-1982 to 2017 AS-

The world’s largest and most ferocious war began with a claim to the vacant throne of Sagacia, a once-great empire that suddenly collapsed in 1982 AS following the suspected assassination of its King Narlus without a heir. The crown was taken at this time by a usurper king named Anenakt III, but he failed to hold real authority over Sagacia. As a result, for seventeen years afterwards, the former Sagacian lands turned into a no man’s land, until more stable nations started seeking to take advantage of the chaos. There were no breakaway states during this time, due to the enduring loyalty retained by a large portion of the populace to the Sagacian crown (nominally led by Anenakt III) and senate, even with most of their authority stripped. Finally, the first independent state to emerge from the dissolution of the empire was precipitated by the aforementioned claim.

In 1999 AS, a Talosian prince by the name of Earlen emerged as the key escalator of the dispute regarding Sagacian succession. This Earlen had descended from Benjast-El, a Sagacian prince and the son of the legendary King Narlus, and he laid claim to the Sagacian crown on this premise. As a result of this ancestry, the Talosian crown, led by the new king Jorun III, placed its full support behind Earlen’s claim, and Talosia sent over 12,000 soldiers to Sagacia’s eastern frontier. The eastern frontier cities of Auden and Nau Tenz had always possessed strong diplomatic and trade ties to Talosia, and their leaders agreed to support Earlen’s claim and even send their wartime armies to back up the planned Talosian attack on Solris (the once-great capital of former Sagacia, and the home of the enormously influential Stargazer sect).

Two great developments in the brewing conflict occurred upon the respective parties hearing this news. First, the leaders of the region of Susset (who did not agree with the Talosian claim) realized the urgency of asserting the region’s long-brewing desire for independence and officially broke away from the remains of Sagacia on the first day of the next year. They proceeded to send diplomatic delegations to all seven of the nations that would ultimately participate in the conflict, which ultimately convinced the leaders of each of the six nations they reached to at least recognize the new republic’s independence. Some went even further than that – the great empire of Hysyka even agreed to send 25,000 troops to defend the new nation, in turn for the Susseters helping to convince their northerly neighbor, Leaghrian, of the virtues of joining Hysyka. Second, the Yorūn or leader of Yavālang, longtime enemies of Talosia, was convinced to send an army of 18,000 to oppose the Talosian claim. In the process, they persuaded the southerly Sagacian city of Sa’urn, along the direct path to Solris, to willingly and peacefully join the Yavāssa. Already, the stage was set for bloody conflict over the fate of Solris and with it the remains of the Sagaican Empire.

By the time the Talosian army finally attacked troops in the Solris area, on the dawn of September 7, 2000 AS, Anenakt III and his supporters had been killed or exiled from the region’s premises. In their place, the stargazers of Solris accepted a huge monetary bribe from the Yavāssa army to support their efforts, giving half of the 11,000 soldiers in the region a safe garrison within the city’s walls. The other half remained in the countryside, holding the area, and these 5,500 Yavāssa were the ones attacked by the full Talosian army of over 16,000 men. The Yavāssa leaders realized they were at a huge disadvantage, and made a hasty retreat to the city itself. Along the way, attacks by the expertly-trained Talosian hussars proved less effective than anticipated, killing less than 1,600 Yavāssa soldiers only to lose over 900 of their number in the process. The remaining Yavāssa army regrouped with their comrades inside the walls of Solris. At this point, the Talosian generals realized that any attempted siege of Solris would be long and futile, and the Talosian army retreated to their encampment to regroup and plan future attacks.

