Apres Les Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Le Deluge

Invasion of the Air-Eaters was one of a series of small, inexpensive wargames with science-fictional or fantasy themes, published by Metagaming in the 1970s and '80s.  The production quality was usually bargain-basement - a glossy but small rulebook, with rather crude illustrations; a thin sheet of non-die-cut playing counters, and a two-color map - but most of these "Microgames" packed big ideas into small packages.  Invasion was no exception: it postulated a near-future (1983) alien invasion of the Earth that backed the technologically-inferior human race against the wall.  In the game the aliens could destroy human cities and industrial centers with impunity, but their real goal was to convert the Earth's atmosphere into a form - "life-sustaining sulfur dioxide" - that they could breathe and humans could not.  The human defenders' 20th-century weapons were nearly worthless against the aliens' well-shielded bases, crawlers, and atmospheric converters; the basic human starting unit, the Army, comprised "3,000-6,000 tanks, several hundred combat aircraft, and 300,000 - 800,000 men," and could still only destroy an alien unit 1 out of 6 times.  The advanced game gave the humans the option to use nuclear weapons, but even a nuclear attack would only succeed half the time, and the fallout would destroy 7% of the world's industrial capability (per attack).

The humans' salvation lay in their ability to develop more more powerful units - lasers, "disintegrator tanks," combat spacecraft - through expensive research and development programs.  This was one of the first games, I believe, to feature R&D as a major part of strategy, and in this sense it was an important predecessor to Hitler's War (also by Metagaming) and Axis & Allies.  The humans win the game if they can essentially drive the aliens off the planet for two consecutive turns (six months); destroying the alien mother ship will usually also win the game for them, unless the invaders are about to finish converting the Earth's atmosphere.  The aliens win if they reduce Earth's "atmospheric index" to zero with their conversion machines; they can improve their chances of doing so if they also attack and destroy the Earth's "industrial units" (cities and factories), since the humans need IUs to produce new units and conduct R&D.

The game appealed to me as a kid because I liked the idea that the humans were up against a terrible foe but could win by improving their technology - an appealing idea to a fledgling D&D fan just discovering the concept of games where one could upgrade the playing pieces (so to speak).  As an adult, Invasion appeals to me as the prelude to a thought experiment: if the humans succeeded in driving off the aliens, what would the world and the lives of ordinary people be like in the aftermath?  I assumed as a youngster that an alien invasion would bring the world's peoples together, but I'm older and more cynical now, and I assume that nations that weren't primary targets of the invasion would reserve at least some of their military resources to exploit their adversaries' weaknesses in the aftermath.  If the invaders devastated Japan, central Europe, and parts of the U.S. before being driven off, for instance, the Soviet Union would have come out of the war stronger than ever, much like the aftermath of WWII.  The Soviets would have a new generation of leaders - the sclerotic old leadership of the early '80s would have died out as the atmosphere went bad - and access to a relatively unscathed industrial heartland, nuclear weapons, and alien-derived technology.  Probably it would have been able to crack down on its satellites after the war and "Finlandize" whatever nations were still left in Europe.

Meanwhile, the U.S. would have been weakened by the war, and its post-invasion government would probably have been rather McCarthyite, hunting for pro-Soviet dissidents or purloiners of alien technology rather than focusing on reconstruction.  The American armed forces would surely have alien-derived technology but would keep it under wraps; in this world, the government really would have secret warehouses containing the remains of aliens (or at least their machines).

The new technologies developed during the invasion, meanwhile - such as high-powered lasers, disintegrator weapons, and (most likely) compact high-energy power plants for military vehicles - would generally not be the sort to improve the lives of large numbers of people after the aliens' defeat.  As George Orwell observed of the atomic bomb, expensive new weapons would instead have the effect of strengthening large and militaristic countries at the expense of smaller ones.  Moreover, the diversion of scientists from other research paths during the war (R&D attempts in this game cost nearly 25% of the world's "industrial units," or about a trillion U.S. dollars) would stunt the development of other technologies we came to take for granted in our own world, like cell phones and the Worldwide Web.  In the post-invasion world, the Internet would remain crude and limited to military and government communication in the U.S.

The invasion would of course have thinned the world's population, possibly by hundreds of millions.  Given the aliens' limited numbers, many of the potential victims of their attack would have gotten away, but some would have subsequently died from lack of proper medical care, particularly once the atmospheric sulfur dioxide level rose and killed people with pre-invasion lung problems.  Moreover, the destruction of the developed world's resources would leave the survivors much poorer than before; many of the world's factories, ports, and rail hubs would be glass-lined craters, and many of its people would be refugees.  Even countries that escaped devastation would be worse-off in the 21st century than their real-world equivalents, because the export-led growth that lifted many of their people out of poverty in the 1990s and early 2000s would not have happened (due to depressed demand for imports in developed countries).  India, parts of Southeast Asia, and China would probably remain impoverished.

Finally, the invasion would have an intellectual impact, as humans realized they were no longer alone in the universe and that there were sophisticated and hostile intelligences lurking beyond the Solar System.  Perhaps the best analogue for how humans would deal with a deadly alien invasion would be the real-world reaction of indigenous peoples to European conquest in the 19th and 20th centuries.  In many cases indigenes responded to European invasion by developing chiliastic or millennial religious cults, such as the Ghost Dance in North America or Nongqawuse's cattle-killing movement in South Africa, which anticipated an imminent end-of-days with a better world afterward.  We might expect to see similar millennialism in a post-invasion world, akin to the Holyfolk movement in Jack Williamson's novel Lifeburst.

(Why "Flying Spaghetti Monsters"? Because the game's cover, reproduced above, featured an alien which strongly resembled an FSM, menacing fleeing refugees in early '80s leisure wear.  I suspect the model for the aliens in Invasion came from John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, whose alien Masters had similar physical features and similar goals.)