Succession Wars

The Succession Wars were a series of conflicts between the powers of the Inner Sphere from the late 28th to early 31st centuries in the Battletech Universe, and one of the most defining periods of the universe's state of being; a game of BattleTech most of the time lore-wise probably happened during one of these four wars.

History

Preamble To War

With the eradication of House Cameron by Stefan Amaris during the Amaris Civil War and the Rim Worlds Republic' secret long-term infiltration into the Star League's trust as a poster child Periphery State, there was no one left to take over as First Lord of the Star League. Additionally, the Terran Hegemony's bureaucracy was gutted by the Amaris and SLDF purges of collaborative officials with only Jerome Blake from the Ministry of Communication (later called ComStar) surviving. To make matters worse, each of the Great Houses distrusted Alexander Kerensky. Outside of appointing Jerome Blake as head of Comstar to keep the HPG network running, their last action as a unified body was to strip Kerensky of his title as head of the SLDF. While the SLDF was still the biggest military in human history, they were decimated from their grinding attritional war while fighting back from the Periphery to Terra with over a staggering 75% of their regiments and warships destroyed. That, alongside Kerensky's antipathy to politics, made him convinced the best way to save the Star League was to take it's entire fighting force into exile in hopes the threat of retaliation would make the Great Houses compromise. To say it didn't work is a massive understatement.

First Succession War

Almost from the minute Kerensky and the SLDF fucked off into the Deep Periphery, all the Successor States braced for what they knew was inevitable conflict. Knowing that becoming First Lord would inevitably mean they could run their opponents off the map forever, all five Successor States waited with baited breath at the opportunity to actively begin the violence, and wouldn't you know it, the Draconis Combine started the whole damn thing as Minoru Kurita decided to kick things off. Openly declaring the Draconis Coordinator to have claim to the seat of the First Lord, he also asserted that any refusal to recognize the claim would be met with total war.

What happened next is that the Inner Sphere basically warcrime'd itself for 34 uninterrupted years. Biological, Nuclear, and Chemical warfare were rampant, and billions of lives were lost in senseless battles to claim long disputed systems and further territory over what was ultimately petty grudges; to the point that worlds that could produce clean drinking water were as valuable as they were when they were first discovered. It got so bad at one point that the Mercs, who were already a huge part of everybody's battleplans, basically had to start reigning in the violence themselves by forcefully refusing any contract that involved a breaking of "The Conventions" that was offered to them, usually by doing just as much damage for the other side the old fashioned way as they might've for the offer. By the end of the war, grand full-scale invasions and geneva convention-violating battlefields gave way to simple skirmishes and raids to stop each other from producing more Mechs and other vital military equipment.

This is also where the Kentares Massacre happened; wherein Minoru Kurita got his brain ventilated by a sniper, and his deeply unstable child Jinjiro basically decided that everyone on that planet had to die as quickly and painfully as possible as penance for this action. To make matters worse, any Draconis Combine soldier who protested was killed alongside the civilians themselves; often with a katana as Jinjiro figured it would waste less ammo. The local ComStar representatives, deeply concerned by Jinjiro's openly genocidal nature, broadcast the whole thing to the entire Inner Sphere. They got killed by Jinjiro too, but made sure that even if everybody was picking a fight with everyone else, they definitely had an undisputed "bad guy" now. After a series of FedSun counterattacks to liberate worlds picked up early on by the Combine, pretty much everybody was exhausted and now very resource-poor, and eventually most fronts just ceased being fronts at all, with everybody deciding to call it quits and come back when they were ready for next time.

Second Succession War

The Second Succession War occurred shortly after the first when the Minnesota Tribe showed up in Draconis Combine space to raid for supplies and fresh civilians from prison camps before disappearing into the Periphery forever. Fearing the SLDF would show up at any minute with his back against the wall and egged on by ComStar planting information for his enemies to exploit (though not the Minnesota Tribe stuff. The last thing they wanted was Kerensky showing back up), Jinjiro Kurita kicked off the Second Succession War to distract his country’s civilians from agitating in favor of the SLDF’s apparent inevitable return.

The Second Succession War's major fronts largely involved the Lyran Commonwealth, Draconis Combine, and Free Worlds League, all three getting into full-scale espionage wars thanks to ComStar's egging on, with largely the FWL managing to come out the victor...which inevitably dragged ComStar into the conflict when the League found out that ComStar was playing several different noble houses against each other in order to cripple the FWL. The League, not taking this lying down, decided to try and fight ComStar head on, which was just about the dumbest thing they could've done, as blackout after blackout of the HPG ended up doing the trick for ComStar.