Near-simultaneously, another heated Sagacian battle raged, as the 1,930 defenders of Nau Tenz faced a 3,000-strong Yavāssa army that had prepared for a siege. For the attackers, however, the devil turned out to be in the details, as the pre-built siege towers they lugged along to Nau Tenz were rendered useless by the region’s incredibly hilly terrain. This setback turned the battle into a bloody and destructive melee, after the Yavāssa finally breached the city’s walls. In the later phases of combat, as the once-great city began to be destroyed from the inside out, both the Yavāssa backup army of 4,000 soldiers and almost 5,000 additional men from the Nau Tenz region rallied to fight on their respective sides. Finally, the Yavāssa army prevailed and almost entirely eliminated their enemies, who fled to the harbor of Nau Tenz and proceeded to start slowly fortifying in place. The Yavāssa took over the rest of the city, and were content to attempt to repair its walls instead of trying to vanquish the harbor defenders.

Further combat raged in Talosian lands themselves, as the Yavāssa mounted an 8,000-strong invasion of the western borderlands of Talosia. The Yavāssa invasion force ultimately took and held Gateon, isolated as it was from the rest of Talosia, but was unable to conquer Tirivil. At the same time, 6,000 Yavāssa men tried to take the Talosian city of Havenshield by surprise in an amphibious invasion, but the city’s defenders ultimately held out. Over the next few years, the Talosian army relieved their comrades in Nau Tenz, then attempted but failed to take Solris. In these years, however, the war also spiraled far beyond a mere Talosia-Yavālang conflict, as friends and enemies of both the combatants declared war on each other. First, the recently reunited Ankalvan Federation set its sights on its neighbors; their council elected to declare war on both Talosia and their southern neighbors Ionia. At this point, Ionia’s ally Sornma declared war against Ankalvan in retaliation, and Ankalvan’s ally Hysyka declared war against Ionia. In particular, the battles between Ionia and Ankalvan would turn out to be the bloodiest the world had yet seen.

As the year of 2004 AS dawned, a massive Ankalvan army of 100,000 soldiers, and an even larger Ionian force of 110,000, both assembled at the two nations’ borders. Several bloody bouts of battle commenced from there, but even as the Ankalvani tried every trick in the book to trip up the Ionians, they suffered more severe losses than their foes every time. Finally, one last Ionian offensive managed to vanquish the remains of the once-great Ankalvani army, and the remaining Ionian troops pushed far into southwestern Ankalvan before being stopped by the combination of civilian resistance and Hysyka’s retaliatory offensive. These Ionia-Ankalvan battles resulted in a total of over 160,000 casualties among the fighting men (100,000 Ankalvani and 60,000 Ionian) and substantial civilian losses from the Ionian actions into southwestern Ankalvan. The next year, the Sornmar invasion in southeastern Ankalvan commenced, and the combination of muskets imported from Ionia and the nonexistent Ankalvani army allowed the invaders to conquer the majority of southeastern Ankalvan before their push stopped due to the threat of Yavālang attack.

Late in 2005 AS, the Ionians finally brought representatives from all the other participants in the main conflicts of the War of Sagacian Succession (plus the breakaway state of Susset) to the negotiating table at the Ionian Cavale trade center of Sinir Kasabasi. There, they agreed to mutual peace between all participatory nations. As to the specific fate of territories that had changed hands during the conflict, the diplomats first voted unanimously to recognize the independence of the new Republic of Susset, the one point about which all those assembled were in unison. Then, after a few days of heated debate punctuated by talk of embargoes and the like, most of the delegates agreed to cede Ionia and Sornma’s Ankalvani holdings to those respective nations. This decision, the Susset representative noted in his later report, was met with “a most ungracious hissing sound” by the Ankalvani diplomats. The main subject of argument, however, was the fate of the remainder of ex-Sagacia (save for the Brij and Nace regions, which the diplomats conveniently forgot all about).

Heated debate over this subject threatened to dissolve the whole gathering on multiple occasions before the delegates finally started reaching tentative agreements – agreements which mostly elected to preserve the new status quo. The decisions to cede the Sa’urn region to Yavālang and the Auden region to Talosia were especially uncontroversial. Additionally, the joint Hysyka-Susset delegation to Leaghrian had seen great success in convincing the inhabitants to join Hysyka for their own defense a few years back, convinced as they were of an incoming raid from Hesh. The raid did in fact happen and the Hysykan troops successfully defended Leaghrian. Beyond Hysyka and Susset, in fact, none particularly cared what happened to isolated Leaghrian and no one put up much of a fuss when the Talosian delegation insisted on the need to hold most of the Hesh region for self-defense purposes, either.

