First Cluster War

The First Cluster War is the third most destructive conflict to ever occur in The Cluster, though it arguably had the largest long-lasting effect of any intergalactic war. It involved some of the strongest civilizations to ever exist in The Cluster and left a gruesome legacy that future civilizations were left to sift through.

Background
The First Cluster War was started not over complicated diplomatic disputes or border tension, but rather a simple act of aggression incited by the Zetylians on Kaeolian exploratory vessels. A small fleet of Kaeolian exploration ships entered the orbit of Zetylu, the Zetylian homeworld, as the planet was a prime candidate for a new Kaeolian colony. Automated ground-to-space cannons on the planet surface destroyed the ships, which caught the attention of the Kaeolian Empire. Seeing as how the Taselvian Empire had already been destroyed, no major enemies of the Kaeolians remained, so what exactly had destroyed their exploration ships was a mystery. The Kaeolians sent more exploration ships into territory controlled by the Zetylian Hegemony, all of which were destroyed. As more ships invaded Zetylian territory, the Zetylians quickly grew anxious of possible alien attack and began to rapidly build up their military in preparation for all out war. The Kaeolian Empire quickly did the same, believing that whoever was destroying their ships clearly had hostile intentions. Eventually, the Zetylians struck the first blow of the war, attacking a Kaeolian border colony with a large fleet of invasion ships. The colony did not anticipate the attack, and was completely destroyed. With no medium of communication established between them and the Zetylians, the Kaeolians could not officially declare war against their empire, but their retaliation with warships of their own signaled to the Zetylians that they were not going down without a fight. The First Cluster War was set in motion.

Attempts at Expansion: Border Stalemate (300,000 - 281,000 B.C.E.)
Though both civilizations were eager and willing to destroy each other with their advanced military technology, the early millennia of the war were actually very uneventful. Most conflict was focused on the border colonies of both the Kaeolian Empire and Zetylian Hegemony, and attempts at capturing these colonies in order to gain footholds in the opponent's galaxy were frequently made during this time. The thinking on both sides was that a gradual, slow push through enemy territory was the best method towards victory, as direct assaults on the heavily fortified homeworlds of both civilizations proved to be ineffective. Needless to say, this strategy did not work. Whenever the Kaeolian armies managed to invade and conquer Zetylian colonies, the Zetylians would retaliate and recapture their lost colonies within only a few years. The exact same thing happened when the Zetylians conquered Kaeolian colonies, they were always lost within a few years. Neither the Zetylians nor Kaeolians could gain any significant advantage over the other, preventing any significant progress during this period of the war.

Zetylian Fortification and Kaeolian Assault (281,000 - 258,000 B.C.E.)
It was the Zetylians that eventually broke this stalemate and changed the dynamic of the war. After noticing how ineffective their direct assaults on Kaeolian territory were, the Zetylians withdrew their offensive and focused on reinforcing the defenses on their existing colonies while they figured out how to proceed with the war. This gave the Kaeolians a golden opportunity to attack the Zetylians without fear of leaving their own colonies undefended, an opportunity they instantly took advantage of. This period of the war proved to be the bloodiest and most brutal for the Kaeolian armies, as they were now part of a massive invasion into Zetylian territory that would result in countless Kaeolian deaths. It was these deaths that drove the Kaeolians to pursue research into robotics, as replacing their biological invasion forces with artificial ones would have greatly benefited their invasion efforts. The Kaeolians did use a plentiful amount of military robots as their assaults continued, most of which came from the robotics factories and research laboratories on Ghuldashi, but it never afforded them any major advantages due to the impregnable nature of Zetylian defenses. The constant invasions made by Kaeolian forces were doomed to be completely ineffective overall, but that didn't stop the Kaeolians from continuing to attack the Zetylians viciously for millennia on end.

