Somber War

Somber War
Western Alliance fighters breach the inner rings of the Lexington Vault
Date October 9th 2017 - April 8th 2018 (181 days, or 6 months) Location Serverwide Result Decisive Western Alliance victory (see § Aftermath)
Belligerents
Western Alliance Falstadt The Commonwealth Mir Yoahtl Southshire Impasse Gensokyo Okashima Vinland	Lexington Anguish
Commanders and leaders
Western Alliance Lysika_Lantariel Coni_s2 Walkers BlueSylvaer Frensin Maxopoly Thoths	sintralin John3112
Casualties and losses
Many captured, later freed	Many captured

The Somber War was a military conflict on CivClassic which involved most nations at the time. It that lasted from 9 October 2017 to 8 April 2018.

The war drew in all the server's economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Western Alliance versus Nox. Although the initial alliance only consisted of Hjaltland, Mir, and the Commonwealth, the alliance was re-organised late in the war and expanded as more nations entered the war, such as Yoahtl, Southshire (then as part of Yoahtl), Gensokyo, Okashima, Vinland.

The trigger for the war was the declaration of war by Lexington on Hjaltland and the Commonwealth and the subsequent obsidian bombing of Westminster, the capital city of the Commonwealth. This set off a diplomatic crisis for a vast variety of nations on CivClassic 2.0, such as Tvtopia, who publicly stated their support in favor of the Commonwealth while others declared and/or kept their neutrality, such as Yoahtl (at first) . These declarations of war were soon matched by a formal declaration of war on Lexington by the Commonwealth.

Quickly following the obsidian bombing of Westminster, Lexington City was captured and Lexington (which may also be referred to as Nox in this article) fighters retreated into their bunkers, the war turned into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until the end of the war.

Followed by a couple attempts at breaching the Lexington vault, during early April 2018 a new plan was formulated by the Western Alliance with the new powers that joined. After a two day siege the vault was broken, culminating in the end of the war. The end of the long, stalling war brought peace to former warring nations, the disbanding of the Western Alliance in favor of SATO and the end of Nox.

Prelude To War

The conflict between Hjaltland and Lexington is much older than CivClassic and has to be viewed in the context of events from Civcraft. Hjaltland counted among its citizenry many 2.0 WP players, such as Diet_Cola, Gerg and TangentialThreat, while Lexington on the other side housed many members of the former Nox from 2.0, like VitaCoco, FrenchFrys, MCIsFtw/Reanial and most notably sintralin. Neither group had been heavily invested in Devoted, the immediate civilization server before CivClassic, so the start of the CivClassic picked up where Civcraft had ended. Relations were cold from the get go and both sides were aware that escalation was likely. Multiple events reinforced that belief and eventually led to Lexington's declaration of war.

Animal farm conflict

TODO

Commonwealth raids

For now, see Commonwealth#Prelude_to_the_Somber_War

End claims

TODO

TangentialThreat's shenanigans

During early August 2017, Savion (located in the -,+) had been repeatedly altraided. Shapha2002 realized that he could not hold up against these raids and decided to completely abandon Savion. He contacted Hjaltland to join them and Hjaltland sent multiple accounts to Savion to assist the evacuation and secure the area during it. After this was completed on August 17th, Frensin decided to scout the eastern world border cardinal spot on the way back, because world border cardinals are a prime location for vaults. Even though Hjaltland knew that both Anguish and Mir were somewhere in the east, the exact whereabouts were unknown. Frensin ended up stumbling into Anguish, who asked him to leave to which he obliged.

Unsatisfied with the information gained, Frensin sent TangentialThreat to further scout Anguish on an unknown alt. Anguish stemmed from a server called Devoted 3.0 (a predecessor to CivClassic), specifically the country Ruin, and Hjaltland had little insight into their inner workings, so Hjaltland wanted to determine Anguish's strength and industrial capabilities and vault progress. Part of the motivation was also that Hjaltland saw Anguish as a main suspect behind the raiding in Savion. TangentialThreat was given order to either skybridge or mine under ground to avoid detection and to collect information based on screenshots and mapping data.

Tangent joined voice chat the next day, sheepishly admitting that he had messed up. Instead of scouting and running off, he had attempted to infiltrate Anguish by posing as a newfriend on the account 'CaitlinFoo'. Anguish saw through his impersonation and Tangent was asked to log onto Devoted with his CaitlinFoo account to prove that he was not an alt. Devoted's single account policy prevented Tangent from doing so and instead of safely logging out and giving up on the account, Tangent ended up being pearled by Anguish. Tangent confessed rather quickly when being questioned by Anguish, name dropping Hjaltland and Frensin. Negotiations in voice chat were setup between Hjaltland and Anguish on that same evening, but they went rather poorly, partially due to intoxication on the end of Hjaltland's negotiators. Meanwhile Tangent had started griefing Lexington's end claims as a bit of a tantrum. His actions didn't help his case, so shortly after, his pearl got sent to Lexington. Going into negotations, this had been seen as the worst case scenario by Hjaltand, because given Tangents history with Nox and Titan, Hjaltland assumed that Tangent would be permanently pearled. Due to Tangent not listening to orders, getting himself pearled in an incredibly stupid way, messing up relations with Anguish and leaking secrets in an attempt to buy freedom, Tangent was removed from Hjaltland groups and channels as he was being transferred to Lexington.

A few weeks later, Tangent made contact with Hjaltland's leadership again, notifying them that he had infiltrated Lexington. He had talked down his sentence to two weeks and was allowed to live in Lexington afterwards, developing and running macromod scripts for them. Towards Lexington he made it seem as if he hated Hjaltland and they believed him that. Tangent also relayed that he had come up with a plan to steal all of Lexington's groups through malware hidden in a macro script that he'd give Sintralin, the leader of Lexington. Hjaltland had no intention to go to war with Lexington at the time, but given the tensions and the former history of Sintralin, it became very clear that Lexington was not a friend. Tactically striking them was seen as a good thing, especially given that the action was zero risk for Hjaltland. Due to this, Hjaltland decided to not spill the beans and save sintralin, but let Tangent complete his infiltration.

After multiple weeks of setup, sintralin ran the tree farm macro script that TangentialThreat had given to her on September 22nd. Hidden in the over 500 line long macro was a section that merged all of sintralins groups into one of Tangents groups, once the treebot was far enough into the farm. Sintralin had realized what was going on and cancelled the script before all groups could be merged, but she lost multiple groups before doing so. A lot of Lexington was now under the group 'GoodWizards', which was owned by Tangent. This action sparked a lot of controversy and many players demanded admin interference to both revert the damage and ban TangentialThreat for spreading malware.

Server owner TealNerd refused to revert it, stating that the groups were taken through legitimate means and that Sintralin was at fault. Admin Ribagi decided to overrule TealNerd though and gave the groups back to sintralin. This spiked even more controversy as the rule set still stated that such actions were legal and the admins explicitly said that similar future actions would be legal. Even though the groups were taken from him, Tangent was not banned.

Tangent eventually returned to Hjaltland. His attack on Lexington was seen as a good thing with the safety of Hjaltland and the server in the back of his head, so he was allowed to become a citizen again. To avoid both negative PR and possible repercussions from Lexington, Tangent used both ingame and on discord the account "SergeantMajor", who was framed as a random newfriend by Hjaltland.

Events

Commonwealth Campaign

A birds view of the city of Westminster after the attack by Lexington

For now, see Commonwealth#Prelude_to_the_Somber_War

Fall of Lexington

Main article: Fall of Lexington