The year is 2763 and the megastructure known as Sanctuary embraces the Sun. Humanity’s crowning achievement, this colossal, multifaceted metal-platform now shelters over a trillion lives. Alas, Sanctuary is far from the idealised paradise it was meant to be. Great chasms of serrated metal teeth gnaw hungrily into the vast expanse of space, evidence of the Breach and countless ongoing battles. The war-ravaged shells of once-proud cities exposed to the void, looming over scorched earth and barren wastelands. Painful reminders of better days, long past.

 

Despite the devastation not all is consumed by warfare. The vastness of Sanctuary has allowed some of its inhabitants to escape the chaos by retreating into those few unmarred arcologies, glittering technological marvels surrounded by nature's bounty. Such brilliant havens stand testament to mankind’s will to survive.

 

The seed of this turmoil can be traced back to the year 2554. Humanity's past mistakes had chased them to the stars. Pollution and overcrowding threatened Earth and its colonies with extinction. The solar system’s greatest thinkers—biological and otherwise—proposed the construction of the Dyson sphere: a man-made heaven fueled by the warmth of a star. ​This synthetic nirvana was to be named “Sanctuary”.

 

In 2647 ​​a new subspecies of human, dubbed the Chosen, revealed its existence. The Chosen had been selected from among the brightest and most influential members of society. Remaking their bodies into highly advanced digital forms, they converted their organic minds into liquid light energy matrices, granting them physical immortality. Intelligent and ambitious, the Chosen soon came to rule most of humanity with a detached benevolence.

 

Over the next century, resentment among the natural citizenry towards their transhuman stewards grew and festered, resulting in protests, social unrest, and outright civil war. In 2741, a coalition of disenfranchised civilian and military organisations formed the Earth Defence Alliance (EDA) to oppose Chosen hegemony. The EDA's fiery rhetoric quickly gained them support amongst their fellow naturals, furthering the divide between the two cultures.

 

As Sanctuary neared completion in 2758, tensions between the EDA and Chosen were at an all-time high. The Breach fractured both the Dyson sphere and that tenuous peace. Billions of lives extinguished in an instant. The land, torn and ruined, entire cities swallowed up in the collapse, the damage to Sanctuary’s superstructure, unknowable. A permanent wound on the human psyche.

 

Each side blamed the other but the EDA struck first, sparking the greatest conflict in human history. The Great Solar War had begun. The resulting violence was unlike any other in its scale and savagery, bringing untold destruction upon a promised utopia.

 

Now, as the stalwart EDA fights tooth and nail against the cutting-edge Chosen, a new power emerges. Sanctuary’s AI caretakers have retrofitted themselves into the Guard, an implacable robotic legion determined to protect Sanctuary through the forceful pacification of its two warring blocs. As the Great Solar War rages on, which faction will you pledge allegiance to? Will you lead your side to victory or will you be forgotten by history?