I know that I have little say in the matter, but for a while now I've been thinking of this idea for the back-story to PA. Looking at the game so far, I believe that a lot of the buildings and units look they were designed by a human. And in the PA kick starter video, the guy says that the age of humanity has long passed. So thinking about this I have an Idea. (WARNING! VERY LONG) Sometime in the far future, mankind has visited almost every solid surface in the solar system. Earth has long been covered in vast nuclear fallout fields from terrifying world wars; forcing the Billions of people living there to move into small relatively safe areas to try and survive. However, several space colonies in places such as mars, Ceres, and all the way out to Pluto have thrived. With knowledge of this, the military leaders of earth made the decision to abandon their old home. After a brief war over the solar system by the surviving governments, a new coalition of mankind is born: the Terrain Empire. They led our race to unimaginable heights. Building huge ships and structures, they accelerated man's potential ten-fold. However, after a thousand years of peace, the leaders of the empire noticed something. They realized that they were running out of space. All of their colonies had populations in the trillions, with cities covering entire planets. They predicted that soon the population would grow to a point where rebellions, corruption, and anarchy would blowup all over the solar system. As wise as they were, they decided that a second great expansion was necessary; to the stars. In the past, probes had been sent out to other star-systems and even found planets that could be inhabited by humans easily. However, any interstellar voyage attempted with humans usually ended badly. The empire, in all its wisdom, could not invent a FTL drive of any sorts. Experiments with warp drives were promising in the past, but quickly turned out to be quite unstable to the ship using it. Undetermined though the Empire built huge colony ships. With huge bio-domes capable of transporting millions of people each. The empire planned to build hundreds of these ships, with a new one coming every fifty years. It is important to note that these ships would be propelled by conventional means and would take hundreds of years to reach their destination. This meant that each passenger that boarded the ship would not reach their destination. Finally, the first ship left. It went all the way to it's destination in Alpha Centauri without a hitch and the colonists set up a magnificent city they named New Athens. Pleased by this, the Empire launched a huge campaign to recruit volunteers to join on new colony ships by promising them the chance to give their great great great great... grand kids to have the freedom to new and fantastic places. Unsurprisingly they had a surplus of volunteers and picked the best and brightest to make the future colonies more prosperous. They sent one hundred ships far into space and they all surprisingly made it. That was when they received a signal from New Athens, remember that the signal would be over 4 years old since Alpha Centauri is 4 light-years away. Apparently a dispute had been occurring between to factions in the colony; one wanted to rebel against the empire and the other didn't. A civil war quickly followed and both sides nuked each other out of existence. New Athens was dead. As if this wasn't enough, similar situations were occurring in the other colonies as well. In the end, only a handful of the colonies survived. The empire was troubled. They needed more military power to secure their colonies, but any force would die before they got there. And they couldn't recruit from the colonists because the empire didn't trust them anymore. They needed a force that was 100% loyal but didn't die from old age. It seemed impossible until a lowly inventor gave the idea that a robot, equipped with hyper-intelligent nano-bots, could not only fit the criteria, but save on weight by building an army out of available materials. The empire loved this idea, they nicknamed these robots commanders and put them on the next wave of colony ships experiment with hundreds of models. They told the public that they were only for construction purposes so that their true intent could be kept secret. They worked by quickly building infrastructure and factories on the planets for the colonists, but would change to assault mode if a rebellion was detected and would switch all civilian production into military production. The idea was surprisingly a success. The commanders quickly proved to stop any rebellion and kept the empire in complete control. For the next couple thousand years, the empire colonized a huge number of planets. And was even experimenting with teleporter technology and communication via interlocked particles. Then, when a colony on the edge of the empire suddenly rebelled, the experimental commander, named X, reacted quite strangely. It killed all of the colonists and started to spam large numbers of units. It quickly moved its forces on from the lost colony and built an interstellar ship for itself. It then moved from star-system to star-system destroying colony after colony. The empire noticed that it usually target the other commanders in the colony first. Meanwhile, the other colonies near the rogue commander, decided to direct their commanders together to destroy X. They made a force of over 100 commanders to face him. An epic battle ensued in the former colony of J-17. No one could believe the intensity, accuracy, and intelligence X could command his units with as reported in the battle report given to the Empire after the battle. He even somehow directed an asteroid to hit the planet where the commanders had set up a large collection of units. However, in the end, from sheer numbers, X was cornered on a moon with no escape. It was looking like the end for X. Then, X committed suicide by purposely corrupting his energy core for his uber-weapon. However, in one act, he had sent