Difference between revisions of "History of Sweden"

Revision as of 16:36, 16 November 2018

This article is based of an article by zzzingo: https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-history-of-esweden-2007-2017-2657669/1/20.

I. The Rise of an Empire

On the 20th November 2007, the New World was created. Sweden was one of the 43 original countries that were added to the game. There is limited information about what happened during these first days, but we know that the population in all countries were very small, since the invites that was needed in order to the game were rare at that time. The first political party in Sweden, Samlokaliseringspartiet, was started in late November 2007. They were the only party in the first presidential election on December 1st 2007. Their candidate, Landie, became the first president of Sweden.

Just like the rest of the countries in Scandinavia, Sweden had a slow start. Pakistan quickly became the country with the biggest population, a title that they would just keep for a few weeks before Sweden started to grow rapidly. A propaganda and flaming war would go on between these two countries for several years.

Timeline of the Swedish parties 2007-2016.

Three big political parties were created in December. Arbetarepartiet MSAP (Militant Socialist Workers Party) was formed on December 1st, FBS (Flashback Sweden) and DNA (Democrats of New Sweden) on the 18th. At that time more and more Swedish people started playing the game. More invites were available and threads about the game became popular on several internet forums. As the name suggests, the majority of the members of the Flashback Sweden party came from the Flashback forum, the most popular forum in Sweden. The majority of the DNS players came from another community called Gamereactor.

On the 19th of December 2007, Sweden became the country in eRepublik with the biggest population of about 500 people. Flashback Sweden quickly became the leading party of Sweden and won the Mayor elections in all Swedish regions in the that month, they would also become the biggest party in the world, with over 1000 members in early 2008.

The population continued to grow quickly. In early January 2008, there were more than 2000 people in Sweden. In January 2007, the Flashback Sweden candidate, Carradine, became the second Swedish president. He was followed by Ziggyzag (FBS as well) who would build up the Swedish Military that would soon frighten the enemies of Sweden.

Although the war module wouldn’t be added until April 2008, these weren’t very peaceful times as they may seem. All countries were preparing for the upcoming wars. The (Anti-Sweden) Northern Alliance was created in January 2008 by Norway, the United Kingdom, Romania and a few other countries as a response of the threat from Sweden who became bigger and bigger, with a population of almost 3000 citizens at that time.

Norway would be the next country to get a baby boom. In February, Sweden and Norway were two of the most populated countries in the world, and with the war module getting closer it looked like a war involving these countries was close. But on February 27th, Norway left the Northern Alliance and became allies with Sweden. As a result of that, the Northern Alliance would be dissolved before the release of the war module. A new alliance was created, the Nordic Alliance, with Sweden and many of the former anti-Sweden countries.

The war module was finally released on April 7th. The first battles were filled with bugs and it was very difficult to expect who would win since there were so few battles available. Sweden made a smart decision by waiting two weeks before initiating their first war, which also allowed them to build hospitals in all Swedish regions before the attack. On April 21st, Sweden attacked Denmark, in what would became known as the "Öresund War" in Sweden. The official reason of the attack was the fact that the Danish president Grev Per had insulted the Swedes by phrases like “Homoswedes”.

Two days later, Sweden had conquered Denmark without much resistance. Just a few days earlier Norway had conquered Finland. Both countries were now planning their next attacks. More and more countries opposed the Swedes. The Mediterranean Alliance, consisting of mainly countries in south and central Europe began to mobilize. Even Pakistan and Indonesia who were two of Sweden's main rivals would end up sending soldiers to fight against Sweden and Norway. As a result of that they started their next attack on May 1st, sooner than most expected. Sweden First Sweden-Germany War Germany, while Norway attacked Russia.

Even with the help from Asia, both wars were successful for the Swedes and Norwegians. Sweden conquered most the German regions and signed a peace treaty and let Germany keep a few regions in return of 500 gold. Norway conquered Russia and reached the height of it’s empire. They would keep these regions until late 2008 when they would meet resistance both internally and externally. The Finnish population started to grow fast and a political party with Finnish people would become the biggest party in the country and eventually take control of Norway. But that’s another story...

