I was actually going to say we have thr old civs in ruins and have the species of those civs trapped on there homeworlds with no tech and unaware of what happened. They have to find remnants and piece together what happened so they could stop it from happening to them. It take them a while to figure out they were involved however and that they were even a civ before. The sequel would be 1000s of years after this one. Also Faust will place the Federation species on seperate worlds but close together so we can have a AIF from the start.