Alternative Strategies and Destruction of the Cotith Collective (258,000 - 239,000 B.C.E.)
While Kaeolian invasion forces barreled down on them, the Zetylians quietly worked to devise a new strategy. Directly assaulting the Kaeolian border colonies the Zetylians had been attacking before was no longer an option, as recon fleets reported that the Kaeolians had heavily fortified their border colonies, and a majority of existing Zetylian forces were already preoccupied with defending their colonies from Kaeolian attack. The Zetylians needed to find an alternate route to core Kaeolian territory that would allow their fleets to rapidly strike at key colonies, and the discovery of a minor civilization in the Triangulum galaxy offered them that chance. Residing a safe distance away from core Kaeolian territory, in an unremarkable part of the Triangulum galaxy, was the Cotith Collective, a small civilization occupied by a race of intelligent machines. The Cotith had never been encountered by the Kaeolians due to their comparatively small size, but the Zetylians were observant enough to discover them. At first, the Zetylians attempted diplomacy. They tried to convince the Cotith to aid the Zetylians in war against the Kaeolians, promising advanced Zetylian technology and protection from other threats if they agreed. The Cotith refused, claiming that they conflict was strictly between the Zetylians and Kaeolians, and that the Cotith had no business involving themselves in it. This upset the Zetylians greatly, leading them to destroy the entirety of Cotith civilization within a century or two. The destruction of the Cotith offered two major advantages to the Zetylians. First, they were able to use territory previously occupied by the Cotith to create military bases and strongholds in the Triangulum galaxy that they could stage future attacks from. Second, they were also able to make use of old Cotith Wormhole Gates that had once been used by the Collective for interstellar travel. These gates allowed the Zetylians to rapidly transport ships and materials around their newly acquired territory, and also allowed fresh Zetylian fleets from the Andromeda galaxy to rapidly attack Kaeolian territory through the gate network. With these advantages, the Zetylians were quickly able to open up a second front in their war with the Kaeolians, drawing attention away from their border colonies and redirecting the Kaeolian offensive for their benefit.

The Kaeolians were now on the losing side of the war. Forced to split their forces between defending their territory from local Zetylian attacks and attacking Zetylian territory directly, they began to lose considerable amounts of territory and military power. In order to survive, they had to devise a new strategy. The Kaeolians turned their sights towards the Milky Way Galaxy, as, aside from a few unremarkable minor civilizations, it was uninhabited by intelligent life. They quickly set up numerous colonies in the MWG, many of which grew to become quite large. Most of these colonies were focused around scientific research that would directly aid the Kaeolian war effort back in their home galaxy. The infamous Paragon Project was started among the science colonies in the MWG, which is why many of the species created in the project ultimately ended up scattered across various parts of the Orion Spur. Many inventive new war technologies were produced by the Kaeolians through these research colonies, but they ended up not becoming a major help to the Kaeolian army due to their immense distance and relative lack of resources.

Massacre in the MWG (239,000 B.C.E. - 215,000 B.C.E.)
When new battlefield technology was deployed by the Kaeolians on the frontlines of combat, the Zetylians were quick to notice. Though they largely held the advantage thanks to their new apertures into Kaeolian territory, the Zetylians were concerned that the technological advantage (which they had held up until this point) was rapidly being stolen by the Kaeolians. The Zetylians traced the new Kaeolian technology to the Milky Way Galaxy, where they discovered the clusters of Kaeolian science colonies that had been developing such technology, far away from the vicious fighting in Triangulum and Andromeda. This made the Zetylians realize that the Kaeolians would inevitably surpass the Zetylians in terms of military technology, and so they decided to launch an all-out incursion into the MWG to shut down the Kaeolian research operations. Though the colonies did not go down without a fight, they were not prepared for the ferociousness of the Zetylian offensive, and were quickly destroyed, completely and utterly, leaving almost no Kaeolian relics in the MWG left. This destruction took a heavy toll on the minor civilizations and species that resided in the MWG, especially the Vecuuri, who were confined to their homeworld and lost virtually all of their interstellar holdings due to the severity of space combat between Kaeolian and Zetylian forces.

The End Game: Total Collapse (215,000 - 200,000 B.C.E.)
The destruction of these colonies damaged the Kaeolian army considerably, as without fresh military technology to use against the Zetylians, they were now back in a disadvantaged position. The Zetylians weren't any better off, however, as their military had been worn thin after thousands of years of conflict. The last battles of the First Cluster War were mostly fought on the border colonies of both civilizations, much like the very early years of the war. At this point, however, conflict slowed at an exponential rate, eventually stalling altogether, save for a few battles fought between robotic forces. The Kaeolian Empire and Zetylian Hegemony were left bankrupt, badly damaged and overall completely decimated after about 100,000 years of constant fighting, and as such, they collapsed. Kaeolian core worlds, now seething with radiation and chemical residue from millennia of orbital bombing, became the graveyards of trillions, while their border colonies, though not immediately decimated, quickly became the victims of attacks by minor civilizations and stellar nomads. Some Kaeolians, under the leadership of Ryi Poq Uytio, migrated away from the decimated ruins of the Kaeolian Empire and formed the Kaeolian Collective, which never lived up to the legacy of its predecessor. The Zetylians followed a similar path, caving in on themselves until no major traces of their civilization remained. A few small Zetylian colonies in the MWG, formed during their incursion against the Kaeolian research colonies, managed to survive the death of the Hegemony, but they quickly regressed and lost all connections to their former civilization. Many of the Zetylians occupying former Hegemony territory in the Andromeda Galaxy were taken by the Gleaming Sisterhood to use as slaves, or killed off by the rapidly emerging CAZR. Only the enigmatic Bedlam Society survived this destruction, planting sleeper agents across existing Zetylian colonies and setting up their headquarters on Earth to ensure the survival of the Zetylian species.

