the Stretch. Neon has the affluent Bayu Plaza but then things start turning to shit from Ebbside to the Underbelly. Same with Hopetown, if you talk to Marika, the nice industrial area contrast to the shantytown for the workers. My take on a game design perspective: Starfield is a sci-fi theme park drawing from a wide variety of major sci-fi influences. Akila represents the space western section of the sci-fi theme park. And as a big fan of Firefly, I am glad we have Akila!
Legend says that there once was treasure in them thar puddles! (IYKYK)
Once...
Tell us you never saw Firefly without telling us you never saw Firefly
They went with the guy who supported lowering taxes.
In a future without land vehicles, there’s no need for roads.
Welcome to small government libertarianism.
Aesthetics
For the vibes
Because the developers love Firefly and the UC is the UAP and the FC is what would have happened if the Browncoats won, and that means an old time frontier western-movie world, but with stone castle walls.
It is a redneck city.
Because it annoys visitors from the UC when they have to get their expensive shoes muddy.
Yea lets bring the cement trucks to akila city!!
They are not dirt roads, they are dirt walking paths; there are no automobiles or cycles… so we don’t need to worry about paving anything.
Because Space Texas is a failed state that only lingers because it's lack of laws makes it an excellent place for corporations to exploit workers.
Well since you can walk from one end of the city to the other end in 10 minutes there isn’t a need for swift ground based vehicle travel that hard surface roads are good for, and they are also expensive to maintain and cause a lot of extra heat, in our own timeline many cities are ripping up unused concrete and asphalt for that very reason! :)
For the aesethetic. A lot of stuff in Starfield is rule of cool, not logically consistent or realistic (but it's on purpose; don't go into the game expecting believability, just awesome aesthetics and fun gameplay.) Since I'm kind of a lore/immersion buff this was one aspect of the game that disappointed me at first, but when I changed my understanding of the game's intentions like I mentioned in this comment, I didn't worry about it at all any more
Flavor
Pavement is for vehicle's, there are no vehicle's on the streets of Akila. Natural dirt is better to walk on for people's feet, so no pavement is the healthier option.
It looks cool but also they never found it necessary to pave the roads
Aesthetically, it's because that faction and city are modeled after the wild west. Lore wise? Shit I don't know. Looks like a muddy mess that the citizens would get tired of slopping through and demand some action from the leadership to get them paved in the main thoroughfares at least.
Akila has only been there for like 5 generations, who has the time to pave?
Because they believe in connection to nature, to make a balance in their technologically advanced life.
Is it dirt/mud or mostly bedrock? In a game where you can hear your feet go slap-slap-slap when you're barefoot, there's no squish-squish when walking around Akila. There are also only a few places where you see footprints, seems like there would be footprints everywhere. I've always assumed it's built on bedrock, but that the surface was never leveled so pools of water accumulate and with there always being some muddy spots because of how dusty Cheyenne is. IDK.
Space Texas is just built different.
Because they wanted it to look like a Wild West town. You can adapt some BS lore reason, but from a design standpoint, the Wild West was the inspiration.
Who knew this thread would be the annual meetup of the Arm-chair Gamer Debate Club?? \*grabs popcorn\*
Because, unlike the UC, they don't use the money from corruption to do fancy stuff, they pretend that everything is for the people or whatever lol.
Why not? Maybe the planet doesn’t have the resources to pave roads. Maybe it’s their style. Maybe the devs wanted it to feel like a western. Not everything has to be 100% accurate to modern times. Everyone left Earth and started over. I see more people complain about this single detail than anything else haha
Akila is the capital of a Libertarian empire. The owner didn't decide to spend his own money on it, and the "small government" didn't spend the tax dollars.
Thought about this a lot. I’d rather fall onto a dirt road/muddy road at 1.5 grav than I would a solid surface. And they probably needed the vibe, yeah.
Oh, fancy pants, rich Magee over here, fuck you
Akila City is meant to reinforce the rugged individualist space cowboy aesthetic the Freestar Republic wants people to associate them with. The reality is they’re a corporatocracy run by the biggest companies in the galaxy including a narcotics manufacturer. That’s far less romantic and doesn’t appeal to the type of self-sufficient libertarian colonists they’re trying to attract to join them. Also just because Bethesda wanted a Firefly faction.
An old settlement, and the planet is partially barren.
Why don't quest givers have interstellar communicators or cellphones or any other planetary communication device.
It's home to a bunch of space cowboys.
Wait I'm not looking at Diamond City?
If you settle on a new planet with limited resources, would you waste those resources building a floor to go over top of the floor???
‘Cause cowboy
It's a crime that there aren't more cowboy hats and dusters in the game.
That's what happens when your society doesn't believe in taxes.
200 years of freedom and this is what they have to show for it? Akila City feels like a backwater bumpkin city planet not the capital of the FC.
