I have been thinking too much about the fantasy world of sid meier's alpha centauri today but have only come up with one feeling and one idea
the former is that it is a fun feeling to imagine 10,000 or so people occupying a whole planet over the course of 300 years or so and reaching only a population of a few millions before the singularity happens
the latter is to consider that in civilization games when you play on an "earth" map you have strange things where "England" is about five or six tiles yet there is an "English" civilization, which necessarily ends up building "London" in London (i.e. the whole archipelago), then "Birmingham" in France and by the time you get to "Nottingham" and "Lincoln" you are building them in north africa, and so therefore the sprawling factional empires we see in the game are a similar conceit, and so the more literary fiction version has the entire core 10-12 bases of 100,000 in only a few tiles of the map, with global claims being economic, religious and worked mostly by robots. realistically the planet is mostly wilderness.
war in particular cannot work as it does in the game, a sort of worldwarian fantasy of occupation of population centres. i see a history going in phases something like
early settlement - nothing really to do but posting at one another over the packet radio with occasional missions, mostly via ship. "probe teams" are a representation of this period
"industrial automation": the "supply crawler" era, something of a return of the Age of Exploration when factions compete to discover strange natural phenomena, rare mineral resources, have captain cook types on slow boats opening up trade routes which get pirated. colonial drone wars. malcontents sent out to heroic duels. very much the heroic age.
relatively late recovery of aerospace technology: now regular travel between factions becomes a real possibility, core territories under threat for the first time. perhaps there are airstrikes and exchanges of missiles.
but the first real casualties happens after this point when the woowoo technology reaches the point where gaians weaponise the awakening and increasingly hostile planet. in the famous Gaian-Spartan war, which is mostly conducted via worms and fungus, Sparta is scapegoated by the other factions as the irritant to Planet, and consumed by fungus and worms.
The war cows every other faction into a submission to the Gaians, except for the Hive and the Believers who form an alliance - it could easily have been them who ended up like Sparta.
The Hive attempts to use technology to create what has not existed yet - an industrial proletariat, capable of conducting a terrestrial war, and form an alliance with the Believers whose reactionary humanism has synergies.
This three way war between Transhumanist Alliesbthe Humanist Axis and Planet is the great confusing drama at the end of the Human Age, with cyborg armies fighting, which ends in a last-minute alliance between the Transhumanists and Planet, with a recapitulation of the Gaian-Spartan war on a grander scale as the entire Growth Dream crisis is focused against the Humanists.