The First Cluster War ended not with a triumphant final battle, but with the painful inward collapse of both civilizations involved, unable to continue fighting after such a long time. The war had lasting effects on The Cluster as a whole, wiping out numerous minor civilizations and imprinting visions of hyper-scaled conflict in the legends of stellar nomads and traveling Technomages. Many artifacts of the Zetylians and Kaeolians were left for future civilizations to ponder over, exploit, or, in some cases, destroy, due to the inherent danger many of them possessed. It would take at least another 100,000 years for The Cluster to fully heal and allow for the development of large civilizations once more.

War Technology
The First Cluster War was one of the most technologically advanced conflicts to occur in the later history of The Cluster, due in no small part to the immense size of the empires involved. Though they both attempted to gain a technological advantage over the other, both the Kaeolians and Zetylians were effectively in military technology in the grand scope of the war. At first, the Zetylians held the advantage, as their advanced Serphiad war technology (which included extremely potent plasma weapons and a highly-efficient FTL system that functioned similar to a Fold Drive) had been designed to combat the mighty Neo-Serphiads, and was much more powerful than what the Kaeolians possessed, at first. However, unlike the Zetylians, the Kaeolians invested significantly in military research during the war, eventually building up their technology to be on-par with the Zetylians. Both empires only performed research when their enemies had a clear technological advantage, so neither managed to surpass the either in terms of technological capabilities.

For the Zetylians, military technology was focused solely on raw destructive power. Their gleaming white spaceships, though heavily armed with plasma cannons and particle accelerators, were fragile, and usually didn't last in prolonged conflicts with the Kaeolians, even though their ships were often much larger than Kaeolian ships. Zetylian ground forces operated by similar principles, relying more on firepower than durability. On the ground, the Zetylians depended mostly on their own bodies, as Zetylians were naturally very durable and agile creatures. They possessed heavy terrestrial vehicles, as well, but the most widely known terrestrial weapon of the Zetylians were their cyborganic vehicles. A technology borrowed from the Serphiads (who had once used it to create Tixax), cyborganic engineering allowed the Zetylians to create mechanical vehicles that moved and thought just like living creatures. These highly-intelligent semi-alive weapons were much more adaptive and agile than Kaeolian war machines, and were greatly feared by Kaeolian ground forces.

The Kaeolians, though lacking the ethereal technologies of the Zetylians, were much more well-rounded when it came to their military technology. Their ships, though not as large as Zetylian vessels or as heavily armed, tended to be more durable and adaptive than Zetylian ships. Lotofer Carbon, a unique material invented by the Kaeolians, was significantly more durable than Zetylian ship armor per layer, meaning Kaeolian ships could have the same durability as a Zetylian ship twice their size. Kaeolian antimatter cannons, in addition to being powerful, were more adaptive than Zetylian weaponry, as antimatter blasts could be shaped and fired in a multitude of ways, allowing ships to change their roles in the middle of combat. On the ground, Kaeolian troops, by nature, were less powerful than Zetylian troops, forcing the Kaeolians to heavily rely on robots, mechs and large vehicles during ground skirmishes. Genetic engineering, one of the Kaeolian's signature technologies, aided them considerably on the ground, as they were able to engineer their troops to be more effective, reducing the need for mechanized support. A frequent defensive tactic used by the Kaeolians involved the engineering of various types of hostile fauna and flora that they would then populate one of their colonies with. These plants and animals would attack Zetylian invaders alongside Kaeolian forces, improving the colony's defenses overall.

The greatest technological feat of either civilization, though, were the superweapons they both developed. While many were never put into actual use, most still remained as testements to the technological might of both civilizations even after the war was complete. The Zetylian Tech Inhibitor, a failsafe created by the Zetylians near the end of the war, was intended to be used as a killing blow against the Kaeolians, but was never activated in time, and instead began charging up over 200,000 years later during the Second Cluster War. Using their cyborganic engineering, the Zetylians also created EBNO, a complex cyborganic virus that could transform almost any piece of technology into a cyborganic weapon that would fight on behalf of the Zetylians. Kaeolian superweapons, while not always as inventive, usually guaranteed results better than Zetylian superweapons. Their widely-feared Swapper Bombs could decimate entire Zetylian colonies instantly, but were difficult to manufacture and typically only used as a last resort. Some of the greatest Kaeolian superweapons were actually unique spaceships that possessed uncanny abilities, such as the Haluhvoshi and Myriad Terror. The most notable Kaeolian superweapons, however, were the creations of the Paragon Project that actually got an opportunity to be used in battle against the Zetylians. These included Astral Maulers and the Aanom, who would come to form an independent army after the war was concluded known as the Aanom Legion.

