At the beginning of humankind's ventures into space, a group of ridiculously wealthy religious dissidents built and launched a generation colony ship in the hopes of living and practicing their ways in peace. The effort bankrupted the members of the sect who chose to stay behind and, as the ship promptly lost contact with Earth, the whole fiasco crumbled into obscurity.
On the century-long voyage, the once harmonious faithful developed splinter groups of their own, meeting secretly in the bowels of the ship, plotting to overthrow the current ruling theocrats. Mutiny after mutiny was put down, with greater and greater power being given to the theocrats, who soon lost all pretenses of holiness and began to call themselves Guardians (one had brought along a copy of the Republic, you see). Wholly frustrated and cautious, the few secret societies which still remained gathered together and bided their time, hoping, like good millennial comrades, to eventually overthrow their oppressors when the time was ripe.
The time became ripe upon arrival at the planet they had dubbed as Eden, where the discovery of an Confed FTL probe that had arrived at the planet years before sufficiently embroiled the crew to make revolution possible. The revolutionaries lost quite quickly, but after they had reverse engineered the probe's drive and adapted it to the colony ship. Hiding out in the depths of the ship had had some benefits. They fled to a neighboring star system, taking quite a few of the scientists, engineers, and merchants with them, where they founded the colony of Nod. Unfortunately, the strain placed on the ship in its initial faster than light flight was far to great, and its engines had burned themselves out. Renaming it Cain, they left it in orbit as a manufacturing plant and trading post.
Unfortunately, Nod was quite poor in minerals, and so the new provisional government focused on scrabbling what they could from the soil and native life forms, creating whole new classes of materials and species in an attempt to build their colony up to the point where it could defend itself against the certain attack by Eden. The provisional government, with strong support from the merchants, declared a Jihad against Eden, promising to step down when the heathens were destroyed.
Back on Eden, the Guardians had established a firm hegemony over their subjects, relegating them to live in orbiting factories while only they could venture onto the planet's surface. The rich asteroids in the system more than provided enough resources and diversion that the Eden was quite surprised when, decades after the original revolt, Nod Theocracy ships appeared and destroyed three of the five stations orbiting Eden before the invaders could be beaten off. The two governments have been at war ever since.
Recent rulers of Nod have been quite complacent about the Jihad, realizing that they might win if they put all their effort into it, which would mean the dissolution of the provisional government. The current Matriarch has said as much, numerous times, and is following the path of her predecessor by instead encouraging free trade with anyone and everyone, taxing them "for the war effort," and sending the occasional foray into Eden's space to keep the radicals happy.
No one has seen the Guardians since the war began. All that is known of them is the yearly budget plan that is issued from their enclave.
Additions:
Until I get the planets to work right (the player can dominate them without a fight, which is no fun. Anyone have any ideas on this?), the only additions are six ships and five weapons, none of which the player can purchase.
Ships:
Ball Defender:
A really, really, really big, slow ship. It can be defeated if you don't get too close to it, but don't risk it if you can help it. It carries twelve Monopods as well as its normal digestors, web spitter, and barnacles.
Mini Ball Defender:
A heavy fighter version of the Ball Defender, smaller, faster, with weaker versions of the same weapons.
Monopod:
A small one-man craft which swarm all over you but are fairly easy to kill.
Trestle:
A large, solar sail propelled warship. It carries quite a few javelin turrets, which are its main guns, as well as four Trinaries. Quite fast, but it accelerates and turns like a snail in molasses.
Trinary:
A small fighter, using only missile weapons and a repulsor beam. Fairly quick and agile, however.
Sloop:
A solar sail freighter, roughly equivalent to an Argosy. Like the Trestle, it is fast, but can't turn or accelerate to save its soul.
Weapons:
Digestor (turret and cannon):
This weapon sucks a ship in as well as eats away at the shields and armor.
Web spitter (guided missile):
This weapon shoots small, slow, short range missiles in droves.
Barnacle breeder (guided missile):
This weapon spawns the dreaded space barnacle, scourge to engineers everywhere.
Repulsor beam:
A reverse tractor beam.
Javelin turret:
A turret that launches javelins.
Known bugs:
All ship names suck. I know this. If you have any non-testosterone laden suggestions, I would appreciate them. I'm keeping "Sloop," however.
If a Trestle and a Ball Defender are in the same system and launch all their fighters, you may not be able to fire any projectile weapons or launch any fighters of your own.
Both the Ball Defender and the Mini Ball Defender have a barnacle gun, but they seem to be unable to use it unless the moon is in the right phase and you sacrifice a goat.
Resources used in this release:
düde 164 (changed to mercenaries), 221, 223, 224
gövt 160, 161, 162
PICT 1082-1091, 3032-3035, 5133-5138
shïp & spïn 160-165
sÿst 189, 218 (both changed to add düdes from this plugin)
