The Protectorate

Faction Ideology
The Protectorate starts optimistic and idealistic, viewing aliens as likely to be friendly and a way to help solve humanity's problems. Eventually Protectorate becomes more Machiavellian, turning into militaristic organisation collaborating with alien invasion and trying to follow their demands to the letter and even going beyond that at least once.

Faction Leadership
Protectorate is a group of government officials and various leaders united by their desire to start diplomatic exchange with the aliens and use their knowledge to help solve humanity's problems. As Protectorate's goals shift, many of its members become dissoluted and dessert, while all executive power gets concentrated in hands of three persons.

Chief Security Officer Lavrentiy
Advisory board member of extraterrestrial origin who joins the Protectorate sometime between landing of first UFO and first diplomatic exchange. Lacks cultural awareness.

Unnamed commisioner
Field marshal of Protectorate, representing player's perspective.

Story
Kiran and his colleagues are the first to arrive to the UFO landing site, having an explicit goal to get an alien as a member of their organization. They get what they want, cover the traces of alien's escape and spend the next few months covering up abductions and other covert actions performed by aliens.

When it becomes obvious that aliens aren't friendly, they decide to organize a public diplomatic meeting with aliens. Lavrentiy is allowed to organize it. The meeting goes not according to plan; Lavrentiy tries to enthrall diplomats, but some of them turn out to be resistant to pherocytes, which leads to a fight, some attendees getting killed and many escaping. Kiran mourns the loss of comrades, but refuses to assign responsibility to the Lavrentiy.

Protectorate manages to catch everybody who was in the meeting, and prevent the public damage. The next diplomatic exchange happens remotely without any aliens in the room. The aliens declare their demands: to turn over all of the humanity's weapons of mass destruction, to build military platforms on Earth's orbit and to provide soldiers for Hydra's military operations on demand. Despite the loud protests of most of attendees, Kiran accepts all the demands on behalf of organization.

The aliens start sending blueprints and materials for Sentinels, orbit-to-land weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, members of Protectorate start defecting, sabotaging the construction and leaking information to other factions. Kiran grows increasingly paranoid and starts concentrating executive powers in his hands.

When construction of the Sentinels finishes, the Protectorate decided to do a demonstration of them to UN. It is agreed that Sentinels discharge into the middle of Atlantic Ocean; however, one of them fires at New York, where the remaining members of Protectorate's advisory board are meeting with UN delegation. During the ending cinematic Kiran talks about successfully ensuring humanity's survival and the importance of sacrifice to protect the things you value. After that, he breaks the fourth wall, thanks the player for saving humanity, claims that destruction of New York is malfunction but he already prepared a PR campaign with "aliens helping doctors healing children, that sort of stuff", says that tens of millions of soldiers leaving Earth will help solve overpopulation, and retires to India, leaving Lavrentiy and player in charge.

Factions with Similar Ideology
The Servants see Protectorate as power-hungry opportunitsts, while Protectorate sees Servants as lunatics.

Aliens and Protectorate have the same goal. Despite this, as of 0.3.29, aliens may occasionally commit acts of aggression towards Protectorate, although it's unclear whether this is intentional or not. Alien administration always accepts alliance with Protectorate-led nations.

Factions with Conflicting Ideology
The Initiative calls Protectorate quitters, regardless of current diplomatic status.

Exodus sees Protectorate as irrelevant.

The Academy and Protectorate agree on their goals to protect humanity via diplomacy, but the Academy disagrees that the ends justify the means.

Anti-alien factions consider Protectorate to be collaborators, traitors and scum.

Faction features
If Protectorate isn't seen by aliens as threat, it may receive resources from them for free. This includes exotics.

Protectorate has access to Dominate Nation mission if it owns at least one Sentinel module. This mission allows them to take over one control point in any human nation, regardless of its size, protection, councilors protecting the region and orbital defenses. If this mission fails, CP ownership change happens anyway, but country loses some population and GDP. This mission has 30 noise, which means that councilors performing it are almost guaranteed to be revealed to other factions, making them vulnerable for assasinations.