(Lore Transfer from Interest Check)

All of us would be crew aboard one ship, but I also wanted the option to traverse space individually, hence the Warp Fighters. Each role should play out more like Artemis Starship Simulator, with a captain, gunner, helm officer, etc. The ship itself is sentient and *can* be controlled autonomously, but it needs humans to train it and give it a soul. We're training it from scratch - how to move, shoot, repair itself, and such like.

The Empire sees itself as a bastion of goodness, a light on a hill so to speak, but reality is a bit more complicated. At the start of the mission, we will be running various goody-two-shoes jobs like feeding orphans, building shelters for the homeless, rescuing the stranded, and the like. Later on, though, we will be delving into the darker side of the Empire, into its genetic experiments, morally bankrupt population, and corruption at the highest levels of government.

The Empire has a foothold in every single star system, whether it be a core world, colony, conquered group, or military outpost. Only the core worlds produce the best starships and tech; the other worlds are struggling to catch up, or even taking different paths. While the official government is an oligarchy, with 7 Immortals on the Immortal Council, the Empire is so vast that the more remote colonies can get away with operating like sovereign states. One of your missions will be to change that.
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The Core worlds are, at once, a bastion of high civilization and a den of evil. The economy is almost totally automated - from production and services to mining, farming, and maintenance. Even science and coding are automated to some degree. The end result is that work and money have become obsolete. Any necessary economic transactions result in bartering.

Sounds like utopia right?

Wrong. Having nothing worthwhile to do with their lives, the people have wholly devoted themselves to the pursuit of pleasure. Alcohol, drugs, games, and especially sex are popular pastimes, and all manner of historic depravities occur on these worlds. The more conscientious members of society devote themselves to the pursuit of science and the arts. The military used to be an outlet for their energies until the end of the Conquest War.

The outer worlds are more or less postmodern, which is to say, considerably less advanced. Most of them can't even get a craft in orbit, let alone out of their solar system. And unfortunately, those that *used* to have spacefaring abilities were bombed back to the stone age duing the Conquest War. Over the last few years, some have regained some degree interstellar travel, but they're nowhere near as advanced as their conquerors. Our game will start with one of their emmisaries returning a batch of starship crew to their post around Crescent Prime.