Introduction:

In the time of BattleNations, before Boss Strike was created, before the implementation of guilds, and before the battles of the invasions, there was not much going on within the game. Devoted and long time players got bored and developed there own gangs or as they called them, "clans." In the beginning there was only a few, BSR, BNA, VR, BOA to name a few. They developed these clans to wage war against other clans. War was basically sending each other occupations until one side could not send or beat the occupations anymore. And so the story of Phoenix begins...

January 2013... three people tried to start up 3 different clans at the same time… I guess it was about time… a few clans had recently fallen, and there wasn’t really a lot of action in the c&g… besides of course, BNA handing Violent Resolutions (VR) defeat in a few small skirmishes. Dachigenius (current Phoenix member), created a clan called RAD, another player named Blackgrgoyle made Phoenix, and another player named shadow512 made BBB.

Really, none of us were any good, but we carried around a certain swagger and thought we were cool, so that was all fun and you know, we lived in our own little world, no concern of the Z2 forums or anybody else. I’m not sure when or who it was, but I think it was blackgrgoyle who had the idea of merging all three clans together into a combined clan. After all was said and done, the combined clan was called Phoenix.

Phoenix, at the time of the merge, had about 15 people, but they were good, with well known players such as purushagovinda, djhop, and blackgrgoyle headlining the group. I think the BBB had two people. No joke. And one of them was a VR spy. RAD (and I know this to be exact) had 17. Really, it was a bunch of level 40s like myself and dachigenius, but I think there were two level 50s (max level at the time) in kabw88 and crusher800 (current Phoenix member). We still kinda sucked, but hey, at least we had some numbers.

Well that lasted about a week. Not sure what started it, but dachigenius decided to pull RAD out of the alliance that we had. And in doing so, he attempted to turn the Z2 forums against us. And thats when the fun began.

I joined blackgrgoyl's side and went with Phoenix, taking as many RAD players as I could. BBB joined Phoenix, and no Phoenix members went to rad, so I think we had some strength in numbers at that point. I think it was at that time that purush, a well known, good player who helped mentor me, defected to BNA (thats 1).

So at that point, you could kinda see some tension developing between the two clans (Phoenix and RAD)…

I think we both wanted to destroy each other...but RAD really didn’t have much strength besides crusher800 and it took abouttwo weeks of back and forth to get a war started. It was inevitably going to happen, but RAD never really had much of a chance. At first, I think blackgrgoyle kinda underestimated crusher800, as I was the guy who was supposed to be occupying him throughout the war (did someone say mismatch?). Eventually djhop came in to assist my occupations, and once the rest of RAD was cooked, everyone in Phoenix ganged up on crusher800, and at the same time BNA joined in, until RAD finally surrendered. And thats when Phoenix felt REALLY cool. At that point, I think I thought my rank 3 mini tanks could win wars against anybody.

Well, our recruiting spiked a little (40 members!), I was bumped up to high command and immediately began recruiting crusher800 before I realized that he wasn’t budging, so I kinda gave up. We had no strength whatsoever, especially after djhop left for BNA shortly after the war ended (that’s two). I think myself and 2 other members of Phoenix, combined for 3,000 forum posts in like, a month. We had a lot of inactives, but us three made it seem like we didn’t. One of our inactives was blackgrgoyle, but no one really cared because we weren’t really doing anything. And it stayed that way for three months. Then April 2013 rolled around.

BNA wanted us, VR, RAE, RAD, and any militias that were to form to all fight against bna. They had recently challenged BSR to a war, who declined, so they wanted a formidable opponent. Well, it seemed like a good idea, until we realized that BNA had already beaten RAE and VR, and that we weren’t going to change the outcome of anything at all. But we went along with it, and our second war was scheduled.

Well blackgrgoyle knew we were going to get crushed. He found it as an opportunity to leave Phoenix, as he didn’t want to be leader anymore. We had n0 organization, n0 strength, and waaayyyy too much confidence. I never knew why he didn’t just quit, but he wasn’t really trying to win the war. He made false claims of having the strength to beat them without help and lied about our armies. When VR and RAE backed out of the war, we were the only ones left fighting a war we couldn’t win. We pretty much pissed everyone off, saying we had backup (which never came) and saying we had armies (which never existed).

Two private messages were sent to me that changed everything. I was told by the BNA that if we removed blackgrgoyle from leadership and I took over they would stop the attacks. I tucked it away without responding, there was no way we were doing that… until another message came in. One of our members, told me that blackgrgoyle was acting strange, which he was, I mean, he wasn’t active, he had gone around creating 5 of these weird spy clans, and no longer paid any attention to his first, Phoenix. He suggested we kick him. So then I showed him the message from BNA, and we executed it.

Well there really wasn’t much hope. The attacks from BNA had stopped, but everyone hated us, people thought our clan was dead, and if it wasn’t, VR was going to make it so. We had spies left and right. We got rid of the spies, rebuilt our ties with BBB, and somehow merged with RAD. I think the only reason dachigenieus did it was because RAD was on the outs as well, and I did it because well, we needed members, and I knew RAD had some strength since crusher800. Well the BBB thing lasted a week, but RAD definitely gave us some strength. I merged fenghuang (a separate clan I started) with Phoenix to hold together any divisions we may have had.