The agreement was humiliating for Germany who would soon attack Poland in order to get more regions. With help from Pakistan they were able to wipe Poland. But the German situation quickly became much worse as more and more Polish people joined the game and eventually took control of the country. Shortly later, the Swedes accused the Germans of breaking the agreement and declared war on them on July 18th 2008, a war that would be known as the second Sweden-Germany war. On the first day, Sweden met a lot of resistance as a result of all the help Germany got from other countries. On the next day, Sweden was on defense for the first time but managed to turn the war in their favor and eventually conquer all German regions, including their Polish ones. The Swedish empire had now reached it’s height, with a population of 4000 citizens and 32 regions under its control.

II. The decline of an Empire

The next challenge for the Swedish empire was the rapid growth of the Polish population. You may have seen a pattern here and the Swedes were afraid of ending up PTO:ed like Germany and Norway had been. A party consisting of Polish people in Sweden called “Polish Secessionist Front” even became the biggest party in the Swedish congress during one month. The Swedish government agreed to release the Polish regions in September 2008. In October, all regions were released during the following months and Poland and Sweden began a close cooperation that is still lasting with an exception for a period in 2012-2014. The Polish population continued to grow after its liberation and as a result of their baby boom, they would soon become the biggest country in the game. Sweden on the other hand, lost their spot in top 5 countries with the biggest populations.

A few months earlier, in August 2008, Sweden was one of the countries that founded ATLANTIS, one of the first big alliances in the game. Just a few days after it’s creation we saw the first world war, which started when Romania attacked Hungary, a member of the other big alliance at that time, Peace GC. Sweden played an important role in that war when they were able to move 80 soldiers to fight for Romania when they were about to lose the initial battle, effectively turning that battle for the Romanian side.

Together with a few other members of the alliance, including countries such as Spain, United Kingdom and USA, Sweden attacked France in December 2008, a war that would be known as Operation French Toast. Although the first battles were successful and Swedish forces were able to reach southeastern France, all Atlantis forces were pushed back out of France as a result of lack of cooperation between the countries.

On the 10th of January 2009, the Swedes had its next setback. During the Operation Burning Spirit campaign, Germany started resistance wars in all eight remaining regions held by Sweden. All regions were liberated in less than 24 hours.

Meanwhile, we began to saw more internal conflicts within Sweden. The Flashback Sweden party continued to dominate Swedish politics and won every president election until early 2010, while also holding most of the congress seats. In January 2010, a new party called FRONT was formed. During the upcoming two years they would become the first party to be able to challenge Flashback Sweden. Their discussions were often heated and involved accusations and smearing. This is likely the period when Swedish politics were most active but on the other hand it caused many players to quit the game.

Another important event within the Swedish community was the coup of MSAP (the communist party), a quite big but very controversial party. Especially after they had fought for Germany against Sweden in order to combat what they called imperialism. The coup took place in the party president election in April 2009. A group of Swedes with people such as Neppons and Westerberg that previously had couped and robbed Malaysia had returned home and looked for their next target. They managed to take control of MSAP and renamed it to Neppoleons Nationalgarde. Shortly later they left the party and started the new party “Nationalgardet”. Although it’s not the same party as the one that is active today it has several connections to the current one.

Sweden’s alliance, Atlantis, had a difficult time against the Peace GC alliance and the situation wouldn't improve. In May 2009, there was an important president election in Sweden. The Flashback Sweden candidate, Kalle Holm, promised to start a third war against Germany if he would be elected. But the problem was that Germany was about to join the Atlantis alliance at that time. Sweden, on the other hand, were bloodthirsty. With the exception of a few training battles there hadn’t been any wars for the Swedes for some months. Kalle Holm won the election and the attack on Germany was likely the nail in the coffin for the alliance.

But what about the war itself? It’s an interesting one. The war was quite even during the first days. But when it was time for the congress election, some Polish citizen were able to take control of the German congress. This was done with the help of many multies and as a result of that Germany was able to take control of most of the congress seats again after several of these players got banned. At the same time, Sweden had several infiltrators within the German community, all organized by the Swedish Military and their masterminds Misho and Kape. These infiltrators gained a lot of respect within the community and one of them, Shoot, ran for presidency in June 2009 with the promise of ending the war with Sweden. Thanks to some help from Swedish and Polish people who voted for him, Shoot become the president of Germany during the war between Sweden and Germany. He “betrayed” his country and made sure that Germany lost all battles against Sweden, resulting in another wipe of Germany. Shoot would later move to Sweden and work in the government, before eventually becoming president of Sweden later that year.