But that didn't mean ComStar was still a passive participant. The Primus at the time, Raymond Karpov, was extremely distressed at how slowly technological progress had begun to spiral out of control, and begun Operation Holy Shroud; a covert massacre of scientists, engineers, and technicians across the entire Inner Sphere disguised as other Great Houses, which ended in a complete success; the other Great Houses were all too willing to go to the mat with each other for their "dishonorable" tactics, and subsequently smashed up factories, installations, and supply depots across the Inner Sphere just to teach each other a lesson. Less stellar territory was fought over, rather the means to wage war itself became the most precious prize of all.

By the end of the war, the Inner Sphere was in terrible shape: The capacity and the understanding required to build life-changing technologies had been completely lost to the Great Houses. HPGs and JumpDrives may as well have been magic, and Mechs had become so valuable that old and broken ones became valuable recyclables. Exhaustion and an increasing lack of resources had ultimately ended the war in a way that no winner could possibly be crowned.

Also by the end of the war the Capellan Confederation was double fucked by both the FedSuns and the Free Worlds League. Business as usual.

Third Succession War

In contrast to the first two wars, the Third Succession War was extremely low intensity due to the relative depletion of technology, and most sides were honestly trying to stay out of it; with the FWL and the Lyran Commonwealth trying their best to rebuild after getting some of the worst of the fighting over the course of the previous war. However, the crown of First Lord was still too good to pass up, and once again ComStar egged the Draconis Combine with planted information into open war yet again. You'd think their intelligence service would be able to notice that this was becoming a recurring theme, but nope, off to fight again.

The battles of the third succession war ultimately became much more individualized affairs, particularly between their Mechwarriors, who at this point were like landed knights due to knowing how to use these titans of metal and steel. Further, the slide into a neo-feudalist society for each Great House had ultimately ensured that a new kind of warfare, known as "The Honours of War", which developed from the old Ares Conventions. War now was over production facilities and fought in large individual stages with plenty of time to drag people back from the battlefield and start over. While it still meant loss of life was prevalent, it ultimately kept battles into the mere thousands instead of millions dead over time.

The war ended in another call for peace, but this time in a much more drastic way than had been done previously. Lyran Archon Katrina Steiner proposed to the entire Inner Sphere peace accords to be signed and sealed in 3020, with only Hanse Davion of the Federated Suns willing to come to the table. Everyone else thought it was just talk like all the other times it'd happened beforehand, but were horrified to learn that not only had both sides come to the table in earnest, but had actively found themselves seeing more eye to eye than previously thought, drafting the Federated Commonwealth Alliance Document, which went into effect in 3022. Every other power was horrified by this, as it meant that two of the largest powers in the Inner Sphere were now well on their way to being one enormous superpower in the way that none of the others could possibly handle, and the other three powers hastily signed a mutual defense pact with each other, quickly ending the war in a stalemate as the rest of the Inner Sphere now watched hesitantly and waited against the FedComm's aims.

Fourth Succession War

The Fourth Succession War was one of the largest and most desperate conflicts of the entire saga; as both Commonwealth and Federated Sun borders did not actively touch, and they knew that in order to fully consummate this relationship, they would have to bridge the gap between the two states, which bordered the other three empires. Done on the wedding day of Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner, both sides had found critical weaknesses in their foes and had begun piledriving their way into connecting both states on the galactic map. As the reception began to wrap up, Hanse Davion said one of the most quoted lines in the Inner sphere: "to you my bride, I give you...the Capellan Confederation."