The most controversial regions were Gateon, Nau Tenz, and Solris, each seeing competing claims by both Talosia and Yavālang. Ultimately, the fate of these regions was decided by two overriding factors: the Yavāssa advantage in the battles that had transpired within, and the juxtaposition of Yavālang’s strong relationships with most other nations versus Talosia having no allies among the other nations at the conference. The delegates first reached a tentative agreement to grant the immediate Gateon region to the Yavāssa, though this was stridently opposed by the Talosian component. Next was Solris, for which most of the delegates eventually acceded to the Yavāssa proposal of granting the region to Yavālang as a vassal state. This decision led to further protests by the Talosian delegation. Finally, the other diplomats decided that Nau Tenz should be liberated as an independent city-state similar to Susset. For the Talosian delegation, this decision on top of the rest was truly insulting, both because they had held Nau Tenz for the last four years following its liberation from the Yavāssa and because most inhabitants of the region sympathized with the Talosian cause and had willingly agreed to unification with their nation. So angered were the Talosians by these decisions, in fact, that they simply walked out of the convention, leaving the remaining delegates to draft a final treaty confirming their decisions. This treaty subsequently gained the assent and signatures of every remaining delegate at the conference, ensuring that Sinir Kasabasi would find a place in history as a byword for peace and diplomatic agreements among nations.

Seven years later, the Trollish king Tefūmon LXXXI received an envoy from the city of Brij, alerting both him and his vassal Troll-Lords that the region was open for the taking. The king proceeded to send a raiding party of 5,000 to the city of Brij, under the command of his Lord Marshal and eldest son, Prince Tefūmok. Additionally, many lesser raiding parties made their own ways to the countryside of the region, with a total combined force of 8,000. All the Trollish forces made demands of fealty and tribute from the regions they landed at in exchange for not getting pillaged and massacred. The leaders of the city of Brij quickly realized that not heeding the Trolls’ demands would have the same effect as surrendering, except after the city’s key buildings were destroyed and its streets potentially crimsoned in blood. On the other hand, the rural Brij dirt farmers would not willingly cede their sovereignty to these dirty invaders, and took up arms to attempt to fight back. Unfortunately for them, the city of Brij immediately surrendering freely allowed the 5,000 Trolls to join the other 8,000 as reinforcements. With expert raiding tactics and a greater than 2-to-1 numbers advantage, the resistance of the Brij region was slaughtered at a cost of barely 4,000 Trolls, and the almost 9,000 remaining proceeded to establish authority over the Brij region, as a tributary state.

In another three years, the Trolls seized another opportunity, and declared war unannounced on the overstretched Hysykan Empire by landing raiding parties on its northern frontiers. These Trollish raiders conquered both the Hysykan Common Lands and the Narlys region before the Hysykans were able to mount an effective defense. Finally, late the next year, the Hysykans rallied to the defense of a northern city they called Ayquehvo, and in pitched battle managed to fend off the 10,000 Trollish invaders, at a grave cost of eight of the ten thousand Hysykan defenders. Another year later, the Trolls and Hysykans willingly met for a peace treaty, where Hysyka ceded the lands that had been conquered by the Trolls. Finally, the War of Sagacian Succession and all its resulting conflicts had ended.

OOC Section:

tl;dr: The biggest war in CivSim history was kicked up by the collapse of the Sagacian Empire, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties before all the resulting conflicts finally ended.

A somewhat outdated map of the results: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/420435086874509313/428767137927135233/War_of_Sagacian_Succession.jpg

Note that all territorial changes resulting from the War of Sagacian Succession have already been updated on the Old World map.

Additional links will come later.