Volume III: The First Great War and Neutrality

On this day, the 28th of April 2006, the Independent Republic of Orange Nations was first revealed to the world. It is the anniversary of this day that we celebrate as our birthday. Thank you to the world and other citizens of cyber nations who make this game fun, thank you to all those who have been part of and contributed to IRON and thank you to ADMIN for making this game where we have thrived.

Happy birthday IRON.

Also: For those of you in silly timezones, it is the 28th for me!

A lot has happened since we first came into being, much of which is obscured in the mists of time. I've written up this brief history (with cliff notes for the people who say tl;dr at everything over two paragraphs) to clear some of the mist and reveal who and what we are.

Since the fateful thread on the Outside Discussions forums of Heavengames so long ago, and with the following post, IRON was born.
http://www.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/...&st=650#post651
NOTE: You need to be registered to be able to view the OD forums.

http://www.alfatech.be/phpBB2_test/index.php

Register and I will allow you entry (Please register with your Cyber Nations ruler name)
It is by no means finished, but it might as well be used now
Please go to the Intro's section and I can enter your nation under your name
The charter has yet to be placed there (still waiting for Awakened to arrive)
*Remember...You have to be in the Red team*

In case you are unaware (which is likely), Celt in Exile is Glyndwr.

Yes, that's right. We were originally a red alliance. We also considered moving to green and purple I believe before settling on our beloved orange. At the time we finally decided, the citrus war was either coming to a close or had shortly ended. I can't remember exactly and Sister Midnight's forum pruning incident has wreaked havoc with our early records.
( SM (
We decided on orange to take advantage of the weakened and somewhat open orange team, with the intent, like many young alliances to conquer all and become the strongest. While currently we are the strongest on orange team, thankfully it was not because we went around killing our orange brethren (and sisters!).

Colour was not the only hard choice we had to make. We went through several names: The first, The OD Alliance; Second, The KoRT alliance; Third, and for a while nearly our final name (thank god we changed it in the end though) was ACHTUNG which had some silly backronym for it; and finally we chose IRON, the Independent Republic of Orange Nations. I believe Loegaire is credited with coming up with that name.

With our name and sphere chosen, we had but one more task to complete, we had to create a charter. Generally before that we had no established leadership and we practised something between anarchy and direct democracy. So it came about that a few of us ( The cast of the original council), volunteered for the arduous task of treaty writing whilst Glyndwr invited a Kith Kanan and Sister Midnight to assist us; as they had proven capable and talented leaders of a clan in Lords of Legends. Sister midnight was the clan's leader and had just lead them to victory and I have no idea what Kith was but the important part was he came too. For the first few days we discussed something, then we kind of got lazy for a while until Kith-Kanan decided to make one based of the NATO charter. I'm personally not familiar with the NATO charter but I believe we ended up with a modified version of it. This charter has served us pretty well and has seen very few (like 2 maybe?) amendments and a single revision which simplified the charter and brought the security act and amendments into the charter.

IRON as we know it had formed.
Essentially those of us who had formed the charter, and one or two others Glyndwr invited formed the first incarnation of the IRON Council. Technically it was an interim council and I think we were going to hold elections or something but that never happened for some reason or another and the members seemed pleased enough with us anyway. The original council consisted of Shan Revan, Glyndwr, Loegaire, Ender, Zambaman, Lonsberry, Good Ol MC, Kith Kanan and our president Sister Midnight.

Finally with our charter, colour and name sorted, we announced our existence to the world and the initiation of acceptance of new members from CN on the 28th of April 2006. To this date the same thread remains as high as ever in the player created alliance forum and is our recruitment thread.
http://z15.invisionfree.com/Cyber_Nations/...?showtopic=4555
I cannot remember our stats at the time, but I believe we entered with about 60 members and a nation strength in the tens of thousands which, while certainly not the largest was a decent sized alliance (these numbers are based partly off memory and partly off speculation!, neither is really reliable in this case).

In the following period, we immediately hit it off with several alliances. We officially opened relations with ODN first and have had remarkable level of mutual respect and positive relations ever since. I believe the second alliance we opened relations with was NPO, who sent Bakunin's Dream as their ambassador to us. While not as friendly initially, we have definitely seen a continued growth of friendship and respect with NPO since. The other notable relation we had at this time was with OPA.
OPA was a similarly sized and like-minded alliance, we hit it off quite well. So well in fact, we signed an MDP with them. Yes that's right, IRON had an MDP. It's astounding I know. Unfortunately it didn't last long as a month or two later we adopted our "no MDP" policy. I think this was partly done because people kept bothering us for MDPs and we didn't want one and also because we had very high standards. We later saw the wisdom in this policy.
EDIT: the OPA MoFA say the MDP lasted like a weekend or something before we adopted the no mdp policy which they also adopted. Cheers to our old friends in OPA!

