Arabian Coalition

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

*"You got a lotta nerve*

*To say you are my friend*

*When I was down*

*You just stood there grinning*"

-"Positively 4th Street" by Bob Dylan
The Arabian Coalition (referred to as the Arabians or Coalition.) is a fan faction formerly worked on by DeadlySilence, and since enveloped by the Echoes group. A struggling Middle Eastern coalition of Allied-friendly nations, it relies on putting down both damaging and debuffing AoEs along with close-range burst firepower and explosives to bring down its enemies in battle.

## At a Glance

 **Motives** | Stability, Gradual Progress, Paternalism

## Background

### One Thousand and One Years to Dawn

The Middle East and progression have had a long, bumpy road, having been under various monarchies and autocrats since the dawn of civilization, back in the days of Sumer and Babylon. Assyrians, Persians, many others, and finally France and Britain all dominated the region at one point or another. The European colonizers held onto much of the Middle East as mandates for some time, with initial worries about a war with Italy following its seizing of Libya being unfounded when Stalin's world-beating superpower sought to cut off the Allies from their oil.

Stalin's Soviet Union had all the fossil fuels it ever needed, with vast oil fields, enormous coal deposits, and limitless reserves of natural gas. The same could not be said for the Allies, who felt the pinch when the Soviets, having a direct land border to the Middle East, quickly swept aside their mandates and poured into North Africa. While this would start the slide towards socialism that many Arabic nations begun, embittered by being left to dry, this would galvanize others against the Red Menace. The Sultanate of Egypt, Kuwait, and the House of Hashemite would meet many times to discuss a potential alliance: an Arab league, but the peninsula;,content to remain apart from the world's problems, were reluctant to join.

But with the onset of the Cold War, it seemed that perhaps there wouldn't be a need for a league, so long as the Soviets stayed in their borders. It was the decision of Iraq, Syria, and Iran to go communist that convinced the need for renewed talks of the league. All of this would have to wait, however, as soon the Third World War started and once again, communist forces pushed through the Middle East to cut the Allies off from oil supplies, with Cherdenko's red army almost completing a conquest of all of Europe and North Africa.

However, the setbacks inflicted on it by the Empire gave the outmatched allies a chance to roll back the red tide, pushing them to Berlin and out of Africa, with the gains of the Arabian communists reversed. King Faizal, leading officially-neutral Saudi Arabia, worried about the threat of red Persia during the war. Even when the Soviets seemed ready to once again steamroll across the Western world, it was always to the land of the Shahs where his greatest fears lay. During a period of particularly intense fever dreams, he saw soldiers in blue armor fighting against red demons in Farsi writing and green snakes spitting lead and poison, then he saw soldiers in lime joining these blue warriors, and at last, a great new Arabian empire from which orange elephants and teal wolves recoiled while brown gorillas offered a hand.

### Two Eagles Joined

It was then he decided that he would join the Allies. But to do this, he would need to modernize. He was, like many other Arabic rulers, a reformer at heart. He agreed to some extent with the communist Arabians that the time of the old ways had come and gone; for his dream of a new caliphate to arise, he would need to make his nation appeal to the Allies at a far greater pace than ever before. Working with moderately swift programs around the Middle East, he kick-started them all, even forming a democratic parliament and holding his nation's first elections ever in a widely-celebrated and approved-of move.

This decision to join the Allies came with the Saudi army sending forces to join the fight against the Soviets when the war did come. While the initial phase of the conflict seemed bleak as the Communists rapidly swept Allied members out of the war, Faisal remained strong with his convictions. When Cherdenko had turned the whole of the Mediterranean into a Soviet lake, he remained true to the Allies, even when Riyadh itself was being besieged.

When the tide started turning at long last, his persistence was rewarded when the Empire suddenly invaded, the pressure on the Allies lightened, the Soviets started conceding ground in Africa and South African reinforcements landed in the Middle East. It was with this that the Coalition's troops, sheltering in southern Arabia once their nations were overrun, fully began with helping drive the Crescent Pact back to their own borders; a feat that was made possible not only by the reinforcements, but because they struck just as they funneled volunteers to help protect Siberia from Japanese aggression in a moment of complacency.

Even though the Arabians suffered some invasions from Imperial expeditionary armies who sought to kick the Coalition down at a moment of weakness, and did battle with far western ranging elements of the Empire's navy, the main push was always against Iran. What had once been just talk had long become a formal alliance, a Coalition of Arabian Monarchies from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and Bahrain, standing against the might of the communist Republicans. However, a new threat soon emerged in the form of the Global Liberation Army. Angry at both sides for abandoning tradition, they sought to light powder kegs - both political and military.

### The Sheikh and the Viper

The GLA armed itself with whatever they could cook up or scrounge together, and exploded against both sides, quickly dragging the Middle Eastern war to a halt. When the war ended with the death of the royal family and the departure of the power-mad Cherdenko, the GLA remained a problem even as the Communists to the north consolidated into a new cold war. The green snakes had arisen. Declaring their hatred for Western decadence, the GLA battled everyone they saw as oppressors ferociously. In Pakistan they rose against the Indians, in Afghanistan they struck at the Syndicate, and here they fought against both the capitalist south and communist north.

The Peacekeepers could only be in so many places at once, and despite the actions of so many factions against the GLA, the snakes refused to die. It would have almost been manageable, but betrayal rocked the Coalition when the White Guard, many of them being long time friends and trusted (and competent) family members, even the formidable General Deathstrike, decided to defect to the GLA. This betrayal personally hurt King Faisal, securing emergency powers for himself to try and stabilize the situation as the army that had once battled the Crescent Pact back was now faced with losing much of the Arabian Peninsula to the green tide.

