View source for Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War

{{Infobox military conflict
|name = Ilios Alliance - Vask Authority War
|image = VAwar.png
|caption = Vask Authority [[Light Frigate|frigates]] down an Imperial Novan [[Attack Destroyer|destroyer]] at the [[Battle of Asteri]]
|date = 11 June 2024 - 29 July 2024 <br>(48 days)
|place = Server-wide
|combatants_header = Participants
|combatant1 = {{flag|Ilios alliance.png|Ilios Alliance}}
* {{flag|Orovika logo.webp|Orovika}}
* {{flag|Radiance Emblem.png|Radiance}}
* {{flag|CDM FlagP.png|Cortesia Del Mar}}
* {{flag|Nova Flag.png|Imperial Nova}}
* {{flag|Arimfea Flag.png|Arimfea}}
{{flag|Rsz 3carthageflag.png|Republic of Carthage}}
|combatant2 = {{flag|VAAFFlag.png|Vask Authority}}
{{flag|Vega logo.jpg|Vega}}
<small>(material aid, minimal direct involvement)</small>
|casualties1 = 171685 [[warship]] blocks lost
* 127685 to Vask Authority
* 44000 to Vega at the [[Battle of Asteri]] 
46274 [[freighter]] blocks lost
|casualties2 = 91819 [[warship]] blocks lost
<br>2 [[battlecruiser]]s lost (1 captured intact)
684 [[freighter]] blocks lost
|result = White peace struck with Vegan involvement on 29 July.
Majority of Vask Authority players subsequently [[Vask Authority Leak|banned from server]], remnant of Vask Authority resumes pirating to present.
|width = 450px
}}
The '''Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War''' was a major military conflict on Horizon's End fought between the forces of the [[Ilios Alliance]] and the [[Republic of Carthage]] against the pirating nation of [[Vask Authority]], which was materially supported by [[Vega]], in the summer of 2024.

This war was the first conflict in [[Horizon's End]] history to see the use of [[supercapital]] warships in combat, and established the dominance of [[starfighters]] and 500-block [[Tackle Gunship|tackle gunships]] in the (post-[[gunship]] nerf) 2024 starship combat meta. It was the largest conflict of 2024.

= History =
== Prelude ==
=== Andurian Federation ===
Following the conclusion of the [[Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War]] on 8 January 2024, [[RentDueYesterday]], a major pirating nation led by [[FellOffBridge]], was re-formed by [[pqio]] into the [[Andurian Federation]]. Unlike its predecessor or successor, the Andurian Federation presented itself as a respectable participant in server politics, and did not allow its members to engage in unrestrained [[piracy]]. 

From 11 February 2024, the [[Andurian Federation]] engaged in [[Arimfea-Anduria War|a military conflict]] with [[Arimfea]], with [[Imperial Nova]] intervening on behalf of [[Arimfea]]  on 26 February. This war ended on 18 April 2024 with a white peace, leaving the Andurian Federation's combat-inclined player-base without anyone to fight.

Three weeks later, on 3 May 2024, pqio formally handed control of the Andurian Federtion back to FellOffBridge, who renamed it first to "HorsemenOfTheVegapocalypse", before settling on "Vask Authority" the following day. 

=== Vask Authority ===
Under FellOffBridge's leadership, Vask Authority took a more hostile stance towards the rest of the server, adopting a policy of allowing its members to [[pirate]] other players on the server as they wished. This was first realized when [[z4nityy]] began pirating server-wide on 13 May, followed up soon thereafter by [[DearGhost]] doing the same.

As the largest [[colonist]] and [[privateer]] alliance on the server, the [[Ilios Alliance]] served as the primary responders to Vask Authority piracy. Seeking to avoid sparking an all-out war with the whole of Vask Authority, the Alliance settled on a policy of attacking members of Vask Authority only when they were engaging in acts of piracy, seeking to detract from their ability to cause mayhem on the server in this way. 

Additionally, on account of a convergence of interests in anti-piracy activity, and viewing the prospect of all-out war with Vask Authority as an increasingly inevitable one, the Ilios Alliance admitted the nations of Imperial Nova and Arimfea as associate members of the alliance on 10 June 2024. This brought the two nations, who had already been combating Vask Authority piracy on their own, under the Ilios Alliance's mutual-defense umbrella, and facilitated coordinated fleet actions between all five alliance members.