Battle of Nianzid (298,384 B.C.E.)
First major attack made on a Kaeolian colony by Zetylian forces, commonly considered the battle that started the entire war. A large Zetylian invasion fleet entered orbit of a moderately-sized Kaeolian colony, Nianzid. A large force comprised of numerous infantry platoons and light cyborganic vehicle accompaniment was sent down to the planet and began destroying nearby settlements. The unprepared colonists were only able to organize a light defensive force that was quickly destroyed by the invading Zetylians. Extensive damage was done to the planet's infrastructure and no Kaeolians managed to survive the incursion, as they were all either killed on the ground or in transports that were shot down as they attempted to escape the planet. Nianzid was completely decimated, and the Zetylians suffered very few losses.

Battle of Keslarotar (297,886 B.C.E.)
First major attack made on a Zetylian colony by Kaeolian forces. A sizable Kaeolian assault fleet entered orbit of a large Zetylian colony, Keslarotar. Ground-to-space cannons picked off numerous incoming dropships, but several did manage to break through and land. Mechanized infantry platoons assisted by gunship squadrons and heavy vehicle divisions attacked Zetylian defense installations and planetary infrastructure, dealing considerable damage to the Zetylian presence on the planet. The Zetylian colony was not fully destroyed, but enough damage was done to the planetary defense systems so that the Kaeolian forces could retreat effectively with only moderate losses.

Battle of Mollim (260,184 B.C.E.)
Major assault launched by Kaeolian forces on the Zetylian manufacturing colony of Mollim. Though ground-to-space cannon defenses were minimal, a very large defense force was located on the planet surface, which included many heavy infantry divisions, heavy vehicle accompaniment and ultraheavy cyborganic vehicles. The Kaeolian invasion force, though also very large, was quickly destroyed by Zetylian planetary defenses. Orbital bombardment proved to be too ineffective to destroy the remaining ship and weapon factories located on the planet, which prompted the deployment of a Swapper Bomb. The bomb was configured to teleport a chunk of a star currently occupied by a Kaeolian Dyson Sphere in place of its target. Upon detonation, a large portion of the planet's surface was teleported into space and the star chunk was teleported in place of it, which quickly expanded and vaporized the entire planet within seconds. Most Kaeolian ships were already out of the area upon detonation, preventing further losses from being suffered.

Battle of Ghaluvox (237,772 B.C.E.)
Space battle between Kaeolian and Zetylian forces, close to the Kaeolian research colony of Ghaluvox. A Kaeolian fleet comprised of numerous battleships and siege frigates encountered a Zetylian fleet comprised of a few ultraheavy cruisers and several heavy frigates approaching the colony, which they immediately engaged. Kaeolian forces quickly gained the advantage until Zetylian reinforcements arrived, causing the Kaeolian ships to become outnumbered. 2 Astral Maulers were deployed to the battle from the nearby colony, which quickly went to work dispatching all Zetylian forces. Though one Mauler was badly injured, the other managed to tear apart the ultraheavy cruisers, crippling the attack power of the Zetylian fleet. The remaining Zetylian forces retreated shortly afterward.

Battle of Jrindet (228,336 B.C.E.)
Space battle between Kaeolian and Zetylian forces, near the distant Zetylian outpost of Jrindet. A Zetylian defense fleet appeared in orbit around the planet to attack an invading Kaeolian fleet. The Zetylian fleet was comprised only of a few heavy cruisers and frigates, but it had also been equipped with a dormant copy of EBNO that was implanted into every ship. The Kaeolian fleet was significantly larger, comprised of several battleships, heavy cruisers and anti-light frigates. Fighting ensued, in which almost all of the Zetylian ships were annihilated. Upon destruction, these ships exploded into EBNO spores that attached onto the Kaeolian ships and began to infect them. Within minutes, several Kaeolian ships had been infected with EBNO and were rapidly succumbing to the cyborganic virus. These ships eventually succumbed completely and began to attack the remaining Kaeolian ships, who retreated as they were now outnumbered.