Then The March Led To Assault

Part One of Three.

Hvamsfjordhur signature image, February 2006

Let it never be said I'm not in it for the long haul. January marked nine years on NationStates and six on CyberNations (never the twain shall be mentioned on respective sites). In these online games two or three years are the equivalent of real world centuries; so not only am I old, I'm very old, and old people like to tell stories. When I republished my NS memoirs back in 2010 I stated that I didn't believe I had much to say when it came to my time on CyberNations as a member of the New Pacific Order. However, when the NPO marked it's sixth anniversary in January, I and twenty-five other senior members were asked by the media corps to comment on the evolution of the alliance in those years. As the oldest remaining member and fifth oldest nation in the world, I realised the more I responded with claims to have nothing interesting to say the more I started alluding to actual opinions and insights into those six years.

No history of CyberNations is complete without discussing NationStates. As NS waned in 2005 a hot new web browser game arrived. This game was not CN, but in fact Particracy in November of that year. On the 25th of January 2006 that was disappointingly relegated to a footnote by the discovery of a new nation simulator. My NS region, The Proletariat Coalition, had in the previous year absorbed the United Socialist Kingdom whose delegate was The Mighty Pump. It was he who posted a link on our offsite forum for the new game and on the 27th a link to a thread for NS members to come together to form the New Pacific Order. At the time TPC had recently left the Alliance Defence Network in May of 2005, an alliance which was engaged in a long-running dispute concerning the legitimacy of the NPO's government of The Pacific region. Here we see the interrelation of the games, as many of the historical powers of CN were comprised of NS migrants either creating new groups (eg, Legion and the NAAC) or wholesale porting existing ones across as both the NPO and ADN - though the latter took the altered name of Orange Defence Network on claiming the orange trading sphere. The carry over of the conflict, whether real or perceived, delayed my membership in Pacifica until the following week on February 1st. The registration process back then consisted of signing up on the forum and changing alliance affiliation. Had I promptly followed Pump's link for the new alliance I'd be listed alongside him, Koona (who was also in TPC at the time) and the other major figures as founders of the alliance. That's hindsight for you.

The great concept that brought about CN was the use of Google Maps to 'physically' locate your nation in the world and have your territory represented by a simple bubble. Where spheres of influence clashed on the map would provide casus belli and the team trading colours would form the basis of allegiance. I had recently finished reading a Christmas present, Red Storm Rising, and named and placed my nation in the location of a scene from the book - Hvammsfjordhur, Iceland (which I regrettably misspelled and for quite some time also mispronounced: IPA /kʰvaːmsˈfjœrðʏːr̥/). In hindsight, again, I should have taken Star City as my name; at least for continuity's sake as many others did. The game design was quickly overwritten by the arrival of the first invading groups. The maps quickly become irrelevant politically (borders as marked on the increasingly crowded map were invalidated as justification for war), and the team colours were reinterpreted as alliance territory - especially in the case of the NPO which claimed exclusive control over the red sphere for half the current lifetime of the game. Far more attractive was the delivery of a game that could simulate trade and war. The arrival of CyberNations was not long after the NPO had publicly criticised Max Barry for the stagnation of NationStates and presented a list of implementable features that players believed could reinvigorate the game. Those desired changes would later surface in the short-lived NationStates 2, which is another story entirely, and whilst NS has undergone major improvements in the past year; they were to be found in CN at the time. Arguably the NPO embraced the opportunity more than anyone.

First Polar War ribbon

Second Polar War ribbon

Citrus War ribbon

Although CN had been running for most of January, the history of the game seemingly doesn't begin until the migrations - the GATO-INC War is so dimly recalled it's effectively pre-history. The early days of February were dominated by the continuation of NS politics and the new powers encroaching on each other. Forum threads were swarmed by exultations of Francos Spain (the founder of the Order on NS), which made it difficult to maintain the pretence on either side that this was a clean slate. Despite appeals to peace CyberNations was in reality more a war game than a nation sim, and it was only days before tensions led to the first major war. It sounds rather centric to say it was the NPO that first perfected war in the game, but when you look back at the complete defeat of the NAAC in four days you have to acknowledge that Pacifica had monopoly on strategy, organisation and mobilisation; and that the mass strike on the stroke of server update is now the foundation of war for any alliance. The NPO's military domination continued with the eventual defeat of the ODN in the long Citrus War (in which I met my good friend Anthony aka Diminix) and the return of conflict with the NAAC in the Second Polar War - the latter leading to the establishment of what was considered a Pacifican colony on the blue trading sphere - the New Polar Order. On either side of the latter war were two minor conflicts, first with International Coalition of Socialist Nations, and secondly with WarpStorm; which are almost forgotten (and I don't remember them at all) but are interesting because they saw the major powers fighting alongside - NPO and LUE against ICSN; NPO, Legion, and GATO against WS - which would stand in stark contrast to coming events.

As Pacfica reached its greatest military freedom the overlap of games ends and marks the point where CN is considered to have surpassed NS. In something mimicking the "metropolitan reversal" of the Portuguese Empire, the middle of 2006 saw the flow of members reverse. Until then the movement of players had been from NS to CN. Here the reversal began and the NPO started to bolster its NS concern (which was by now known as the People's Republic of the Pacific) with players from the new game.

On the eve of the Great War, Pacifica looked completely secure - enemies under terms or otherwise neutralised, several alliances on friendly terms or treatied, and backed up by the Northern Cyprus of the game - Polaris. How could such stability amongst the powers be shattered?

Published record-breakingly thirteen days late.
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