IRON found itself a rapidly rising force and started to become a contender. To make our presence felt, we made a large nuclear push and we gained tens of nukes within a week (I can't remember the amount but it was pretty impressive at the time). That doesn't sound impressive now, but consider the size of the nations.. getting them, the minimum requirements back then were 100 infra and some tech. I myself had 9 nukes which was tied for second most nukes in the world, with Chris Kaos being first at 13 nukes. This always annoyed me and I had a dream of being the first person to max out on nukes. Didn't happen unfortunately but that's another matter. In the long run, our love of nukes may have stunted our nation growth a bit but we still love them. At some point in time we had the most nukes in the world (like 80 or something) and we entered into a bit of a friendly arms race with NPO for the first to 100. I believe they won in the end but it was all fun anyway, besides even back then their bank was very effective and we simply didn't have the money to throw around that they did.

Then the first great war happened. We had only just signed a NAP with NPO days before the beginning of the war. At the outset of the war we notified them of the potential for the cancellation of the NAP but it never occurred. We decided against entering the war. For a large portion of the great war I lacked internet access so I wont be covering this.

This is when IRON entered what I term the "neutral age". We had seen the benefits of staying out of conflict (largely our NS rising while everyone else falls) and Doitzel and I had made many friends in GPA (most of which are now in Old Guard by the way. You guys know who you are!) and we really pushed the whole neutrality thing. A position I doubt either of us would support any more.

There even came a time when we proposed the creation of a neutral block, which was originally my idea and had come to me in a dream. This was designed, largely to fill the role of what GUARD does now. To make a neutral, unaligned block capable of defending itself, separate from the two main sides. I believe we considered offering it to GPA, TOP (who at the time loved us to the point that when I registered on their forums I had to explain why we wouldn't give them a MDP before they would mask me) and VE (both TOP and VE were fairly new and at this time unaligned, neutralish alliances that we saw great potential in). This proposal caused great division in the alliance, many supported it and many did not and there was a long and sometimes heated discussion on it. Much stress was had by all the council and finally it was decided against. I believe when we put it before our members, it got leaked to GPA where I am told it caused a similarly heated debate and was also fairly split. No idea if that's true though but I have no reason to doubt the source.

After a while Doitzel, left IRON for NPO where he was better suited. It was at this time we pulled the VOGINA prank with ODN, GPA and OSF (now ASC). Half the forum loved it, half the forum hated it. We enjoyed ourselves though and it really cemented the relationships we had with the other pranksters. Doitzel also played a part in it, pretending for this to be part of the reason he left. The joke being as he is gay he didn't want to be in VOGINA. If I recall, Mary the Fantabulous got upset at the thread and GPA and closed it (rather prematurely if I might say but whatever).

Eventually We moved away from the neutral path and back onto independence. This resulted in IRON members shouting themselves silly at anyone putting neutral and IRON in the same sentence and informing them of our independent status.

In this time we also crushed the first incarnation of stormfront on CN for leaching aid of us (all the cool alliances crush a stormfront incarnation). In addition we had a few other minor wars which could be described more as us slapping some mosquitoes.

GW2 rolled around eventually and things got exciting. After a short debate we had decided to stay out of it. However there was one incident which nearly saw us teaming up with Legion and ODN against a certain alliance (not NPO for you conspiracy theorists out there). Fortunately it was settled. This period saw produced a greater level of respect and understanding between the three alliances. To the point even of potentially forming a block on our own. We decided against it in the end, sticking to our policies that had worked for us so well so far but we did gain some friends in it. There was another event in which several councillors were contacted and started enticing us to join, however they were caught out in a lie and we decided against helping them. This pretty much cemented our neutrality in the war.

