The ever-popular MechWarrior PC games take place in the far future, where giant robotic war machines called BattleMechs dominate the battlefield. Most of these games take place just before, during or after the historic Clan invasion, but players might not realize that two centuries earlier, a series of devastating wars nearly brought humanity to ruin.
This franchise is brutally honest about humanity's eagerness to build and use mighty weapons of war to settle grudges or grab new territory. In the lore, the four Succession Wars came this close to snuffing out human civilization in the Inner Sphere forever.
The five great nations of the Inner Sphere were no strangers to war. When the great Star League fell to the scheming villain Stefan Amaris, the war hero General Aleksandr Kerensky rose to the challenge. He won, returning peace and freedom to the universe by the year 2780.
Tragically, the peace did not last long, since the five noble houses each wanted to claim the gaping power vacuum that the fall of House Cameron (rulers of the Star League) had left. In fact, no one even trusted General Kerensky with the position of leadership, and the five house lords saw him as an obstacle to their greedy ambitions. In despair, General Kerensky rallied the remaining SLDF troops and departed the Inner Sphere to form a new society elsewhere, leaving the five great nations to their own devices. Utter chaos followed.
By 2786, the five house lords all made official claims to the throne of the Star League, and talking things out was not an option. Five armies were thrust into total war, and many civilians were caught in the crossfire. This was the First Succession War, and each great nation fought dirty by aiming to destroy each other's factories, shipyards, water processing plants, civilian infrastructure, research labs and more, slaughtering countless scientists, engineers and technicians along the way.
Doing this to one nation would cripple it, but with the extreme carnage affecting all five nations, humanity as a whole suffered a serious regression in technological expertise. Even nuclear weapons and bioweapons were fair game in this all-out war, and the civilian death toll was apocalyptic. Most tragic of all was the fact that the First Succession War didn't even have a winner; all five states gained some planets and lost others, but no house lord had managed to claim the position of First Lord. And now the five lords hated each other more than ever.
House Davion, ruler of the mighty Federated Suns, was the strongest of the five, but not even they could defeat four enemies at once and claim the Star League's power as their own. In the end, the First Succession War ended due to mutual exhaustion more than anything. Countless cities, even entire worlds, had been reduced to ashes for no good reason, and the postwar lull would prove short.
The Second Succession War soon erupted, and the nuclear hell that followed continued the grim work of the First, with more factories, shipyards, research labs and cities being wiped away. Before long, the Inner Sphere became decentralized, adopting a feudal political system similar to that of the medieval period some 2,000 years earlier. Galactic civilization was at its low point, and petty feudal lords vied for power among the stars while using primitive and shoddy BattleMechs and tanks compared to the Star League's glory days. The dark age had arrived, and it would last for quite some time -- until the 3000s ushered in a renaissance.
Skirmishes and raids had long since replaced all-our war in the weary Inner Sphere by the 3000s, but a new dawn was just around the corner. No one was using nuclear or biological weapons anymore, and civilian infrastructure was off-limits for all parties. This allowed the five nations to slowly rebuild. In the late 3020s, the Gray Death Legion mercenaries found the Helm Memory Core, revealing all kinds of advanced tech and secrets.
By the 3030s, the five nations were rebuilding and restocking their armies, and long-forgotten technology was returning at last. Newly-built factories were churning out brand-new civilian and military goods alike, and the recovery continued well into the 3040s. By the 3050s, the terrifying Clans had invaded the Inner Sphere, and this jump-started Inner Sphere technology levels, ushering in new radical ideas such as OmniMechs and battle armor suits for infantry.
This, of course, altered the political landscape as well, with the Inner Sphere nations and the invading Clans alike doing battle with one another with these new war toys. That's where the PC games come in, such as MechWarrior 2, where players can take part in the bitter feud between Clans Wolf and Jade Falcon in 3057, or MechWarrior 3, when the Inner Sphere powers used their brand-new 'Mechs to wipe out Clan Smoke Jaguar once and for all.
MechWarrior 4, meanwhile, took place during the FedCom Civil War of the 3060s, which was the high point of the technological renaissance. By now, the horrors of the Succession Wars were long since forgotten, and modern armies fought with glee to test out their new weapons. However, if they weren't careful, they would usher in a new apocalypse -- one that might finish off interstellar civilization forever.
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