Cirrus, you are brilliant. Heavily photoshopping something, shouldn't be for flags, save it for alliance announcement banners. NPO and NpO, in my opinion, have some of the best flags, along with VE and PPF.
This happened to me, back in the day of my first nation. It wasn't tech raiding, it was well before tech raiding was even done for the most part, they just wanted war. And they sucked at it.
One thing you might not have realised is that the truly great (small) alliances (which is what I think you're looking for) dont need to recruit here. They probably wont try and recruit someone at every opportunity - you need to find them yourself.
Midnight Blitz, Try and put their defcon to five, nuke 'em, CMs, Airforce Troops...
That'd devastate em pretty bad. And then after the update sabotage their nukes