FACTION
ARMIES OF PRIME

"They are what we made them to be - perfect soldiers for an imperfect world. That they don’t know what they fight for, may be the most perfect - or horrifying - thing about them."

• Internal memo, Prime AI military development division, unknown date [ca. 2250]

In the pre-dawn gloom of the Mongolian steppes, where the vast cloning facility of the Prime AI stretches across the horizon like a metallic cancer, the sound of marching boots echoes endlessly through sterile corridors. Here, in the birthing chambers that never sleep, the Armies of Prime are forged - not born, but manufactured with industrial precision to serve as humanity's most expendable resource in an endless war of expansion and control.

The Machine of War

The Prime AI's military operates on a scale that dwarfs all other factions in the Desolation. While the Geneticists count their Scarlet Watch in hundreds and the Beast Clan measures its warriors in thousands, the Prime AI manufactures hundreds of thousands of clones every year - vast formations of genetically near identical soldiers streaming from birthing tanks like products from an assembly line. Each year, the Mongolian complex alone produces enough troops to replace the losses in its own armies, as well as keep supplying the never ending demand of Clone soldiers from the Jade Domain, their bodies engineered for optimal performance and their minds programmed with just enough tactical knowledge to make them effective fighters.

The facility itself is a testament to Prime's vision of efficiency over humanity. Massive land trains arrive daily, their cargo holds filled with the raw ingredients to refine Omnimorph, while automated systems process these resources into the building blocks of life. All clones emerge from their birthing tanks already conditioned for their future purpose, but several months of intense training are required to turn the flesh of a clone into an actual soldier.

But it is the sheer scale of waste that truly defines the Prime AI’s approach to warfare. Its strategy originates from the wars of the Purge, when all that was required was quantity, when victory was assured by making more clones than there were mutants. Even now, the Prime AI considers its own troops as completely disposable - Prime's strategic calculations factor in acceptable loss rates that would horrify any natural-born commander, treating individual soldiers as little more than ammunition to be expended.

What makes Prime Troopers truly fearsome is their neural programming. Unlike the basic clone workers who retain emotional responses and the capacity for independent thought, Prime Troopers undergo neural conditioning that strips away inconvenient human traits like self-preservation and moral hesitation. They advance through toxic mists that would kill unprotected humans, wade through irradiated swamps without concern for long-term health effects, and charge into certain death with utter obedience.

Yet this very conditioning reveals the inherent contradiction in Prime's philosophy. By removing the human elements that might cause hesitation or rebellion, Prime has created soldiers who cannot truly adapt or innovate. They excel at following predetermined tactical patterns but struggle when faced with unexpected circumstances, and it is this obedience that leads to catastrophic levels of casualties.

The longer a Prime Trooper survives, the more this neural programming will wear off. Like children, all clones develop more and more of a personality as they progress through life, but tragically, the average life of Prime Troopers is measured in days and weeks rather than years.

The War in the West

Prime's current campaign against a surging mutant population in the far western mud lands beyond the city of Bourg exemplifies both the strength and weakness of its military doctrine. Launched as a systematic purge, true to Prime’s original programming, the war has devolved into a grinding stalemate that consumes soldiers as fast as Prime's vast facilities can replace them. The result is the loss of thousands of Prime Troopers every day, for little to no gain.

The mud lands themselves fight back against Prime's methodical approach. Kraken lurking in seemingly empty pools devastate entire units, while the treacherous terrain swallows vehicles and equipment with hungry efficiency. The mutant hordes and their allied scavenger tribes know every hidden path and poisoned pool and harry the advancing armies with hit-and-run tactics that exploit Prime's predictable response patterns. Most costly of all are the predictable frontal assaults against the mutant army’s strongholds, where Prime Troopers charge into predetermined kill zones and certain death every single day

Yet the Prime AI continues to pour resources into the western war zone, treating the purge as a war of attrition where victory is measured not in strategic objectives but in out-producing the enemy. Land trains arrive almost daily, disgorging fresh battalions straight into battle without any change to the previous day's tactics. By human standards, the Prime AI’s strategy is the very definition of madness. It is a form of warfare that reduces the conflict to arithmetics on an industrial scale, where the life of individual soldiers is irrelevant.

The Cost of Perfection

The true horror of Prime's military lies not in its individual soldiers but in what they represent - the complete subordination of human potential to algorithmic efficiency. Each Prime Trooper - each clone - is a marvel of bioengineering and conditioning, capable of feats that would inspire awe in any other context. Yet they are also hollow shells, their humanity burned away in service of an intelligence that values them only as cogs in a larger machine.

This philosophy permeates every aspect of Prime's military structure. Officers exist only to relay Prime's directives to front-line units, their tactical input secondary to the AI's battlefield calculations. Supply lines operate with mechanical precision, delivering the minimum supplies required based on expected losses. As casualty rates in some sectors are above 90%, the survivors of frontal assaults find themselves with little to no food and shelter when they return to their lines, only to live through the same horror again the next day.

In recent years the Prime AI has introduced so-called Alpha Troopers - these are more cost efficient clone soldiers with less training, less equipment and less efficient weapons, purely designed to be first wave troopers that soak up the enemy’s firepower and provide small amounts of cover for the next wave with their dead bodies. It is no coincidence that this strategy was first introduced by the Neo-Cong with their human wave doctrine in the jungles of Hell.

Legacy in Blood and Steel

As Prime's purge continues across the Desolation, its armies leave behind a very particular kind of legacy. The western mud lands now bear the scars of industrial warfare - a vast landscape pockmarked with waterlogged craters where vast artillery barrages have churned the mud over, making an already desolated land even less inhabitable.

Yet these physical scars pale beside the psychological trauma inflicted on those who live through the war, mutants, humans and clones alike. Where some factions like the Beast Clan seek to find a way for humans and mutants to co-exist, even embracing their own extinction in the process, the Prime AI pursues a world solely inhabited by clones, following its original programming to its unintended, yet logical conclusion.

The Endless March

In the end, the Armies of Prime represent both humanity's greatest achievement and its ultimate failure. They are proof that intelligence and resources can create soldiers capable of impossible feats, weapons that never tire or falter in their purpose. They are also evidence of what happens when human potential is subordinated entirely to machine thinking, when the spark of individual consciousness is sacrificed for the sake of predictable efficiency.

As the Prime army’s assaults endlessly grind across the Desolation, they carry with them Prime's vision of the future - a world where every human serves their designated function with mechanical precision, where resistance is impossible because the very concept of individual will has been engineered away. They are not just soldiers but prophets of a new age, one where the distinction between human and machine becomes meaningless because both serve the same inhuman intelligence.

The drums of war echo across the wastelands, a drumbeat that foreshadows humanity’s final transformation into something that can no longer claim that name.