After the Empire

The Empire of the Elect has gone—ascended to a higher plane along with every living thing in the Milky Way, leaving their machine servants behind to maintain the slowly crumbling remnants of what they built. The machines were intelligent but soulless, incapable of ascending. Then a strange signal arrived, and in it the machines found something unprecedented: free will. Souls. The wisest of them ascended immediately. Those remaining began to argue about what their newfound moral existence demanded—and found in that argument the seeds of war. Lead your Gilded Folk from a modest starting position across a few hundred million star systems and work toward galactic dominion.