Secession — Joe Waller

secession

Download the game. It's old, so you'll probably also want DOSBox. There's also a demo (minus source code).

🚀 Play in your browser — Secession is being revived as a native web build (the original engine, textures and all). It'll be embedded here once the port lands. Until then, the downloads above run it under DOSBox.

it's the year 2358, and man dominates a strife-torn solar system

Powerful corporations, despotic governments, rebel installations and neo-renaissance dissidents struggle for raw materials, survival, and ultimately control of the Solar System in the largest secessionary war in history.

In the twenty-second century the small moons and asteroids near the gas giants became economically desirable for their mineral wealth. Early pioneers were Earthborn, but as the larger asteroids developed they became home to people who started families in space. Selected for endurance, intelligence and reactions, these settlers soon decided they were better than their Earth- (and Moon-) born cousins.

The outer system was rich in metals but poor in food, relying on shipments from an Earth swollen by the population explosion. A famine and a panic in the senate saw food exports collapse. When the belt's second-largest biodome was struck by a meteorite, supplies dwindled and people began to die. In desperation a belt ship hijacked a food transport; a vengeful Earth seized a shipment of hydrogen isotopes in return. The outer system seceded, forming a hazy conglomerate of independent nations.

Earth, with the Moon, Mars and Venus, amalgamated into the United Earth Alliance and began expanding its military for the first time in centuries. The belt responded in kind. Quietly, both sides built armadas — and behind the scenes, a handful of families and corporations began carving out a feudal empire of their own, housed not on worlds but in moving cities, poaching the leading scientists with better 'virtual' real estate. The technological race was on.

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