This panel presentation (Will Miller and Dave McDonough) will be posted on YouTube sometime this week, but I thought I would pass along my notes from that panel. My notes are admittedly incomplete (the panel was so interesting I forgot to jot down many things
), but here is what I have.
The purpose of the panel was to explain the Earthly backstory as of the time of the seeding, laying the foundation for the factions and their unique abilities. From a gameplay perspective, since they were not confined to historical civs, they wanted to construct a plausible future history to explain how the factions arose and why the seeding was so urgent. In their view, a variety of forces/events had to come into play, including territorial upheaval from warfare and climactic devastation, population upheaval in the form of mass migration, famine and pestilence, and technological upheaval, including communications failures/blackouts (no more internet -- gasp!) and political disengagement/isolationism.
The timeline they outlined starts about 50 years from now with the "Great Mistake", followed by 4 generations of recovery (indeterminate number of years -- just "4 generations"), by which point technology has recovered and progressed to a level just ahead of where we are today. At that point, we have the technology to send seed ships and also have come to realize that the "inflection point" is nigh. The inflection point is described as the point in time when the Earth will no longer have sufficient energy resources to propel meaningful cargo beyond Earth orbit. If other planets are not seeded before the inflection point, humanity is forever confined to Earth. (In their view, the backstory did not require explanation of the propulsion methods needed to accomplish the seeding, so that is left to our imaginations.)
What was the Great Mistake?
It starts in China, with a dirty bomb being exploded in Chengdu. The Chinese accuse Iran, fire tactical nukes at Iranian cities, and invade Afghanistan. Pakistan conducts air strikes against China, and China retaliates by nuking Pakistan. Pakistan counter-nukes, triggering further Chinese nuclear attacks against Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and, of all places, N. Korea. At this point, approximately 1/3 of the worlds population has suffered a nuclear attack. Mass migrations of refugees destabilize neighboring regions, including Russia, Eastern Europe, India and East Africa.
The next shoe to drop is dramatic climate change -- polar ice caps melt (the poles are ice-free for many months of the year), raising sea levels by 20 feet, triggering further dislocations and migrations, particularly from coastal China, India and the Americas.
Against this backdrop, the various BE factions begin to emerge.
Most Western nations turn inward, focusing on their own problems and adopting neo-isolationist policies, allowing the rest of the world to sort itself out. Two notable exceptions are Australia, which happily conducts business with everyone, and the Sub-Saharan nations that eventually form the People's African Union, which suffered the least territorial losses from climate change (Africa serves as the world's breadbasket). ARC becomes a super-corporation whose power rivals (or exceeds) that of its host nation (U.S., plus Canada and Mexico). For reasons that are a bit obscure, a hybrid Hindu/Islam religion forms in India, which leads to political union between India and Pakistan (notwithstanding their historical differences). The Chinese-led PAC includes Mongolia and N. Korea, but probably does not include S. Korea and Japan, which remain independent. The EU collapsed early, but Franco-Iberia serves as the effective successor -- presumably including also the Low Countries and perhaps Italy, but definitely not including Germany, England or any of Scandinavia. (They hinted that those countries' (and presumably Japan's) post-Great Mistake stories have yet to be told -- expansion pack material???).
They emphasized that this was the version of the Great Mistake that they used as the backstory for development purposes. None of this appears in-game or affects gameplay, so we are free to (are encouraged to) conceive our own versions of the Great Mistake.