State at launch might be not the best measurement of quality if they essentially revamped the whole game and added an entirely new area/storyline variations/skill system/tons of fixes and additions such as public transit to it.

If you like the setting and got turned off by the abysmal state at launch, I strongly recommend you give it another try.

Gotta use less popular locations close to what you need. As a german I have mostly been using Finland and other smaller eastern European countries, those generally work just fine. Germany itself barely ever.

Fair point, but assuming they manage to get orbital weapons up there, is any government willing to drone strike some replaceable executives if the threat of a nuke looms overhead? Even if they can’t hit terrestrial targets for now, shooting down rivaling satellites and other comms infrastructure (or even shuttles?) seems a pretty powerful deterrent to most developed countries because they are so dependent on it.

I’m thinking mid to long term here. International waters are nice and all, but not really an ungoverned space. If these people have true megacorp ambitions, as in, toppling governments; establishing corporate ruled fiefdoms, commanding private militaries etc. A ship at sea is just another target for the enemy.

Seems more sensible to use this current period of virtually exclusively private space travel to ensure space becomes a privately and not government controlled domain by deploying their tech first and fast, before legislation can catch up.

What are the governments gonna do if google quickly brings a reactor powered data silo into space, and then some defensive satellites? Slap some ICBMs on there or maybe a railgun. Before states and nations are even able to act as a sovereign in space, those corpos will have claimed it already.

Pretty sure what makes this attractive is the extraterritoriality. The first step to sovereign corporations, free from any pesky government rules and regulations