It began life as a complicated strategy game he played with his friends. He started turning this game into a mod for the original Escape Velocity, but due to engine limitations he could not complete it and put it aside for other projects. When EV Nova came out, he decided to complete what he had started 6 years previously, and he had finished it less than a year later, making it one of the first Nova total conversions to be completed.
It has its own website here
; however download links that don't rely on Stuffit are tricky to find.
Polycon provides examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Precursors: The Takari engineered the Polyconians to terraform worlds for them, then would employ a killswitch virus to exterminate them and set up house. Eventually one batch of Polyconians got wise to their creators' Evil Plan and turned on them, forcing the Takari to trigger the virus prematurely. Unfortunately this batch of Polyconians was genetically close enough to the Takari that the virus jumped the species barrier and wiped them out.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Robotic Plague is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a race of parasitic machines that were built by the E-Clan, a Polycon offshoot, as weapons and worked too well.
- Benevolent Precursors: The Vogons, last of the Origin Species, defend the Jains' descendants the Venerians from all aggressors.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The game features two superweapons capable of destroying planets and stations: the Maelstrom superlaser, and the coretap, a missile tipped with thermal explosive that burrows into a planet's core before detonating.
- The Empire: The Polycon Empire, the main state of the Polyconiansnote and single most powerful state in known space. There's some indication that their internal political organisation may be more democratic than the norm for The Empire (the main one being that their leader is a President who runs for re-election during the game without any indication either way whether those elections are fair or not), but when it comes to other civilisations, including ones they've already subjugated, they are imperialistic and occasionally outright genocidal.
- Humanity Is Advanced: Inverted in a way that doesn't fit with simply saying that another species is a Higher-Tech Species; Humanity exists and seems to hold Earth, but we're still using Soyuz capsules and are to all indications unaware that other civilisations exist.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Polycon-built Genocide Cruiser (lower right corner in the page image). It's absurdly easy to upgrade it to the point where nothing the AI throws at you has a prayer of taking you out, and if you don't feel like outfighting them, you can just as easily outrun them.
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Earth is in the game, but can't be landed on despite seeming to be inhabited (it is marked as such, and a primitive spacecraft is floating around), and it plays absolutely no role in any story — the only reason you have to even go to the system is to pass through to where you're actually going.
- Living Ship: The Sorhal are a race of sapient starships.
- MegaCorp: Vecon, a shipbuilding company that controls its own small warfleet, builds most of the military vessels used by the Polycon and directly controls much of Polycon's military R&D (it apparently also was a side in the most recent Polycon civil war and won, though details are scant). Messiah Mining, Infinity and Neo Industries aren't quite up to Vecon's level or ubiquity, but all are powerful enough to control entire systems, maintain warfleets and engage in armed conflict with one another.
- Precursors: The Origin Species, the Takari, Jains, and Vogons. The Vogons still remain and protect the Jains' descendants the Venerians. The description of one planet talks about the theorised existence of an older Precursor civilisation, a common ancestor to all three Origin Species.
- Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Most Polycon military ships are named after Egyptian gods (the aforementioned Genocide Cruiser being one of two exceptions), though in a possible oversight there are two Osiris ships on near opposite sides of the size scale.
- The Republic: The Meridians, a rare combination of The Republic and Proud Warrior Race Guy. They hold their own against Polycon by sheer brute force.
- Silicon-Based Life: The Draconens are believed to be this.
- Translator Microbes: You can buy translator chips that will allow you to read the Flavor Text for some alien planets, e.g. Draconen worlds.
- We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Combo of both trope variants. Frickin' Laser Beams of one form or another are the short range weapon of choice for every faction except the Meridians and Naglafar, the latter of which are an offshoot of the former. Their pneumatically accelerated kinetic guns have superior range to the various types of particle beams used by the others, but are well behind on firepower.
