An abridged history of the game

Note: This is an intentionally abridged history of the game. It is not intended to provide all the facts that happened. Instead, the purpose of this document is to touch on the major formative points of the game as it stands today, so you need not read thousands upon thousands of posts to 'catch up'.

Pre-game

The Coldest War works off an alternate history unraveling of the modern day Syrian Crisis. The Crisis turned hot, and there was an exchange of tactical class nuclear weapons in the middle east. While the situation stopped short of becoming a fully blown nuclear war, the oil infrastructure of much of the middle east was left in a smoking crater. The boiled over tensions caused geopolitical fracturing on the nominally post-geopolitical planet, along with the dominant American and European concerns in the UN, caused Russia, China, and India to splinter off and form the Federation of European and Asian Nations (FEAN) - many countries they influence left the UN to join the FEAN. Energy crises and recent war kept relations between the two supra-national organizations (SNOs) frosty at best and perilous at worst. As the need for energy became more and more voracious, it seemed a resource war seemed inevitable.

And then, Trans-Newtonian Elements (TNEs) were discovered.

In 2024, a UN research team discovered a small battery of elements that defied normal Newtonian physics. The promise of the elements were enormous, and the incredible potential of the minerals to provide an increasing standard of living froze the immediate resource tensions.

So as 2025 dawned, the Federation had obtained the information regarding TNEs, and a new gold rush was on, between two bitter rivals that had been nuking each other just 10 years before.

The Belnar

The new TNE standards made naval space travel possible for the first time, so the UN and the Federation quickly started stretching their spacebound legs. The first momentous discovery came very quickly. In early 2026, advanced TNE geological survey probes, initially dispatched to survey the red planet for more TNE minerals, found an entire ruined city buried under the sands of Mars. Xenology teams of 5 specialized officers from both SNOs scrambled to the red planet to investigate what was real and irrefutable evidence of ancient life on Mars. After 6 months of intensive study, the language of the roughly 50 million year old civilization was translated, and the ruins fully explored. The ancients were designated the Belnar Imperium.

More intensive investigation and recovery of the Belnar's 114 structures on Mars had to wait another 3 years. The laboratories hummed with research on mass producing the sorts of gravity lifts, scanning technologies, and cutting tools required for in-depth excavation, and the ship infrastructure to move the manpower. In October of 2029, the UN's first modern Engineering Brigade, the Belnar Imperium Exploration Corps, arrived on Mars and began the arduous work of recovering as many Belnar structures and devices they could. A few months later, the Federation leased UN troop-lift capabilities to put their own Engineering Brigade on the ground as well.

Over the next several years, intense competition between the SNOs pervaded the dismantling of the Belnar city, and certain windfalls directly influenced the Mars Crisis and the Jump Point Race (below). Furthermore, while excavating the ruins, SNO troops accidentally activated hundreds of automated defense robots slumbering inside the city. The resultant ground action was the first TNE ground conflict in human history, and the SNO troops defeated the robots roundly, with a few coups like UN troops blowing up a Belnar warehouse sheltering hundreds of Belnar droids that were still inactive. As the tide turned further against the drones, they withdrew to an unexplored cavern and activated some unknown technology that caused a minor earthquake. The earthquake also succeeded in wiping out the last of the robots.

In the end, the UN succeeded in excavating the majority of the Belnar city, and came across a large, open structure as part of their explorations. Substantially different from the industrial and commercial buildings they were used to, the building was dubbed 'the Academy', and UN scientists were dispatched to study it further. Their research culminated in the Belnar White Paper, giving the UN a very curious perspective on the galactic timeline, and some warnings of what were to come.