Sakuran Civil War

### Effects

Led to the fracture of Sakura as an alliance, isolated the remaining New Genesis and weakening East Asia for foreign invasion

**Introduction**

The Sakura civil war begins far earlier, when the territory tax update was introduced. This update forced Sakura to shrink in territory size after having recently expanded. Sakura had also just been involved as the key player in taking down Roma. Some of the older original Sakura members had recently gotten back to playing, including MisterSensei. After having shrank down to cover all key cities, Sakura was still over the 3m km territory limit and was paying taxes on having borders up, thus the idea for a split of the alliance to fix this issue emerged.

The split was decided to be in two, one taking over the regions of Japan and Korea as their main and one as China as their main. The Japanese alliance was named the Ainu republic and people soon started to RP their while the split was still in the air. Soon though, anti-leader sentiment grew, as Ainu members were led to believe that the current leader, DIYSlinky, was favoring the players that were going to join the Chinese alliance, and was disrespecting the previous leader, Vivid.

**Initial dispute pre-revolt**

When deciding which cities would go to which alliance, and how to best split the current alliances holding, some disagreements arose, the main one however, being over the top city of Beijing. Ainu believed that they were getting the shorter end of the stick and less top cities than the Chinese alliance, which is true. Ainu also wanted the cities of Taipei and Manila, along with creating a line in the yellow river civilization to decide which cities would be whos.

**Declaration of War**

At 4:07 GMT, August 20th, the Ainu Revolt was launched with a declaration of war made public and sent to the leader of The Sakura Pact.

Official Declaration of War - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T7fXh\_NgqQgetfycC3FY3YhXXgeyI-Hf5097N3F8GFg/edit

https://www.reddit.com/r/citieswar/comments/wt9ipk/sakuran\_civil\_war/

**Initial Day of Rebellion**

From 4:30 - 4:37 GMT, traitorous Ainu rebels began extracting around 400k gold while also kicking out a few members of Sakura that were not in their faction. DIYSlinky was online at the time watching this, confused, as nothing had suggested that there would be a rebellion by Ainu. Leading the rebellion was MisterSensei, who left to use zmmiz’s alt alliance, Femboi Hooters, as their alliance, renaming it to Ainu Republic.

Quickly after a majority of their members had left to join the Ainu Republic alliance, rebel forces began large scale attacks on Sakuran major cities. Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul were quickly taken down without issue. Taipei was successfully taken by rebel forces with defense stationed in the city but they were quickly thwarted by loyalist player AureliusMarcos. At 21:05 GMT, rebel forces struck the Sakuran top city of Shenzhen, successfully taking down the Sakura Capital, having knowledge of its whereabout prior to leaving due to occupying governmental roles within the alliance. Busan was attacked twice before falling to the rebel forces. The northern border of Karamay was exposed due to the rebellion, and thus attempts were made by the rebels to take down the cities defense while it was vulnerable, however, they were unsuccessful.

Ainu Republic also attacked Emperor Vivid in their rush to set up territory, as shown above.

Ainu Republic set up a territory encompassing Japan, Korea, and parts of Manchuria and Russia.

The situation stabilized as The Sakura Pact was able to put borders back up.

**Second Day of Rebellion**

On the morning of August 21st, the day after the revolt, Sakura leader DIYSlinky went on a small offensive campaign to clear unprotected cities Ainu had on mainland China near Sakura borders.

Major battles in cities of Qingdao, Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Tianjin, Baoding.

Minor battles in cities of Langfang, Zhouzhou.

Ainu suffered disproportional losses in these attacks. Ainu borders were therefore moved up to Beijing. Sakura borders were moved up to Taipei.

**Peace Talks**

After the initial revolt, Sakura and Ainu leaders and representatives began working on a plan for peace.

**Second Ainu Offensive**

On August 28th, Ainu forces invaded Sakura and took the major cities of Shanghai and Taipei, making them borders for their territory.

**Sakura probing attacks**

Minor skirmished occurred on August 30th targeting vulnerable cities. This would set up for the larger offensive the next day.

**Sakura Counteroffensive**

Major Battles of September 2nd, 2022
 Itoman

Ainu border city of Itoman was taken down.

Ainu border city of Shikotan was taken down.

**Ainu Counterattack**

On September 6th, Ainu Republic had decided to conduct an offensive on The Sakura Pact, presumably due to some of their border having little to no defenses. This lead to major battles in the city of Seoul. Ainu Republic captured Sakura capital of Huaian at 8:41 pm GMT.

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