The MSAP party was couped several times in 2009, but were able to recover. On the other hand, internal conflicts arose within the party. A new party called Folkhemsdemokraterna (FHD) was formed in December 2009 by mainly people from the MSAP party. This party attracted people who found themselves between the far left MSAP party and the centre party of Flashback Sweden. One interesting thing to note about this party is that parts of the cost to start the new party was provided by people from right-wing parties who wanted to divide the left side of Swedish politics. A few weeks later there were some changes on the right-wing as well. A new party called Liberala Vikingar was formed, they would later simply be known as “Partiet”.

A few more scandals continued to shake Swedish internally during 2010. The money in the Central Bank was stolen in January, most likely by a person in the government, but thanks to the help from admins, the money were returned to Sweden. In July, the newly elected Swedish president, Per-Otto, decides together with the newly elected Norwegian president to betray their countries. Norway declared war on Sweden and when it started, the Swedish president retreated in every battle. This resulted in the first wipe of Sweden. Both presidents were impeached but the damage was already done, the war cost a lot of money for both countries, especially since the United Kingdom saw a chance in attacking an almost defenseless Norway at the same time. The communist party MSAP and one of their leading politicians Radsoc reached the president seat for the first time after the impeachment. It should also be noted that the ability for the president to retreat was removed shortly after this incident.

III. A New Hope

At this time the Swedish population was quickly declining. Several factors contributed to this, including lack of war and the failure of the new eRepublik version, Rising. One can say that a new era began in November 2010 when Valnad was elected as president. During his six months in office, the population started to grow again. One important factor was the creation of the Union with Denmark that was founded in late November 2010. Norway also got a offer to join the union and although they, just like Denmark, had problems with foreigners trying to take over their country, they wanted to have their own country. The name of the union “Homonavia” was a reference to the former Danish president Grev Per who had called the Swedes “Homoswedes” a few years earlier. It should also be noted that many players became much more hopeful for the future for the game after the developers had acknowledged and reverted many of the mistakes in the” Rising” version of the game.

The next important event happened on the 12th of January 2011. On that day, admins added a few new borders to the game. Two of them were the new borders Sweden got with Lithuania and Latvia. These countries had created a Baltic alliance called ABC together with Estonia and it was just a question of time before a war would start. Within a few weeks Sweden attacked Lithuania. At that time Sweden were a bit stronger, resulting in a quite even war that Sweden had a slight advantage in. The countries agreed to convert the war into a training war, while Sweden would keep one of the Lithuanian regions which gave them bonus to food production.

In April 2011, Sweden left EDEN and instead joined the newly created ONE alliance. One month later Sweden attacked Russia and manage to push into Siberia until China attacks them. Sweden is pushed back to their cores but manages to defend themselves there and also ends the war against China. At the same time, several resistance wars were started in Sweden, including in the Swedish regions in northern Germany that German people wanted to take back.

In June 2011, the newly elected Swedish president Lonestar attacked Canada and conquers several regions there before being forced to fall back a few weeks later. Another attack on Canada takes place in October but ends within a few days.

The Union with Denmark suffered from one great problem. The different communities weren’t able to integrate into each other. Most of the Danish people joined a party called Norsefire. They made several attempts to win the president election during the summer of 2011. The problem was just the fact that almost all Swedish parties supported Swedish candidates. This angered many Danes and the union was ended in August 2011. Most of the Danish people left Sweden and they eventually created the Germark union together with Germany, which is still active. But some Danish people decided to stay in Sweden and there are still several real life Danes in Sweden. And five years later, in August 2016 Sweden finally got its first IRL-Danish president.

In November 2011, Sweden once again got a controversial president, Jim Parsons. Together with a few other players from the Flashback party, he and his government helped Serbian people take over Norway, something that would cause a lot of problems for the Norwegian people for a very long time. But the Swedes would soon pay their price as well. The Swedish president was impeached and was once again replaced by a MSAP politician, this time by Raticon. On December 20th 2011, Russia, Finland and Norway declared war on Sweden. After two weeks of fighting, Sweden gets wiped at 16.16 local time on the 7th of January 2012. This is the first time Sweden gets wiped in a “legitimate” way.

