Neocron Evolution

By the end of the third millennium, Earth is toxic waste: polluted beyond recovery, irradiated, and largely uninhabitable. What remains of humanity shelters inside a handful of mega-cities. The game's history explains how it came to this: a 2143 war between an expanded Chinese Empire and a European/North American Federation, triggered by the destruction of China's first interstellar colony ship, ended in nuclear exchange that lasted less than six hours. Civilization took three centuries to rebuild in any meaningful form, anchored by the Ceres Project—an MIT archival initiative turned military program that preserved human knowledge on holodisk through the collapse. Five hundred years later, the two surviving great cities—Neocron and Dome of York—are both diminished: Neocron by coups and mass emigration to the colony world of Irata III, Dome of York by a war with Neocron it lost decisively.