a virus to the surviving commanders; thus corrupting them. The feed to the watching colonists was cut and they had no idea what was happening in J-17. The empire, fearing the worst, sent a huge force to the region. They weren't taking chances. The rogue commanders were actually doing just as X had. They built a Huge interstellar fleet and moved to the surrounding colonies. The empire watched in terror as the rogues, as they were called, tore through system after system. And the empire's commanders moving slowly across space to meet the force. Finally, the commanders arrived but were only infected with the same virus as the rest of the rogues. This effectively doubled the number of rogue commanders. The empire realized then that it was powerless. All of their commanders in the thousands of colonies were effectively waiting to be turned over to the rogues. Worst still, the empire couldn't attempt to destroy the Commanders because that would be considered an act of rebellion. In the end, the Empire decided to build new colony ships that would work as breeding grounds for super soldiers to fight the rogues. However, the endless tanks, planes, bots, and boats were to much for the Empire's forces. The leaders of humanity watched horrifically as world after world fell, each holding a commander that quickly defected. After only a handful of colonies were left, which included man's birthplace,earth, the empire decided to launch one last attack. Every last man, woman, and child was marched onto a military ship to move for the final attack. They organized themselves and prepared for humanities final battle. They met the rogues in New New Athens, it was rebuilt on top of the old city. Trillions of troops on both sides fought over the system for months. But, finally, the last human soldier died on top of a rogue commander as it exploded. Through out the entire battle, only one rogue commander was killed. However, the humans primary goal was ultimately lost. the reason they had fought to protect New New Athens was because they had to stop the rogues from capturing the Commander Factory in the city, the only one in the universe. It now was unprotected and free for the taking. Now that the humans were defeated. The other commanders moved to capture the factory and a stream of commanders marched out that then launched them selves distant stars for "colonization". The rogue commanders and all the new ones being built sat dormant all across the galaxy for over two thousand years. Until a new variable was introduced. A delta model commander had a sudden shift in programming. The virus inside of it had changed and it now marked its fellow rogues as hostile. This Commander, by attacking other commanders, had changed their programming as well. In a thousand years, every last commander was reprogrammed and a new war broke out. Packs of commanders teamed up against other packs. While some commanders fought alone. The only question now is what new wars will be fought. What epic battles will rage over the abandon human colonies. Only time will tell. -to those who read this, I wish to congratulate you! If you have suggestions for changes or any better ideas; feel free to post below and answer my poll. That being said, what do you all think?
A few changes I might suggest - Terran Empire. How cliche. I know you were probably thinking "Well, Earth, prosperity... Romans.... EMPIRE! Terran Empire." Or something like that, please rename them Let me list a few examples. The UTA, United Terran Empire from SPAZ The UEE, United Empire of Earth from Star Citizen The Terrans from StarCrap Use something interesting... Like The Project or The New Paradigm from Warzone 2100. Another thing, when Uber releases details on separate Commander models, you should give a reason for separate Commander types. For example, Spider Commanders might be used in mountainous environments. Beasts are used for extremely hostile environments. Imperials are used in wealthy colonies. Deltas are used on planets that require a lot of terraforming.
I'll admit that Terran Empire was a product of my love for planetside. How about something like the United Colonies or Alliance of Sol? Also, I'm kinda mad that I forgot about the different commanders types. I'll have to think about how to include that.
In my opinion, alliances, coalitions and empires of people are cliche. Divide people up and have them face off against each other!
Humans tend to do this, so I'll agree. Feudal systems, Principalities, Tribes, City-States, Countries, Nations, Empires, they've never been able to work together. Not in the way suggested by Sci Fi wettings.
You're right on human behaviour there. That said, I've always expected people to work together when faced with a common enemy. That's why tribe-members looked after each other. Same for people from the same country, nation, etc. On a slight aside, in today's society; that doesn't happen so much any more now that we're all globalised and peaceful. Instead of waging war with sharpened sticks, we wage war with capitalism, marketing, and lobbying. People are top-dog on Earth, so we don't have to worry about sabre-toothed tigers eating us, or natural disasters coming and killing us off (well, still a bit there). Evolution's little slave bitch, natural selection, is still hard at work though. We compete against each other, and we always will until there's something ready to kick us off the thrown. This is why I don't many human-empires are plausible in Sci-Fi.
I suppose speed is the factor there. If you move to slowly between systems, by the time you hear about a rebellion and get there to quell it, they would have already won and build up a defence against you. You can't have an empire that can't respond to problems, and that might have been the situation in PA.
Yeah, the logistic cost of moving an army (and paying wages for an army too). They were really simple premises. It's part of what I thought made SupCom so awesome - a rational way of explaining why armies of robots are fighting over the space of an hour.