A new party was founded during these events in December 2011, three right-wing parties merged and became the biggest party in Sweden, Nationalgardet. Their main goal was to create an alliance between the Nordic countries, but their first task would be to clean up the mess after Jim Parsons and the wipe of Sweden. Valnad once again ran for presidency in January 2012 and during his two months as president managed to take back all regions and turn the state treasury from being negative due to its debts to Swedish soldiers to over a million SEK. It was also decided to let Russia hire the region of Bohus, a region they would keep for over two years. This event also became the end of the occupation of regions in Northern Germany where Sweden had been gaining production bonuses more or less since the beta. But it should be noted that there were periods when the countries agreed to let Sweden control these regions.

IV. Brotherhood

The Nationalgardet party had already started to discuss with Finnish and Norwegian representatives about a future alliance between the Nordic countries before the coup of Norway, but the relations between the countries were at an all time low after these events. Another problem was that Sweden had left EDEN alliance while Finland and Norway had stayed there, which caused the countries to end up on different blocks in the world politics.

Several presidents from the Nationalgardet party continued to work for the creation of a Nordic alliance. Two of the main people behind the idea were Westerberg and Neppons and during the latter’s presidency in August 2012, the Asgard alliance was created with Sweden and Finland as founding members. This was a dream that came true for many people, already in the beta there had been discussions about something like a Nordic alliance, but it never reached the main agenda. Norway were also part of the discussions but decided to stay in EDEN for some time, but eventually joined Asgard in late April 2013. Canada also joined the alliance around that time. Several other countries expressed interest in joining, including the Netherlands, Japan and Ireland. Most of these attempts were vetoed by Sweden, who wanted to stay with the original idea of having a local alliance.

But as many of you probably remember, the Asgard alliance had many problems. For the first time ever, Sweden found themselves on the other side as Poland. Poland instead supported the ABC countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. A few days after the creation of Asgard, the war with Latvia and Lithuania broke out. Estonia were already at war with Finland at that time. Sweden lost almost all of the wars during the first weeks, while the Finland-Estonia war was more even until Latvia joined it. Sweden were able to win most RWs in the war, but in early November 2012, Poland decided to help out. A few days later both Sweden and Finland ended up getting wiped. The war between the Asgard and ABC countries continued until a peace was agreed upon in December 2012.

The war would start again after just two months. This new war would go on for more than a year and followed a similar pattern as the last one. The Baltic countries had the upper hand and Poland decided to help out several times when Sweden won too many resistance wars. Russia, who still controlled the region of Bohus, helped the Asgard countries several times, although they didn't directly attacked Poland or Lithuania, they could block their advances.

More and more people within the Asgard countries were getting tired of the alliance. Sweden was without congress for the first time in February 2013. Canada decided to leave the alliance in August 2013. But there were still many people who wanted to keep Asgard alive. Some progress were made in early 2014. A few more MPPs were signed and the alliance started to cooperate with the newly formed Asteria alliance.

Internally in Sweden, we saw several scandals during these years as well. The SSE-scandal took place in June 2012, when a Swedish Military Unit tried to use a one million SEK bribe to win the president election. In February 2013, the communist Party MSAP proposed a successful impeachment a few minutes before the Swedish congress would be removed due to a wipe. The young MSAP politician Kamrat Anka became the new president. But instead of following the orders from his party, he understood that the impeachment was unfair and instead decided to cooperate with the right wing parties.

The Asgard situation became a bit more better in spring 2014. Sweden finally saw an end of the non-stop wars. There were a few wars during 2014 against Lithuania, Germany and Poland but Sweden were “only” without congress two months that year, September 2014 would also be the last time. Another factor was the first resource war in mid-2014, where Sweden made sure that there wouldn’t be any regions with bonuses that its neighbors were missing.