=== 11 June Incident ===
On 11 June 2024, at 12:15PM EDT, [[DearGhost]] attacked [[SammaSystem]], a member of [[Imperial Nova]], at her space station in Ilios, killing her in [[PvP]]. Novan forces scrambled to hunt down DearGhost in retribution (in accordance with Alliance policy); however, DearGhost quickly fled south to Vask Authority's shielded main space station, [[Apollyon]], and sought refuge inside the structure. Vask Authority leadership [[_Clone1137]] and [[FellOffBridge]] had previously declared Apollyon to be off-limits to non-members of Vask Authority, and declared that DearGhost was under Vask Authority protection while inside the station, regardless of the act of piracy he had committed minutes earlier. 

The Novan response force elected to assault Apollyon regardless, prompting a fleet battle in which Vask Authority forces directly engaged Ilios Alliance ones. This event is broadly considered to be the start of the Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War.

== Conflict ==
=== Fleet Doctrine ===
Once formal war began, the fleet doctrines of the Ilios Alliance and Vask Authority quickly solidified.

As of the start of the war, the Ilios Alliance was much better prepared for combat than its predecessor the [[Horizon Federation]], counting among its ranks many skilled [[SvS]]ers, such as [[_omni]], [[EloMilo]], [[NovaManGood2110]], [[yodabird19]], and [[_Longy]]. This enabled the Alliance to attack members of Vask Authority proactively (as opposed to exclusively responding to incidents of [[piracy]]). Ilios Alliance combatants sought to leverage their numerical superiority in combat, seeking to ensure that every fight that they took against Vask Authority gave them the numerical advantage, and quickly disengaging from any unfavorable matchup. These incentives produced a fleet doctrine centered on skilled strike teams employing smaller ships than their adversaries, most often [[starfighters]] and [[gunships]].

Vask Authority fleet doctrine was nearly diametrically opposed to that of the Alliance. With material support from [[Vega]], whose non-involvement in the war ensured that their industrial output was unimpeded, Vask Authority were able to mint several [[supercapital]] warships: [[cruisers]] and [[battlecruisers]]. These ships offered disproportionate health and firepower per pilot, allowing Vask Authority to partially compensate for their numerical disadvantage. A majority of fleet engagements involving more than one Vask Authority pilot would involve the use of one of their battlecruisers, as these ships were competitive in combat against 2-3 [[capital]] ships, and were nearly untouchable for the small ship classes that the Ilios Alliance favored.

These incompatible fleet doctrines resulted in a large number of matchups between Ilios Alliance and Vask Authority forces ending in stalemate, with Ilios Alliance small ships unable to sink Vask Authority supercapitals, and Vask Authority supercapitals unable to catch up to Ilios Alliance small ships.

=== Battle of Asteri ===
{{main|Battle of Asteri}}
The Battle of Asteri was the single largest fleet engagement in the war, caused when FellOffBridge released the battlecruiser "ARMAGEDDON" inside a Vask Authority-controlled siege station on 26 June. Ilios Alliance forces attempted to prevent Vask Authority from recovering ARMAGEDDON until the station's siege window re-opened after 22 hours, resulting in [[Vega]]n forces intervening on behalf of [[Vask Authority]] to flush the Ilios Alliance garrison from the station. 

Vegan leadership, in a diplomatic communique to Ilios Alliance leadership 3 hours prior to the battle, claimed that their impending involvement was due to Vask Authority paying them 1,000,000 credits for a mercenary contract, and that they did not want anything to do with the war beyond this, even posting purported private message logs between themselves and Vask Authority leadership as proof. It was subsequently discovered that this premise was a ruse, and that the logs were faked, to justify Vegan involvement without incurring diplomatic consequences. This became known to the Ilios Alliance after they observed [[z4nityy]]'s payment of 1,000,000 credits to [[Vandrayk]] being quietly refunded a few days after the battle; the Battle of Asteri is widely understood among Ilios Alliance members to be the moment at which the true extent of Vegan support for Vask Authority was understood.

The Battle of Asteri was a blowout defeat for the Ilios Alliance, claiming 44,000 blocks' worth of Alliance warships - over 25% of the Alliance's total warship losses across the 7 weeks that the war lasted.

=== Siege of Cicatrix ===
[[Radiance]] was the largest member of the Ilios Alliance measured by active player count during the war, and its population had relatively few combat- or tech-oriented players. This made Radiance players prime targets for Vask Authority piracy, due to their number and their relative inexperience in defending themselves at the time. This was most acutely realized in the city of [[Cicatrix]], the capital of Radiance, which is located on [[Aerach]], a single jump away from Vask Authority's central operations base of [[Apollyon]] in [[Regulus]]. 