Naturally, all not-FedComm sides began to panic big time, and each had their own front to deal with; the Capellans were ruled by yet another nutcase of a Liao, and Hanse Davion anticipated a major structural weakness in their defense strategy in that it was ready for third succession war style conflict, and not massive invasions, something he used to great effect to ultimately cripple Capellan industry for decades. The Combine was getting hit on both sides, both by Lyran Assault Mechs and also by their hated rivals, Wolf's Dragoons, who only needed a modest excuse of cash to go fight Kurita forces. With specific regards to the Wolf’s Dragoons, their commander held a grudge for the DCMS attempting to forcibly conscript and integrate the Dragoons into their military. To add more salt to the wound, he was forced to kill his Kuritan friend who was their liaison and commander of a Combine unit they were training. The grudge was bad enough that Commander Wolf publicly berated Coordinator Takeshi Kurita for squandering such honorable soldiers and enraged him in the war to the point the coordinator enacted his infamous “Death to all Merc’s” edict to slaughter all hired guns in sight. The Dragoons served as a provocative lighting rod on the Davion-Kuritan border and were bloodied but enabled FedCom units to avoid the worst of the meat-grinder there. The Free Worlds League was simply in the way, and currently dealing with the after effects of facing ComStar, and found themselves having to deal with a massive rebellion in the form of the Tikhonov Free Republic. Finally, there was ComStar.

ComStar was happy that little banana republics were popping up all over the Inner Sphere at the time, but were not happy that now there was a serious chance that there could be a Star League replacement all through the Inner Sphere's idea of politics, and quickly set about attempting to face the Davions and Steiners in the use of Communications inderdiction, but quickly found themselves in a much more dangerous game than they'd previously faced; Hanse Davion wasn't some prissy noble. He was smart, and more over he was more than aware that ComStar was behind what was quickly becoming a somewhat poorly organized military. His solution to the major "blackouts" that were happening across the HPG network were something he called "Black Boxes", which were like fax machines but could do HPG level communications, just extremely slowly. Finally, they found that the best idea to try and halt the FedSun advance was to try and dress up as the Capellan Death Commandos and try to raid the New Avalon Institute of Science, which ended quite harshly at the hands of Hanse himself, taking the field in his personal BattleMaster. Further, use of his spy network in MIIO had revealed that the Death Commandos were nowhere near his own space at the time, revealing ComStar's deception. While they were able to negotiate the HPG network back online, ComStar was now very wary of the FedComm, and ultimately found itself in a years long shadow war against them.

The War ended in a resounding Federated Commonwealth (as the now super-state called itself) victory. The Combine had lost world after world, the Capellans had their military might spanked into uselessness, the Combine had been severely weakened by their own warfare being used against them, and several of the little republics popping up over the Inner Sphere either absorbed themselves into the FedComm, or allied themselves with them. Hanse had gotten pretty much everything he'd ever wanted.

Gray Death Legion saves the entire Inner Sphere

All while this was going on, the technological levels of the Inner Sphere were still dropping preciptiously, and probably would've done so into perpetuity if the Free Worlds League hadn't offered a contract to a specific Mercenary company: The Gray Death Legion.

The GDL had been started by some Owen Wilson-looking ass merc named Grayson Death Carlyle; a military genius who had built his company through revolutionary use of Light Mech tactics and strong strategy. They were given a tough mission by the FWL to just consistently harass House Liao, and they did so admirably, culminating in the spirited capture of the planet Sirius V. This capture got them rewarded with the planet Helm, an otherwise unnotable temperate planet that'd been kinda going downhill since the Star League's collapse. What they didn't know was that Helm was a one in a million planet; a place where the Star League had stored a priceless information cache; a memory core, deep within the planet. Thousands of things that'd become LosTech sat in a single vault somewhere in the extensive cave systems underneath the planet. A precentor of ComStar had found this out, and began blaming the Death Legion for atrocities of the highest order, convincing the Free Worlds League to attack Helm at full-bore. While defending their holdings, they and a Combine noble by the name of Hassid Nicol came to the conclusion of the Memory Core's existence, and struck an easy alliance to quickly find the Core. It was a fierce fight, but ultimately Nicol and the Grey Death Legion were able to get a copy of the Memory Core and some of the goodies left therein before House Marik and ComStar blew the place sky high, killing the mad Precentor in the process. After they were cleared of all charges laid against them, the Legion spread the information in the core like wildfire, knowing now that ComStar would do anything to keep it from being spread further.

In essence, Gray Death Legion saved the Inner Sphere from not only ComStar, but itself.

Consequences

As a consequence of the Succession Wars, all of the Great Houses expended the bulk of the Inner Sphere's riches and advanced technology while making life go back centuries in terms of living quality for civilians. While the discovery of the Helm Memory Core by the Grey Death Legion would partially bring back the Inner Sphere's technological development and the newly formed Federated Commonwealth seemed the most likely hegemon to come, all that came crashing down once the Clan Invasion began with the descendants of Kerensky's followers would return after 300 years of isolation due to probing expeditions from the Inner Sphere.