Yeah, I was tempted by Solee too - but I guess that I found it's list of naval combatants too overwhelming. Great if you want to play the already powerful expanding, but not if you want to play out the rise of a new Pocket Empire. Which I do.
If I did Solee, the idea wouldn't be about Smash and Grab or exploration. It'd be about spying, internal Solee politics, and possible outright war.
Solee, even from the short blurb, is fascinating. High Corruption, High Talent, Cruelty Moderation, Aggression High, Paranoia/Xenophobia High.
On the surface, Solee is tremendously powerful. It's likely that the Empress is riding high on a wave of nationalism and general optimism. Military industries are likely gearing up and there's probably an alliance of government and industry to provide for the expansion of the Empire.
What's interesting to me is the idea of characters being officers in the Solee military.
Army characters rotated back from Hindahl or Marcena are seeing that military efforts are not the easy conquests they'd expected. While the fighting on Marcena with its TL7 vs. Solee's main force TL of 9 might be "interesting", Hindahl should have been a roll-over with its TL4 (black powder) vs. Solee's TL9. But the fighting is tough on both worlds, like the RC the Solee army officers are seeing the effects of Guild-smuggled weaponry (given Solee's TL9, Guild supplied weaponry will be much more effective). They might have begun to feel disillusioned and feel the road ahead is much harder than people think.
Similarly, Solee Naval officers (for the purposes of this campaign) would assume that there'd be some contact with the RC before any kind of outright war (as is shown in Brilliant Lances). Naval officers from Solee's military might be invited to the RC and given tours. Alternatively, they might inspect wreckage and speak with RC prisoners. Either way, the most rabid nationalist Solee Naval Officers would only see the tiny size and low tonnage of the RC navy and dismiss them, cooler head (the characters) might notice that RC crews are very well-trained and experienced, their ships properly maintained ("Did you notice that the emergency vacc suit closets are well-maintained and stocked, not rusting, empty, or painted shut unlike our ships? It means they've been in combat and know the importance of such things"). The RC ships would have advanced and practical drills and procedure for combat coordination and damage control that Solee is struggling to even set-up. Their officers would be combat experienced and used to working together, unlike the Solee. It might not take much to realize that the RC has a vast advantage in experience that'd give them tactical and strategic maneuver superiority over the Solee Navy. Perhaps the two militaries put aside their differences to try and tackle a particularly powerful Vampire ship somewhere, something that'd probably very starkly illustrate the differences between the two navies.
Now as they begin to see their military start frothing at the mouth about crushing the RC, even while their fellows are talking about how they'll burn the RC to the ground, these officers might shake their heads thinking, "This isn't going to be nearly as easy as people think" or "We could lose this pretty easily." Perhaps the Empress hasn't made her mind about what to do yet.
What comes into play here is the high corruption value of Solee. The Solee military would probably have cliques of officers and so on, perhaps with various political beliefs. It might be possible to engineer things to try and convince the Empress not to attack the RC. Of course, other cabals of military officers might just take it upon themselves to engineer events to start a war with the RC regardless of how the Empress feels. With the different cliques of military officers, industrial magnates, and so on, such internal politics could get very interesting and dangerous, with rival cliques assassinating each other's members and so on. Remember, Solee is high talent, which means that there's a meritocracy at some level - people who are good at what they do get found (and given high corruption they probably get wooed up by some cabal or another and it's like gangs in the inner-city - you have no choice but to join one if you don't want to get assassinated, remember high corruption) so there's all kinds of brilliant and talented men and women in the Solee military, but each have their own idea on how to do things ... and they don't agree on it. They might make very strange bedfellows like cooperating with the Guild or the RC. Meanwhile if the Empress decides that going to war is a good idea, the players might be forced to remove the Empress from power before the Solee are dragged into a war with the RC they can't win. Again, given the high corruption of Solee, this might be possible - if they set things up correctly they might even get away with it.