During this time, we established Phoenix as a democracy...and so an election was quickly held for leader. We didn’t know exactly what to do about the high command, but I think we collectively came up with the idea of electing five high command and then electing a leader out of that. Two of the remaining four would be diplomats, and the other two would be war council. They would each vote for things that fell under their category of work, and the only thing the leader would have is the tiebreaking vote in each.

But of course, in addition to all the internal stuff that was going on, we still needed to figure out all of the external problems that we had. VR declared war on us, and we had just gotten out of the war with BNA in which we were smashed. We didn’t even fight back against VR. The reason that VR was attacking us was not only because we blew off the war, but because I apparently “insulted” tourmby (the leader of VR and still currently) and claimed that we were better than them. I guess tourmby wasn’t too happy to see me become leader, and he tried to pull a BNA move and get me out of there. There were a lot of sides within VR that did not believe this to be true and were against a war with us. Eventually I think they saw the light and ended the war.

After that came a few months of doing nothing. We focused on getting stronger, stayed quiet and away from wars and for the most part, away from the forums. No one really thought much of us, they had no reason to, but being left alone allowed us to regroup and become stronger than ever before.

Finally, around mid-June of 2013, all of VR’s strength left for BNA. We felt that this was our chance to come out and get some of our reputation back, and also to revenge VR for trying to destroy us. The issue is that this came a little early for us. We really didn’t have the strength to knock out VR, and almost ended up losing the war anyways. I’m not sure how it ended, but we were definitely winning when I went for vacation. VR either assumed the war was over or ran out of troops. They stopped attacking. Eventually, we got tired of that and decided we had won and stopped attacking. VR’s claims of never stopping attacking were disregarded by the clan world and it was decided that we had won, finally beating a major opponent for the first time. Finally, we had arrived.

What happened next was what officially began to get our clan some publicity and part of the reason why we have the reputation we have today. We wanted another war. We began challenging clans left and right, not challenging anyone of real strength, but anyone who crossed us in the slightest of ways. All messages in any small argument contained: “Want to back that up with a war?” We bashed around a few clans, the most fun being FotS and KRA but didn’t get any wars out of it. However, we became one of the most recognized clans over the month of July and we weren’t even near the peak of our strength yet.

When BattleNations update 3.0 was released, as well as introducing Boss strike to the BN world, it resulted in me rage quitting. I was pissed at Z2. During my absence, Sharp104 took over as leader (not that he wouldn’t have won the election anyways), and he naturally being a better recruiter than me, we saw a beautiful spike in numbers, from 40 to 70. We became pickier and pickier and started to recruit some of our strongest members and had officially turned into a powerhouse. That first boss strike was important to us. We really wanted to beat VR (there never was and never will be any love between us) and ended up doing so by a few hours to tier 7, as that bs was ridiculously challenging with lower point rewards than normal. Only RAE, BNA, BSR, and BOA beat us. But as happy as we were with our performance, we saw another war coming.

It had to be timed in between boss strikes, so we agreed to war with damnation after the 2nd Boss Strike. Aannddd… well.. to give you an idea... I was using flame troops to clear occupations. We were sending out tanks, to only see wimps in return. This war ended quick with a Phoenix victory.

Then, after the next BS, we warred with VR themselves. I’m going to be straight with you, this war sucked. Neither side ever got an edge, and it seemed rather endless. Slowly both sides got bored and the attacking slowed. As the next BS started, neither side wanted to fold, so it just ended. I guess we should call it a draw. But this war did have a meaning. It showed that with the current occupation system, a war could not be won or lost in battle nations barring an overwhelming mismatch. Another war has not been fought since, and I highly doubt that unless Z2 fixes the system, we will ever another occupation war again.

After that war, there was a little bit of a fallout. Powerful players such as Eaglesdude, papabear chimmy, wildwilly (current Pheonix member), madman, and megaman all left for BNA. But everyone really stepped up. Eventually, we got tier 11. The quest towards 12 began and we were getting closer and closer every time. However, we started to realize that a lot of other top guilds wanted and were taking our players.

It was at that time in the winter of 2013-2014, that BSR sent an offer to our high command offering a complicated sort of family like deal… not merge but a way to help both guilds reach their goals. We accepted, and the “alliance” was formed.

The next BS we saw the results come through for us. Phoenix completed tier 12 for the first time, and BSR hit tier 13 becoming without a doubt the number 1 guild in all of BN. Both guilds have climbed their way up in the invasion leaderboard, and BSR got 1st before boycotting the most recent one. Phoenix worked their way up to 7th place in the most recent one. Also, in that time, phoenix2 has turned into a great feeder guild. The development of phoenix3 and 4 has also been great, as phoenix itself cannot handle the number of people that want to join, thus improving the feeders. The trend is still going up, and hopefully there are more great finishes to come!

We all hope you all stay and continue on the soaring ride (pun intended)!