i liked the revelations throughout the campaign. i kinda disliked how they turned the assembly into the villains, though. it's interesting that the canon decision for the vanilla assembly campaign is the independent / side with logen branch. they were militant about kicking the non assembly powers off that planet, but they didn't seem like the sort of hegemonizing assimilator madmen they are in the star kings campaign. more like some sort of fiercely individualistic transhuman cyborg punk anarchists.
I disagree with that. Looking at Ellen Shaw and her faction
specifically, going the 'independent' route actually kinda makes them
more evil. The main body of the Assembly at the start of the campaign are, essentially, acting as CORE's enforcers: and as tyrannical as CORE is, it'll generally let you remain as you are as long as you accept its jurisdiction. So under CORE's direction, the Assembly might be allowed to Reassemble rebellious populations, but they'd be held back from doing it to just anyone.
Taking the 'independent' route, however, shifts her to an "Assembly above all, Reassemble the galaxy" faction. L0G3N-1 doesn't want to make the Assembly into anything that any other race would consider "good" - he just wants the atrocities to be part of an agenda that benefits the Assembly directly rather than being on behalf of CORE. You can see this in the final Assembly scenario - one of your goals in the independent route is cleansing non-Assembly from the planet (and while you're not forced to migrate them at the time, it's made pretty clear in the Heritor campaign what happened afterwards). Like the Syndicate protagonist, she cooperates with the other independent factions in the finale, but her long-term plan is still a power grab - it's just that it's a power grab to make herself the one in charge of a Reassembled galaxy, rather than restoring CORE.
Now, like the other races, the Assembly are not a homogenous polity, so this does not mean that
all Assembly are like that. But when you look at the original campaign (particularly Shaw's campaign) and the lore snippets with the units, the majority of the Assembly,
particularly Shaw's faction, certainly
are the hegemonizing assimilator madmen they are in the star kings campaign. The 'fiercely individualistic transhuman cyborg punk anarchists' are a subculture that the majority of the Assembly is actively trying to stamp out. You can see this in the Electrocutioner lore snippet (it talks about culling Assembly that are underperforming... but why are they considered to be underperforming?
Because they have too much independence) while the description for the Chopper describes individuality as a punishable trait.
Again, the Assembly aren't all in one single polity with one shared outlook, but their portrayal in the Oathbound campaign
is consistent with the portrayal of Ellen's faction in the original campaign.
