Star Empire

The Gold Empire, not to be confused with the much later Ogili Gold Empire, also known as the Gold Union, was an alliance of nations positioned around the Gold Sea. It was formed from the union of the Star Empire and Subumpam, each of which were themselves unions of smaller nations who had agreed to a military alliance.

History

Early problems in Subumpam

The treaty creating the Gold Empire was unpopular in Subumpam. Even though more than 80% of the population of the Empire was located on the western (Star) shore, the founders chose to build their imperial capital in the extreme southeast, near the eastern border of Subumpam. Even though Subumpam was not a democracy and its people were used to being exploited, the sudden appearance of a foreign power forcing the Subumpamese to build castles and fortresses from which they themselves could be even more strictly controlled led to a conflict. This was the Peep Riot (Peep was the name of the city they had chosen for their capital). The Gold rulers were forced to admit that they could not build their capital here, and Peep seceded from Subumpam soon afterwards, joining instead the nation immediately eastward for its own protection. Thus the Goldies realized they needed to put their capital someplace central. Even so, they chose another location within Subumpam, the city of Wabula Pipem. Since word of the revolt had spread among the peasants, they told the Pipemese people that they were not merely a "second choice", as they felt that would spoil their rule, but that they were chosen because they were already the capital of Wabula Pipem and that it made sense for the subimperial capital and the high imperial capital to be in the same place.

The Pipemese rulers realized immediately that they had essentially been removed from power, since they were under the control of foreigners even in their own imperial capital, and began to regret signing the treaty. Soon, the Gold legislature voted to disband the Subumpamese military, since they didn't want to worry about the threat of any more revolts, and threatened to invade and occupy Subumpam with the much larger Star military if they did not immediately comply. Subumpam thus became the only member of the Gold Union without a military.

They also occupied all of Subumpam's ports, placing them under direct control of the Gold military. They raised taxes on the Subumpamese people to pay for an armed police force that watched cities and inspected people to make sure that peasants were not able to buy or produce dangerous weapons. Many positions in the Subumpamese governtment were abolished or replaced with figureheads reporting to the Gold government.

Due to the lack of a military, the Gold governors worried about invasion, and so they blocked the major roads leading out of Subumpam. They did not actually do this, as was commonly perceived, to prevent Subumpamese from leaving; in fact, for a small fee, anyone in Subumpam could leave so long as they relocated to somewhere still within the Gold Empire. But the Gold governors ordered the roads blocked off because they realized they had just deliberately created an extremely weak open wound in their Empire, out of the fear of the native population rebelling, and did not want to put their new preferred home territory in a weak spot. They were afraid to allow the Subumpamese to create another military, even if it was more strictly controlled than before, because they felt that would mean admitting that disbanding the military had been a mistake. They also did not want to force the Star military to waste time and resources occupying Subumpam, but realized that they might in the end be forced to do just that. As a temporary solution, they allowed people from Nama to occupy various key areas within Subumpam.

The shock of seeing Naman soldiers occupying Subumpam, when Subumpam had been promised from the beginning that the whole purpose of the alliance was to protect Subumpam from being crushed by potential enemies such as Nama, was too much for the Subumpamese to bear. Some Subumpamese formed a secret society promising to get Subumpam back out of the Gold Union, even if it meant surrendering control to another union, or even to Nama itself. A throng of unarmed Subumpamese attacked a Naman security guard, who responded by killing them all. The new secret secessionist society was depressed when they heard the news, not only because of the many innocent (as they saw them) victims who had been killed but because it showed that the Subumpamese were far weaker at resisting occupiers than they had been just a few decades before, when the people of Peep successfully resisted the occupation altogether and pulled out of the Union.

On the other hand, despite being massacred by Namans, many Subumpamese actually preferred the Naman soldiers to the Gold/Star occupiers, since the Naman soliders at least were not commonly seen abusing their power. The Star government was suspicious of the decision to hire soldiers from their chief enemy, Nama, to help keep peace in their most unstable part of their empire. This decision had been done originally because the Star military did not want to waste its resources just to occupy its own territory, and because Nama was diverse enough that they felt there was no common "Naman" interest that could possibly be advanced even if the soldiers they were importing decided to try their hardest to cause trouble.

First World War

In 1989, Nama declared war on the Star Empire. This was the widest war the planet had yet seen. It was soon shown that Naman soldiers within Subumpam had indeed been spying for their homeland, and that the Star governors had been wrong to think that Nama was too internally diverse to have a common interest. However, they were correct at least in that not all of Nama was united in supporting this new war; much of Naman territory consisted of coastal strips isolated from even the other coastal strips by mountains and surprisingly deep water. These settlements had little interest in Nama's wider affairs, and many did not even know of them.

The invading Naman army decided to make itself explicitly pro-Subumpam, even though they realized that the Subumpamese people were physically weak due to their lack of weapons and lack of skill even if given weapons, and that in this new war it was likely to expect Subumpamese deaths to be far out of proportion to those of any other nation. They enrolled Subumpamese citizens into the Naman army, giving them preferentially nonviolent jobs so that they would not be frightened or overwhelmed being chased by much more powerful soldiers

Many Star people believed that the invading Namans had magic powers, and secretly hoped Nama would win the war so that they themselves could gain those powers.

Early on, Nama signed treaties with various nearby nations, such as Paba, and Paba effectively became a part of Nama. Note that the Pabaps, so famous for extreme pacifism thousands of years later, had not yet adopted that trait, and were in fact had a military much stronger than one would expect for a nation consisting of just one single city.

During the early stages of the war, a new party called the Crystal Treasurers (usually referred to as Crystals) came into being. They created a new religion, believing in "the Gems of Tebbala". This is the same religion that the Khulls people held to about two thousand years later. They believed that it was only the Crystals who could conquer Nama.

As the war geared up, the Star Empire lost battle after battle. Most of the battles were fought in Subumpam, as that was where the Star military was weakest. But around the year 2000, people from Nama began spilling into Star territory (the stronger, western side of the Empire), and causing overpopulation problems. This army was composed mostly of people from the deep inland areas of Nama, who had the biological trait of women being taller than men. Thus their army had soldiers both male and female, and behind the advancing front whole families and even whole cities coming to make the Star Empire their new homeland, and to enslave the natives.