If such longtime allies could betray them, anyone could potentially turn traitor to the GLA. Anyone could be a terrorist in waiting. With the added threat of communist subversive, the Coalition replaced reform-minded idealism with staunch paranoia. The need for the power of the kings of the Middle East was made more and more loudly stated as Faisal tightened his grip harder and harder on the people.

More and more of Arabia was lost to the encroaching GLA. Much of the oil fields facing the Persian Gulf were stolen from the Regional Defense Force, presenting a devastatingly dire situation to the Coalition as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait were now cut off by any means save for sea or air transport and Yemen and Oman were both invaded by increasingly-militarized GLA cells. With the country's limited manpower compared to the Crescent Pact, it was far less able to stem the tide against the rising tribes and militants of the desert who felt angry and dispossessed by the Allied Order.

### Orange Elephants on Parade

At this time, the Coalition extended some feelers to the burgeoning African League and other factions fighting against the GLA and the Soviets. For a time, India seemed receptive, and the Coalition dared hope that they would be delivered from this terrible scourge as fears were raised that the Crescent Pact would take advantage of this situation while law and order is breaking down in Arabia. Perhaps with the vast manpower of the Commonwealth, they could yet see deliverance against the green serpents poisoning their country (all too often literally, as well).

But such was not to be. The Commonwealth soon took advantage of the out-of-control situation in Yemen to launch a full-scale invasion of what was still technically Coalition territory, using the same pretexts they used in Somalia. This would have been acceptable had the Indians then not taken the hugely controversial move of declaring Yemen to be annexed, declaring its prior government invalid. Taking this as an act of hostility, the Coalition then withdrew diplomats from India and cut off all trade, causing an overnight economic crisis in both countries. Rumors also started to float of small-scale skirmishes between the two occurring, trading warning shots between fleets and air forces.

Now for the first time, two Allied member blocs were now openly hostile to each other, and now the Coalition faced a new and powerful enemy. Geneva, then, became divided on what to do. India's contributions to the containment of China couldn't be simply dropped, and its burgeoning economy and manpower were vital to Allied interests and no suitable replacement existed. On the other hand, the Coalition was also a valuable economic and resource partner and was the lynchpin of their Middle Eastern strategy.

Faced with such a difficult solution, the Arabian Coalition turned to outside help, and soon diplomats in Australian, Indonesian and other embassies started arriving *en masse* to try and broker some agreements for help against the might of India. But they found their most sympathetic ears in the African League, whose western land shared their dominant religion and a foe in the Indians. While the Syndicate, which while allowed and welcome to do business in their lands, are usually the subject of the royals' misgivings due to their ties with the Commonwealth.

It's a dangerous world, but it's one that King Faisal is hopeful in, dreaming that one day his nation will no longer need his surveillance. However, questions still linger if the kings of the desert will willingly surrender the power they have accumulated to themselves in the name of fighting outside threats.

## Gameplay

Coalition gameplay is based on terrain altering and rapid fire burst damage with solidly built units that while slower than their Socialist and GLA counterparts, are sturdier and tend to be better for breaking through a line rather than exploiting break throughs or harass enemies. Coalition units may not be quite as flashy as that of many other factions, but they get the job done and will preform best when used in conjunction with longer ranged or speedier forces.

Another feature unique to the Coalition is their desertification. Some of their units and structures have the ability to turn land around them into desert, which debuffs enemy units in various ways, primarily lowering their speed and accuracy as the enemy is forced to contend with sudden mirages and soft sandy terrain, depending on the severity of the strike. This doesn't apply to buildings, garrisoned units, or Arabian units though.

## Units & Buildings

*"We are currently living in a hostile climate, citizens... We are living at a time when the Red Menace that has swept over Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran is threatening to do to the same to us, the last remaining bastion of freedom in the Middle East.. We are living in a time where who we once thought were our allies have conquered Yemen and would conquer the rest when we stop watching... The worst one? It is also a time where we have to fight even our own friends and family after they cast their lot with those GLA terrorists!*  **\*wipes tears from eyes\***  *It is with a heavy heart I will say that we must do everything to guard our way of life and our dreams of a progressive and modern Arabia as they are beset at all sides by the turncoats, red plagues and imperialists, but may Allah give us the strength and the will to move forward and persist through our adversaries that surround us..."*

- King Faisal's speech, June 12, 1969

### Deathmatch Reinforcements

**Desert Winds**

The Desert Winds are an elite force within the Coalition driven into the battle when the going truly gets tough. Trained to Jordanian standards, these soldiers offer longer ranged, more accurate, and/or faster moving punch to the generally short ranged wall of explosives that the more normal forces represent. The pride of the RDF, they are frequently seen in battle against the invading Indians.

### Deathmatch Protocols

 File:IconCoalition.png | Black Gold Rush | A Coalition plane spills tons of flammable oil in target area, causing *all* units it spills into to be ignited every time they take explosive damage.

## Behind the Scenes

As one might expect given their situation, many elements of the Coalition are based around Desert Storm and the War on Terror, as well as Middle Eastern dictatorships. They can come across as a bastardized version of the modern U.S. with its terror scare tendencies, phobia of communism, hate/love relationship with foreign culture, and fairly invasive actions regarding its people.