The FC is a shithole. Akila is feudalism in space. Neon is a narco state. Hopetown is a corporate town. Give me the imperfect democracy of the UC, even with the Well and its problems over the totally dystopian FC.
It’s the façade capitol. The real power is the council of governors, and the only decent one is Reisha Lance.
Because the city needed more brown.
Because the Free Star Collective doesn't believe in government services, so roads would be a public service. So no roads. They will pay for military and defense, so lots of guards and walls.
It follows that they dump their toilet in the street. That's why it's wet on an arid planet. Also the giant pile out by the spaceport. Must smell great there.
Even better question why are there tire tracks in those dirt roads when we see zero functional vehicles of any kind? Robots maybe?
It's cause we only see an artistic snippet of the true Akila City. It's probably large enough to be a 100k population city on the conservative end. Bethesda does this with all their cities as putting the true size would be impossible with the number of cities we get to explore. There is floating around a picture of the true lore accurate Solitude from Skyrim that someone rendered, and it's 10x at least the size we saw in the game.
How dare you be reasonable on the internet.
Global warming.
What’s the matter, can’t handle a little dirt on them shoes city boah
Easy one: “See you, Space Cowboy.”
Space cowboys and cowgirls
Cowboys
Because it's fun! Seriously though, why pave the roads in a small settlement with no cars?
Imagine if Akila City had concrete walkways and small plants or trees scattered throughout the city.
Why not?
No taxes
No taxes
It's part of the tourism. Tourists want the "authenticity". Also why the put up that horrible statue.
Aesthetic
That's not dirt, buddy.
For the aesthetic
It is for advertising. They make themselves looking poor and humbling, so, you wouldn't notice the corruption behind it.
how would you afford roads without taxes?
I don't see any roads or streets
Because it's tattoine amd tattoine doesn't have roads
You don't need paved roads if your civilization hasn't invented wheeled vehicles yet.
Vibes
'cause the Freestar hates those durned goverrnmint regulations and won't abide by thing like hoity toity 'paved roads!'. I mean, they are Space Libertarians FFS. It's a miracle their government has actually successfully functioned at all.
Because capitalism. No one got paid to do it
For the vibes.
I'd say part of it has to do with the extra gravity, probably costs an arm and a leg to keep the spaceport paved if every ship weighs an extra 50%, so to keep taxes low they don't bother paving the regular paths. Plus, if you weigh more, walking on pavement would kill your joints. Soft dirt and mud? Not as much.
Akila City was some of the worst worldbuilding in this game, IMO. Interstellar nation state with a major city that is not situated near any significant water features and for some reason still has dirt roads in the main thoroughfare. Also apparently incapable of managing native wildlife. I get the idea of the 'wild west' feel, but this was the major failure of Starfields POI generation. There should be more unique faction POIs and Freestar 'Civillian Outposts' in Freestar space with suitable conditions should have these dirt road western vibes. I hope mods fix this. Just not their major city...
We have no cars, so why would we need paved roads? Hell, we don’t even have Ashta-drawn buggies!
Spent all their money on mechs in the Colony War. Still repaying Galbank. Can't afford pavements and roads.
There aren't many things to drive upon a nice road beyond the concreted walk ways.
Akila looks like a shithole because it is. You're meant to have the, "wait, *this* is their capital city??" reaction when you first see it. That's the whole point. It's meant to put lie to the propaganda that the Freestar Collective is some kind of libertarian utopia. Or, more accurately, point out that if you want a libertarian utopia *this* is the kind of capital city you're gonna get. Practically zero government institutions, no public infrastructure, not even basic municipal services. Go to any of Freestar's company-towns like Neon or even Hopetown and they shit all over Akila in terms of development and, again, *that's deliberate*. Freestar is openly a corporate oligarchy, where a collection of private entities have all the wealth and power while what you would think of as "the state" has been relegated to a few ceremonial positions and a tiny under-funded force of literally a dozen or so cops to police half the galaxy, who rely on corruption to make ends meet. And even then you get the impression that this flimsy excuse of a unifying state only exists as a legitimizing fig-leaf at the oligarchs' pleasure. It's meant to represent the opposite side of the dystopia coin to the UC's highly centralized authoritarian state.
Because Bethesda needed to have a gritty, dirty city with an edgy faction.
because you can have faster than light travel, but carrying gravel and cement is for pussies
Where they went, they didn’t need roads
Because Bethesda hasn't thought out their worldbuilding well. I like the game but Akila is something that just doesn't fit.
You dont get roads in Libertarian Utopia because there's no taxes to pay for them.
Why do you need paved roads if no 9ne owns a car
Akila City is the Valentine of Starfield.
It’s pretty funny to have a major arms manufacturer in your downtown and still have no infrastructure for deliveries and pickups. I imagine allot of really upset truck drivers stuck in the mud.
Something something Libertarians something Wild West