After 300 years of robotic exploration, humans arrive on Mars for the first time. It’s a one-way ticket and a race to rule the planet. Mars, originally cultivated by robots and a genetically engineered clone workforce, has become a chaotic mass of war-torn regions.
It started with a small band of renegade clones who began to deviate from their genetic programming. Created to be docile problem solvers, these clones were the opposite – conflict-seeking aggressors who broke off from their roles as manufacturing engineers and began to weaponize the rovers and transports used to harvest iron and water from the surface of Mars.
With a small robotic army at their command, the renegades began attacking mining outposts across the planet, and retro-fitting the laboratories and factories to build ever more powerful vehicles and weapons to grow their power.
Terrified of extinction, the workforce clones manufactured defenses, however their docile genetics made them poor soldiers and the renegades slaughtered them in battle after battle.
Desperate and scattered, the workforce clones went to their top engineers to create new weapons. In the east regions of Mars, they took genetic material from the corpses of dead renegades to begin manufacturing combat-ready clone soldiers. In the north, they began retrofitting their most powerful computers with artificial intelligence programs imbued with a thousand years of earth’s best military knowledge and training. In the west, they built new weapons and flying vehicles, known as “gunships” to attack and destroy the renegade ground units from high above.
However, the spies of the renegades knew these efforts far in advance. Outnumbered and out-gunned, the renegades launched a campaign of cunning and deception, tricking the workforce clones into fighting friendly forces.
Thousands died.
The workforce clones, now known as “the ancients”, are extinct, as are the renegades (the maximum life of a clone is only ten years). The weapons they created — the great Clone Armada of the east, the sentient artificial intelligence robots of the north — now rule Mars as a scattered collection of warlords and tyrants.
As bad as it is on Mars, Earth is worse off, and a series of global wars and nuclear detonations wiped out almost all life on our home planet.
Settlers like you land daily on the red planet, fleeing the chaos of the earth in an attempt to create a new life for themselves on Mars. They work around the clock to harvest iron and water from the planet’s surface and developing the facilities, armies, and alliances needed to allow their outpost to survive in the harshest environment known to humankind.
The stakes are high, the challenge enormous, but with cunning and courage your armies shall grow, as shall your empire, and your legend.
Good luck, Commander.