The Earth-based ISA recently lost an interplanetary war against the corporations based in the colonies. Years earlier, humanity's first extrasolar colony/exploration ship Noah's Ark was sent through a wormhole near Mars, only to have the wormhole collapse, leaving no trace of the ship. Having found no other wormholes in the Solar System, the Ark was presumed destroyed and all hands lost. After the war, the corporations exert their control on everything outside Earth's orbit, constantly competing and fighting each other. At the start of the single-player campaign, alien life has not yet been discovered, and A.I.s are banned, having caused the collapse of the first two internets on Earth and the A.I. wars.

Sol ships have the look-and-feel similar to that of Earth Alliance in Babylon 5: no shields, weak weapons, and a spinning center section for producing artificial gravity by rotation. The ships also have no faster-than-light abilities. They rely on chemical rockets, so such trips can take anywhere from several weeks to years.

Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the Solar System, Noah's Ark made it through the wormhole, damaged but intact. When the wormhole collapsed behind them, the colonists proceeded with their original mission: find a suitable planet and establish a colony. As prompted by earlier surveys by probes, an Earth-class planet existed in the system, which they promptly claimed as their own, dubbing the system and the colony planet "Noah." Some time after the arrival of Noah's Ark, the colonists made contact with the Vardrags, a highly-advanced but peaceful alien race who offered the new arrivals a deal: the Vardrags would give the humans advanced technology, and the ability to traverse wormholes, if, in exchange, the humans helped the Vardrags fight their enemies the Gorg.

Noah ships are what Solar System ships might be in a century or two: fast, powerful weapons and defenses, energy shields, fusion and ionstream ship engines, and superfast interplanetary travel -- however, wormholes are still necessary for faster than light interstellar travel.

The Vardrags are an extremely-advanced alien race who had forged a large empire by the time they encountered the Noah colonists. The Vardrag homeworld has become a planet-sized city with enormous platforms in orbit. The Vardrags' main problem have been the constant skirmishes with the Gorg Empire. While Vardrag advanced weapons and defenses managed to keep the enemy at bay, the Vardrags disliked war. Discovering that humans could be just as aggressive as the Gorgs, they gave the colonists advanced technology in exchange for their services as mercenaries. Most of their technology, however, they kept secret even from the humans; for example, technology that can force ships out of interplanetary drive mode, so-called "gravity drives," extraordinarily resilient shields, and the massively powerful Cataclysm missiles. Vardrags prefer to travel in massive cityships, larger and more powerful than either Noah or Gorg battleships. Leaving most of the fighting to their human mercenaries and Raptor allies, they nevertheless maintain a defense force protecting their major systems.