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.

Declaration of War

On October 9th, 2017, Lexington declared war on Hjaltland and Commonwealth. Citing the bunker that CW tore down (due to multiple instances of Lexington-affiliated raiders' using it as a safe spot) as well as TangentialThreat's cyberattack on her bots, they began the war by dumping a significant amount of reinforced obsidian onto Westminster. This "tactical griefing" has been called the single greatest instance of reinforced griefing in Civ-server history, perhaps beside Sintralin's DRO bomb of Aurora in Civcraft 2.0. Although the action was reversed due to Lexington leadership's dishonesty with the server administration, the attack set the tone for the war to come, one of few limitations inside and outside the game alike. Hjaltland launched an immediate assault that disabled Lexington's end portal fortification, a crucial installation.

BlueSylvaer, in his response, identified the Lexington threat and their vassals in Anguish as the natural resurgence of Nox, and indicated his intent to wage an unrelenting war against this stateless raider threat. Hjaltland's people do not consider the event a war because the war was just so damn easy, nor has their government recognized the vault-based-forces formerly known as Lexington and Anguish.

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

Most of the war's early fighting took place around the Commonwealth, with few victories for Nox. The Western Alliance moved a great deal of resources to The Iron Bank, Hexcorp's small vault northwest of Westminster, and used it as a forward operating base. While hostile parties often walked the streets, few citizens were careless enough to get pearled.

A few half-hearted attacks on the vault ended with multiple members of Nox pearled, and a final strike on their forward bunker pushed their forces out of the Commonwealth for just about the duration of the conflict.

Anguish Invasion

By chance, Mir and Anguish had settled in adjacent territory, and their relations had been cordial, but distrustful. With Anguish's declaration of war, Mir saw the attack as a chance to snuff out a dangerous force before it became a major threat. Hjaltland communicated extensively with Mir, as both nations were host to a great number of experienced players, and an attack was coordinated without hesitation.

In the early hours of October 11th, 2017, players from Hjaltland and Mir, alongside some allies from the Commonwealth, breached Anguish's 8-ring world border vault located at 12880,-1750. Due to the lack of a snitch grid that stretched all the way to skylimit, a simple bridge-based attack managed to penetrate to the heart of the facility, and was only discovered when Alliance forces descended onto the central bunker. After disabling the vault, multiple border skirmishes ended with the pearling of two Anguish fighters.

With their stronghold in shambles and Mirian forces running rampant through their cities, Anguish transported most of its resources to Nox at North World Border. While the decrepit vault would become functional months later due to negligence by the Western Alliance, this attack effectively eliminated the only location outside of Lexington's territory from which Nox could safely operate.

Lexington City Assault

On October 17th, an Alliance force built an attack tunnel at bedrock into the heart of Lexington, precipitating the largest pitched battle of the war to date. Most of the bunkers there were disabled and numerous bastions broken, but only one Nox fighter was pearled that day. Meanwhile, two Alliance fighters were pearled after both were accidentally shot by roboninja77 with a Punch II bow into an enemy trap. Gregy never forgot this affront, and would sit out the rest of the war. While much damage had been done, the attackers were forced to withdraw.

With skirmishes overnight, a final push was made on October 19th. As the bedrock and surface of Lexington were a mess of both side's blocks, no defenders contested. By the end of the day, the city had been looted, its bunkers disabled, and all nearby territory thoroughly snitched. The city would never recover.

"We lost Gregy and it caused us to withdraw and it was because Roboninja77 was being a dumbass and bowed him into a trap" -Tankbuster44 on March 7, 2025 reflecting on Somber War

First Lexington Vault Attack

On October 21st, a short push was made against the eastern side of the Lexington Vault. With the majority of the effort put in at bedrock, little progress was made, but some clever trapping resulted in the pearling of Vicccyy on UHCUnleashed. When stiffer resistance began to surface, the attack tunnel was filled up and Alliance forces pulled out.

Mir Defence

These victories emboldened Nox. On November 25th, a newly-repaired Anguish vault was used to stage repeated attacks on Mir's northern vault trench. These attacks continued for days, but a combined force held it from being breached even a single time. Throughout the campaign, incremental defenses were innovated to further strengthen the trench. An Anguish pearl was taken on December 2nd and consequently alt-banned an account-associated player. On December 3rd, a skybridge from the south breached deep into the vault and initiated a day of combat. No pearls were taken, but the offensive initiative changed the tide of the battle.

This evened out on the 5th, when numerous PvPers from the Big Dogs joined Anguish. JohnFairfax was pearled on the first day, but their attacks continued for a few days. On December 9th, a final skybridge completely rebroke the Anguish vault. This bridge was the first use of ladder-placed bastion breaking, an innovation that would eventually yield the Lexington Skybridge.

Second Lexington Vault Attack

A second attempt to break the Lexington Vault was undertaken on December 30th. Starting early in the morning, a large Alliance force pushed a skybridge deep into the vault, penetrating the trench and 3 rings. Due to a rushed timeline and less supplies than were needed, the attack ended in spectacular failure. While 3 defenders were pearled, the attackers lost tankbuster44, Xavter, BlackXnt, TheJKH, and TangentialThreat. This was by far the greatest hit to morale taken in the war and nearly led to the dissolution of the Western Alliance.

Fall of Lexington

Main article: Fall of Lexington