Although the situation had improved, the Asgard alliance became less and less active. As a result of that Finland decided to leave the alliance in October 2014 and instead joined the Pacifica alliance. Sweden and Norway stayed in the Asgard alliance for some time while looking at their options for the future. Asgard was declared as dissolved in February 2015. Several countries made efforts to bring Sweden into the Pacifica alliance. But Sweden decided to instead be one of the founding members of Orion. An alliance that they would stay in for less than a year before finally joining Pacifica in March 2016.

V. Continuous Decline

The activity within the Swedish community saw a continuous decline during the years in Asgard. Being without regions or congress for many months didn’t help with this either. Compared to many of its neighbors, Sweden had lost much of it’s war capabilities as well. Germany and Lithuania were now much stronger than Sweden individually, something that wasn’t the case 2-3 years earlier. In 2014-2015, we also saw a fast decline of the Swedish forum, which then mostly became an archive of it’s former glory, the Swedish IRC channels met a similar fate during these years as well. These were the two primary meeting places in Sweden for the past seven years. But something happened during the more recent years within the community, less and less people were interested in the politics and the meta-game. We also began to see more and more presidents with just one goal; keeping the country afloat.

The rise of “Antiplatoism” also needs to be mentioned. The old communist party MSAP, has since early 2015 changed their agenda as they likely became the first major “Anti-Plato” party. Since then they have tried their best at reducing the activity in Sweden, with their main goal to stop all MPPs, lowering all taxes and maximizing the minimum wage in order to make it impossible to play the game for anyone in Sweden and to put pressure on the developers of the game by doing so.

The Dictatorship module was released in early 2015 and threatened Swedish democracy several times. The first military coup attempt was started by the Swedish president who wanted to create an defensive dictatorship without the support from the congress. Swedish people fought against each other but most of the stronger players decided that democracy would be the way to go. A total of three foreign coup attempts took place during the following year. The first one was very serious but Sweden were able to defend its democracy, while the other two never were close to succeed. As a result of this, Sweden is one of few countries that never has been ruled by a dictator. One of less than ten countries, as far as I know.

Sweden has learned its lesson after the years in Asgard, that it’s important to not have too many enemies in its neighborhood. The problem during the past years has even been the opposite and the Swedish people have been frustrated at the lack of wars. As a result of that we saw the desperate airstrike on Bulgaria in April 2015, which failed and cost tons of money. Three more successful wars were the ones against the United Kingdom in 2016 and later the attack on the Netherlands in January 2017. Two airstrikes have been used in 2017, the first one, against Ukraine, failed after a very even battle. The second one took place against Indonesia in October. Together with American forces, Sweden were able to successfully land on the Indonesian islands and managed to stay there for two weeks.

After the end of Asgard, Swedish territory has only been threatened two times. Both times by Albania who brought Bolivia and Paraguay with them to visit northern Europe in late 2015 and in September 2017 when they went to war against Pacifica together with Turkey and Italy.

Another important event for Sweden during the past years was the introduction of the air module in late 2016. The pilots in the Swedish Air Force have played an important role in many battles and is one of the reasons why Sweden is considerably stronger in air than ground. Another positive event was the introduction of a Discord server for the Swedish community, which have helped it become a bit more active in 2017, 35 000 messages were sent in the chat during its first year.

As Sweden's alliance, Pacifica, was weakened more and more in 2017-2018, Sweden started to found itself in a new position. During 2018, Sweden has been a target of seven airstrikes. The first one, from Switzerland was defended. In February, Sweden with allies airstrikes Croatia in an effort to help USA, but the airstrike is defended. In April 2018, Venezuela and Uruguay attacks Sweden and in late May Venezuela once again attacks Sweden. In June, South Korea attacks Sweden with another airstrike. In July 2018, Sweden and allies in Pacifica once again tried to help USA. The operation fails and USA leaves the alliance shortly after this event. This is answered by airstrikes from Cyprus and Venezuela on Sweden. Both lands, Venezuela is quickly driven out while Cyprus stays for several weeks until Poland comes to rescue. In September 2018, Sweden is attacked by Egypt. This is the most serious attack on Sweden and after several weeks of fighting, Sweden is left with a 10 man congress after Polish help.

The overall activity in the Swedish company has continued to decline during 2018 and as a result of this, the Swedish forum was shut down on November 25 2018. During the 11 year it existed there have been over 14 000 threads and more than 500 000 posts in it.

More reading

List of presidents of Sweden