Members of Vask Authority, especially z4nityy, attacked players in Cicatrix frequently over the course of the war, most often killing them on foot in [[PvP]]. While the Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War is generally not held to have been as damaging to server health as the [[Horizon Federation-RentDueYesterday War]] before it, the Cicatrix attacks are typically cited as the most damaging thing to server health that Vask Authority did in the course of the conflict, as Cicatrix (and indeed Radiance as a whole) was (and still is) a major hub of relatively new and non-combat-oriented players, who were liable to be chased off the server by repeated unprovoked attacks.

These attacks resulted in a large number of battles taking place on or outside of Aerach, and a large number of casualties for both the Alliance and Vask Authority. As a majority of Ilios Alliance defenders lived far from Aerach ([[yodabird19]] on [[Chimgara]]; [[_omni]] on [[Kovfefe]]; [[_Longy]] and [[NovaManGood2110]] on [[Aret]] (opposite the [[Regulus]] star from Aerach)), bringing in outside defenders to Cicatrix proved a time-consuming endeavor for the Alliance, leading to several members of Radiance ([[SmolPotatoLord]], [[Kay_2905]], and [[TonyTheMage_]]) teaching themselves ship combat in order to defend themselves. 

However, the Alliance's ability to punish Vask Authority pirates for attacks on Cicatrix proved limited, as Aerach had a [[Trade Outpost]] (Aerost) at the south of the planet, a safezone to which attacking pirates could quickly escape when confronted. This dynamic led to widespread calls among server players for a mechanic that would prevent players in combat from hiding in safezones, ultimately leading to the implementation of the [[Combat Tag]] system on 9 November 2024.

=== Capture of ARMAGEDDON ===
On 16 July 2024, [[_omni]] found himself in a 1v2 engagement against Vask Authority forces in southern [[Ilios]]. _omni was piloting a 2,000 block [[gunship]], while FellOffBridge piloted the battlecruiser ARMAGEDDON, and z4nityy pursued him in a starfighter. For unknown reasons, FellOffBridge elected to unpilot his battlecruiser (leaving it active, but immobile) and exit into space on foot, in an attempt to board _omni's ship and kill him in [[PvP]]. Instead, however, _omni successfully killed FellOffBridge in the ensuing engagement with a [[Blaster Shotgun]], leaving the battlecruiser ARMAGEDDON unattended.

[[yodabird19]] quickly responded to the situation from [[Chimgara]], sprinting south in a starfighter to assist in capturing the orphaned battlecruiser; by the time he arrived, the battlecruiser had automatically released. While _omni engaged z4nityy in combat to keep him from claiming the battlecruiser, yodabird19 created a 150-block radius station claim called "mogged" to secure the battlecruiser for the Alliance. z4nityy initially protested that, as he was still engaged in combat with _omni, the claim was not valid; however, _omni proceeded to kill z4nityy in [[PvP]] as well, conclusively securing ARMAGEDDON for the Ilios Alliance.

The capture of ARMAGEDDON, which was worth over 81 stacks of [[iron]] blocks, was the Ilios Alliance's first headline victory in the war. To many in the Alliance, it served as a vindication of the [[Battle of Asteri]], as the capture of ARMAGEDDON had been the object of that battle, which the Alliance had lost.

=== 500 block Gunships ===
Among the most notable developments in the starship combat meta during the war was the popularization of a new subclass of warship: the 500-block [[Tackle Gunship|tackle gunship]]. While this class of ship was known to the server, and had been used before in combat (for example, three of them were involved in the [[Battle of Asteri]]), their employment by the Ilios Alliance in the latter weeks of the war proved a decisive divergence from previous [[SvS]] doctrine.

[[yodabird19]] is credited with the idea to pivot alliance [[SvS]] strategy towards heavy employment of 500s, circa 4 July 2024. As a [[starfighter]] main, he observed that a large number of Ilios Alliance strike teams consisted primarily of groups of skilled starfighter players (so-called "starfighter mogsquads") working in concert, and that these teams tended to see the most success; however, as starfighters could not employ [[Starship Gravity Well]]s, these teams typically included one 2000-block [[gunship]] to provide an allied gravity well to the engagement, which provided a slower and more vulnerable target for Vask Authority opponents to focus on. 

