Good morning and happy Monday from New England!
I hope this new year has given you some semblance of joy, motivation, growth, or all three. So far, it’s looking to be a ridiculous year so far from the news in real life. There’s exciting roads ahead for the Civ genre as a whole this year, so you’ll see some of the info in this week’s edition.
Ready for the news?
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured image is a view of Verdant Valley, in Commonwealth. Located north of the city’s center in Shopside, it has seen massive growth over the past month thanks to Loo_wee_gee and other efforts in the region, with magnificent builds (this is only a taste of what’s there!) You can also see the greenery-adorned Tricon headquarters in the far background. Ever since I first visited the area, it’s undergone a complete transformation from lush jungle wilderness to the great makings of a High Street. Great work, and can’t wait to see what’s next!
Featured Article
This week’s featured article was contributed by ArtificialDriver.
The Gabon Corporation was a publicly traded Gabonese multinational conglomerate corporation operating in the fields of industry, consumer goods, agrigulture and construction. The corporation was based in Salisbury, Gabon and was the first major shareholder-owned company to be established on CivClassic with operations in 7 separate countries. Its predecessor, the GabonXP Corporation was founded by FKA_Twink, Gobblin and BritishWanderer on October 7th 2020 as a means to profit off the server’s XP market.
Its goal was to produce affordable XP and ship it globally. The company went public in December 2020, allowing any member of the public to purchase shares for which the Corporation would pay out dividend every quarter. The Corporation would later merge with Salisbury Holdings and G&W Co. into what would be known as the Gabon Corporation. At its peak the Corporation would make over 6000 diamonds and pay out 1400 diamonds in quarterly dividends to its shareholders who held a total of 4000 shares. The Gabon Corporation’s spiritual successor, the Monument Group, is currently operating in on CivMC. (Full article…)
The logo of the Gabon Corporation, created by BritishWanderer.
Current Events
A view of Griffin’s Harbour district, with a brand new ship built by Seekinq.
Imperial Federation, Southwest & Central
- Estalia’s auction of eight central shop plots at 0,0 has raised over 600 diamonds at the time of writing, with several being sold for 50 diamonds.
- The Commonwealth’s Prime Minister, OakShelf, has decided to resign after serving for one month. A successor has not been named at the time of writing.
- The dissolution of the Hyperborean Confederation was announced by SpacemanSpleef, after weeks of inactivity in the nation. Spleef hopes that the territory would be used for newfriend territory.
- Imperial Federation citizen Coolchacha97 has apologized after making threats of obbybombing Arnen, after being misundestood as serious following the Four Hour War in the Temporal Isles.
- The country also finished a series of elections:
- The January federal elections for the Imperial Federation have resulted in a victory for Jalhf, with a plurality of 38 votes after two rounds.
- Regentsburgh also held an election for its Senate, with Juicy_Watermelon winning with 12 votes.
The Northwest
- Icenia’s elections resulted in 33 people casting more than 200 votes, with many oldfriends being elected for another month to the council.
- The Icenia courthouse’s opening was delayed after councillor Gjum was attacked following an attempted terrorist operation. The opening still continued as planned.
- DonFuer, a building group with fifteen 2b2t iterations under its belt, announced that it would be building on CivMC and is actively taking applications to play in their faction.
- “Arnen” has declared “war” on “Otonabee”, after adding several people to its inner council. This is almost entirely a joke by dredd_kiji.
- Not a Northwest section but there’s nowhere else to put it – wjkroeker is no longer pearled!
Alenarith & Southeast
- Mount Augusta has once again made a slew of amendments to its constitution, making the country’s laws similar to its previous iterations.
- Danzilona has been “embroiled” in a war with Cortesia Del Mar, after the country realized the territory of Imbolc, intended as a part of Danzilona, was mistakenly still part of Cortesia Del Mar. It was intended to be handed over to Danzilona but the transfer was neglected for months, resulting in this war.
- While Danzilonan operatives placed a defensive tank on CDM’s border on Wednesday, and continued their offensive into Thursday, CDM deployed an opposing tank on Friday to fight back.
- Keep in mind, this entire conflict is strictly roleplay, which is at least funny, but not the conflict that’s generally seen in actual wars on Civ.
- Danzilona also has several pending bills in their legislative session, set to make sweeping changes to their defensive and foreign affairs as well as abolishing their national government altogether in favour of worker cooperatives.
- RacconOnCrack along with others perpetrated several raids last week.
- Shadowvdark reported that much of Venne’s wealth was raided by them after unpearling them months ago.
- After attempting a raid on Calw, Doom City, Estalia, and ISP associates chased and pearled four of the five raiders present, and RacconOnCrack is currently being held by Nara.
- Interestingly, the raids are only the second major time that he’s logged onto the server – it’s evident when seen on civmc.tk.
Lyrean Community & Northeast
- Pavia’s tireless workers have dug two different rail tunnels, one connecting up a long-desired connection with Icenia and another nearing completion with Estalia at 0,0. Crossposted from the Desk of Domi.
- Additionally, the country shuffled a lot of land grants under Gobblin II, creating two new counties with new Counts under the Duchies of Avalonna & Braemar.