After the war it was rather quiet for a while. Things continued as normal, rather mundanely. Ender, one of the original charter writers and council members was ejected from the council and IRON for providing sensitive information to other alliances so they could better persuade us to their side. Loegaire and Grand Emperor Brian followed him out and together the three of them founded "The Empire". For a while they started recruiting members from us but we put a stop to that, although there was continued attempts at things which were close to doing it. In addition they continued to badmouth us on the forums we originally came from. For a long time we were very tolerant of their antics, partly because we had been friends for so long I suspect. However when Bay and Bill n Ted (both current councillors) caught them out gaining access to our forums, we couldn't tolerate them any longer. Further investigation revealed that Ender, while not conclusively proven, was very likely to have been the person who hacked the NPO forums. With the evidence being as damning as can be within the limitations of our research we initiated a joint attack on them with the NPO. This saw the empire destroyed and disbanded.

Nothing really happened after that until great war 3. With this being a rather recent and controversial event I wont go into it too much but I'll just touch on our experiences throughout the period. I'll just say, despite initiative forces winning, I am yet to see the world come to its end, nor have we been bossed around.

Finally we come to the post GW3 world.

This period has seen many great periods of triumph and growth for IRON. We've restructured our military to be more compatible with our size, introduced many new aid programs, and brought about s new and improved system for helping new members. However it has also seen a few dark times. With a seemingly constant turn over of new councillors, spies we started to get irritated. This was compacted by the fact that we started to let the fact that we are so big get to us. This resulted in two diplomatic moves I'm not really proud of. The first was taking a senate seat from TOP.
"Hey, we've got the power, why not take it?" some of us thought and we did. It was pretty easy considering the difference in members but it was also a very "unorange" thing to do. For the entirety of orange history, we've all had a lot of mutual respect and easily shared the position. There's no bickering in orange, we're all friends, or so it had been. The second move that I now regret and was also rather "unorange" was the maccers incident. By this stage, we'd become rather fed up with people leaving and taking information and just saw red when we found him doing it. This was not at all helped by the previously stated reasons. This was to be the first, and the last time we have broken a treaty.

The result of this action was a hurt ODN and a pissed off TOP. When we saw ODN's "surrender" to us, and after the few seconds it took to understand what it meant. I had almost instantly become ashamed. I, and the rest of us had saw what was happening and we decided to fix it. To make up to TOP, Heft and I (Shan Revan) came up with the idea of a treaty declaring we would never again take the senate from them. Heft wrote it up and did a lot of the work and I came in and finished it off while he was busy. For ODN, dialogue was quickly opened and we came to some understandings. We have both made public apologies on each other's forums for the maccers incident and are continuing to make progress. Our inter-orange relationships may not be at an all time high at the moment but they are certainly on the mend.

IRON is currently occupying third spot in the rankings, in an ongoing competition with FAN for the spot. With 6.5 million total nation strength and over 8K average NS, the second highest only second to FAN, we've certainly come a long way since our humble beginnings. May the next year be even more prosperous and fun for IRON as our previous year.

Cliff notes:
-IRON First came from a site called heavengames, in particular the "Outside discussions" forum.
-IRON was initially red, considered going green and purple but ended up on orange to take advantage of the citrus war.
-IRON went through many names, in this order before settling on IRON: OD alliance, KoRT Alliance (KoRT was the previous name of the forum we came from before it was changed to Outside Discussions. It stood for Knights of the Round Table), ACHTUNG and finally IRON.
-Kith Kanan ripped off the NATO charter and made it our own.
-We had good relations with orange team alliances, even had a MDP with one
-we adopted the "No mdp" policy and cancelled the MDP.
-nuclear arms race happened (Possibly after GW1, not sure quite when it was) to first to 100 nukes with NPO. They won.
-GW1 happened, we stayed out of it.
-Considered making a neutral block similar to GUARD with ourselves, GPA, TOP and VE. Much controversy in our alliance occurred as a result and possibly GPA too.
-made VOGINA prank thread with our friends, GPA, ODN and OSF (now ASC). Half the world loved it, half the world hated it.
-We killed stormfront first (all the cool alliances kill a stormfront incarnation).
-GW2 happens, we nearly get involved once a couple of times but didn't.
-Boring for a while then in a joint operation with NPO we killed The Empire, a spin off alliance for having hacking scum as their main leaders.
-GW3 happens, stay out of it.
-post GW3 has seen many ups and downs for IRON but hopefully we've put a stop to the downs now.

Thank you to anyone who took the effort to read the whole thing. I wrote it mostly last night and hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

NOTE: Posted on the eve, prior to IRON's first birthday.

http://z15.invisionfree.com/Cyber_Nations/index.php?showtopic=66021