A 500 block gunship is the smallest size ship in the game that can still deploy a gravity well; at only 143% the size of a 350-block [[starfighter]], these ships behave more like starfighters than like larger subclasses of gunship: they employ [[plasma cannon]]s and [[torpedo]]es for weapons, have a single [[Particle Shield|shield]], and can achieve both [[cruise]] and [[direct control]] speeds comparable to that of a 350-block ship (~33-35 and 16.9, respectively).

The introduction of 500s to Ilios Alliance fleets - typically one per strike team, in place of a 2K - removed a critical weak spot in Ilios Alliance attack squads, which caused a measurable improvement in Ilios Alliance [[SvS]] performance in the latter half of the war. Furthermore, due to being nearly as difficult to kill as a 350-block starfighter, 500s were optimal choices for trapping Vask Authority supercapitals inside gravity wells, preventing them from reaching an ongoing fleet engagement by blocking their access to [[Hyperspace]]. 

This style of 1:1 removal of players from a fleet engagement was advantageous to the Ilios Alliance, as it favored their numerical advantage.

=== Sinking of CATACLYSM ===
[[File:Cataclysm sunk.png|thumb|400px|The [[battlecruiser]] "CATACLYSM" is sunk by [[Ilios Alliance]] forces on 26 July 2024]]
[[CATACLYSM]] was sunk in a fleet battle on 26 July 2024 by [[NovaManGood2110]], [[_Longy]], [[Vortexion]], [[_omni]], [[LuvaCz]], and [[ItsAlreadyGold]], with _omni claiming the kill. Vask Authority combatants included [[FellOffBridge]] and [[_Clone1137]].

== Peace Negotiations ==
At 2:49PM EDT on 26 July 2024, approximately 1 hour after the sinking of the battlecruiser CATACLYSM, [[Vega]]n diplomats reached out on behalf of Vask Authority, offering an immediate cease-fire to the war and terms of white peace between the Ilios Alliance and Vask Authority. Based on chat logs obtained in the [[Vask Authority Leak]], it is understood that the impetus for this offer of peace was a consensus among members of Vask Authority, spurred on by the sinking of CATACLYSM (which represented the first time Ilios Alliance forces defeated a Vask Authority supercapital in fair combat, and the first supercapital sink in server history), that Vask Authority's small group of elite combat players would not be able to keep up in the future with the Ilios Alliance's growing war proficiency. As [[Vandrayk]] put it in his opening statement during negotiations:
 VA is looking to negotiate peace and end the war. They are tired of fighting with uneven odds and have no allies other than Vega to rely on, which we are obviously not looking to join in the war so we advised for surrender. After the second lost BC today, I think that it is reparation enough for the toll of the war on top of the other you guys already took. I propose In regards to the end of the war:
 -Full peace for both sides, neither side shall attack the other
 -Stations remain as they are as of now (similar if not the same to how they were at start of the war)
Vegan diplomats implied that they intended to strongarm the Ilios Alliance (who very much did not want to risk a conflict with Vega) into accepting these terms of peace, stating, "if you're unwilling to give peace against an enemy who has surrendered, there will be a larger discussion that has an ending that nobody wants". It was later revealed in [[Vask Authority Leak|the leak]] that the intent of these peace terms was to give the Ilios Alliance time to create their own [[supercapital]] warfleet, which would give Vega an excuse to directly involve themselves in a subsequent war against the Alliance.
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A cease-fire was declared between the Ilios Alliance and Vask Authority on 29 July 2024, to allow for negotiations to progress. Negotiations stalled, however, as the Ilios Alliance were hesitant to accept terms that they believed would simply set them up for another war a few months in the future. The negotiations ended up being moot, however, as on 4 August 2024, the [[Vask Authority Leak]] resulted in [[FellOffBridge]], [[_Clone1137]], and [[Vandrayk]] all being permanently banned from the server (which compounded with a previous ban against [[DearGhost]] for exploiting), crippling [[Vask Authority]] as a fighting force, and restoring [[Vega]] to more friendly leadership.

[[z4nityy]], as the sole active participant in Vask Authority not to be banned from the server, ended the cease-fire and resumed solo pirating under the Vask Authority banner, which continues to the present.

= Legacy =
The end of the Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War marked the beginning of a distinct political era of server history, characterized by unipolar political dominance of the [[Ilios Alliance]], commonly referred to as the [[Long Peace]]. This period of reduced conflict on Horizon's End lasted approximately half a year, until the start of the [[Vega-Nova War]] in March 2025.

[[Category:Conflicts]]
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Player-Created]]