In large part I'm with [member="Reverance"] and [member="Raziel"] on this, but in the interests of being useful I'm going to try and approach it from another angle.
Where's the conflict? Every faction needs some kind of serious challenge. OP did about a year's worth of Bando Gora fighting before it won and bottomed out. That's success. Fringe did about a year's worth of fighting Unknown Regions monsters before it won and bottomed out. That's success. The Republic beat the crap out of Black Sun and destroyed the Sith Empire before it bottomed out. Black Sun, Sith Council, New Order (well, no, not New Order), Shadow Empire, Imperial Remnant and others just straight-up died off for lack of things to do. It's the same problem that the CIS/ASA/ACA faced before it got its stable new Techno Union thing going.
You can't define yourself in isolation. You have to define yourself in relation to other things -- not just by what you're
not, but by what you
become because of them. In other words, you probably need a war, or at the very least you have to stand for something other than three words. You gotta figure out how those three words translate into coherent action of some kind.
And it has to involve risk. Full stop, no question. If you aren't willing to risk what you've got by doing something ambitious, you'll never get anywhere, and your faction will get quietly scrubbed in a little while. I'm with the Levantine Sanctum, which is a slower-paced, plot-centric kind of faction that focuses a lot on enabling its members' personal/group RPs and less on dominions. We've had a lot of good times without invading or being invaded, but we also accepted that we would have to take risks to secure our interests and angle for growth. I guess what I'm saying is, if even a slower-paced, non-conquer-everything faction like the Sanctum finds it necessary to take a big risk and make a big move on the gameboard sometimes, how much more does a new faction need that?
EDIT: [member="Aela Talith"] also makes some strong points. I can speak to the Levantine experience better than the other ones. I'm not a faction admin there, never have been, but I've often noted that it's not sufficient to have a strong set of ideas -- Aela's right. They have to be
clearly and
concisely defined, or you risk your members not being able to explain them. You also risk people thinking you stand for nothing because they can't see what you stand for.
Here's an example from the Levantine experience that you may find useful. The original Levantines and their founding groups had mostly broken away from the Republic for one reason or another, mainly IC though with some elements of dominion fatigue. But it wasn't enough to define ourselves as
not the Republic - or even as 'that Firefly faction' or whatever. Shorthand only goes so far unless your ideas are really carefully chosen. If your main ideas can't be expressed clearly and coherently in a handful of lines, find new ones. So while it's totally plausible to ramble about free space and so forth, you still won't get much of an idea of what the Levantines
are until you know what the Levantines
do, at a higher level of detail than just, say, 'we fight for freedom.'
- Explore and reclaim worlds lost in the Dark Age
- Enable and protect those lost worlds as equal and independent members of a military and political alliance
- Connect those lost worlds with the galaxy through hyperspace and economic ties
Three short lines, rather than a novel. Not the most amazing premise in the world, but it's a lot of fun, and due to our board setting it's a unique fit. In your position, the Vitae Alliance might be suffering from poorly chosen core goals as Rev and Raz pointed out -- but the problem (as page 3 might indicate) might also be linked with...editing. If you want your three-word motto to be the be-all and end-all of the Vitae Alliance, what you want is to be able to make each word into a single bullet point with a single sentence (ideally involving a policy or strong stance) that has a direct hook to RP options. Each of the three short statements I just made about LS has been the hook for many RPs. I'll grant that telling someone 'go fight for life' is remarkably open-ended, which can be good, but it only gives permission. It doesn't give direction, not in any rigorous sense. So you literally need to be able to go:
- Principle 1: Sentence.
- Principle 2: Sentence.
- Principle 3: Sentence.
...and have each line be something that
gives your members something to do just as much as it tells other people who you are.
Sorry if I rambled. I just figured it might help.