- Lambat put several locations under historical protection, with three of four locations being in Pioneer Village.
- Yoahtl’s PVP events have been expanded to include 1.9 style PvP after CivReign announced 1.9 PvP would be in use in its next iteration.
- Djani’hweh (Mery) has opened up a port in their territory, open for trading.
- Bigfatpigeon789 is wanted by SPQR, although no particular reason was stated.
- Someone has bombed the Dirt Islands, located near Novo Sanjurjo, with Hakr_ relinquishing claims to the territory.
Server Administration News
- Another Civ server named “Civballs” (not to be confused with the art form of the same name) is in development, hoping to construct and rewrite plugins with more superflous UI and better performance.
- Currently headed by OnceDoceTrece, you may have seen these exceedingly complicated FactoryMod trees in discord chats. As a modded player, I am both excited and scared…
- CivVie has not reopened since December 27, however one of the developers has signaled to “stay tuned”…
- CivReign’s latest announcement has banned botting from its upcoming iteration.
- They stated that “CivReign wishes to be ‘a different civ server,’” stating that the admins considered botting to be simply not a fit for this specific server.
- Reactions have generally been mixed, and raised questions about enforcibility, the use of mods like JSMacros for casual use, and Kira.
- Additionally, the upcoming release has also forced users to self-verify at their hub, even if they have been verified already.
- CivRev is launching its open beta next month, however, the entry process for the server has made people somewhat concerned:
- While it is an open beta, Owain is introducing a whitelist and invite system, meaning that players will need to apply to gain access to the whitelist pre-launch, and then those people will be able to invite others onto the server post-launch.
- This has been met with confusion and frustration, as this was advertised as a way to prevent prebans, but has made the process more confusing.
- Additionally, more CivRealms mainstays have announced to return for CivRev, along with new features like autofarming, the previously announced earth map that would wrap around, adding guns, and vehicles. It does look like it’s intended to mimick a real life world.
- While it is an open beta, Owain is introducing a whitelist and invite system, meaning that players will need to apply to gain access to the whitelist pre-launch, and then those people will be able to invite others onto the server post-launch.
- CivMC now has an amazingly crafted Portal landing page on CivWiki, made by Red_Steel. It’s a page where you can easily find categories and explore pages on CivWiki. She’s done some amazing work the wiki and it’s like I always imagined it for each server to have its own portal for its own content. Great work!
The Fun Stuff
The snowy hamlet of Esberg, in the Imperial Federation, taken by Frostwarrior.
Builds
- I really like the idea behind the Mery build right here, it’s a nice cozy port on the water and with a little more development it’s going to look great.
- Ok, but can we appreciate the detail that went into the Danzilonan tanks? As well as the CDM tanks? Honestly, even though this is RP the effort is really good
- I really like the small scale style of Topher’s Environmental Outreach Building
- The Imperial Federation has been creating several new builds: I already highlighted Esberg’s striking locations, but also Aethia’s great mountains, a great clocktower in Anor Londo and uh…a new skyscraper in Ohio?
- Pavia’s city is getting filled up with all of the plots in the town’s primary thoroughfare having been filled!
- Griffin is still popping builds left and right as always, the latest additions being their harbour with a complete ship! Of course, the rest of Adria looks really good as well in these series of renders from Seekinq.
- The Commonwealth has been on a small building spree – I highglighted the grandeur of Verdant Valley this week, but there are also row houses in Petergrad and a factory building, as well as the West Gate that was made by Enna last week.
Multimedia Projects
- Imperial Federation’s election maps are always a treat – it’s extremely fun to see a regular election map with such great graphic style.
- Kaprediem – releases another video thing? Will he touch grass? Find out next time…
- Not a build, but this Distant Horizons project is starting to get pretty far. Very excited to see how it turns out in the end!
Memes
- Former Lusitanianian banyough is begging for newfriend help
- This bombing was a worse attempt than Gantoe, he even said it himself
- I never get the pet memes and this Moloka meme certainly doesn’t clear things up
- No, I’m not going to dedicate 927 paragraphs for Commonwealth lore about a stupid sheep
- Another round of wjkroeker memes
- Pergy are you sure you’re not having a stroke
- Well, I guess you can build it like a gingerbread house…
Economics
Starting in February, this section will be transitioning to paid advertisements.* More details to follow soon.
- The Pavia CivMarket exchange had stayed pretty stable throughout the last week, with the exception of a small blip that caused a small price spike last weekend.
- The Monument Group is selling to the global market, offering XP, Prot and Tools, with delivery respect to Doom Delivery.
- Atlas Loot has opened a mob drops shop in Icenia, along with their franchise location in Nara.
Metagame Highlights
- DockerImage’s PvP tier list. I don’t have more to say because I risk offending someone.
- Another one of Prawny’s graphs visualizing the land area of countries across the server – or at least the relevant continents!
- GTAIV implores you to contribute to the Distant Horizons project.
- GuggaBugga asks about the aspects of Pearled Life and why there are very few documents about it, as well as Traveler Houses
- The fact that newfriends do not know how to mine only pushes me one step closer towards making a full Getting Started guide again – please don’t make me
Resolute Cry for Help
A view of Lake Suwa, on the border between Gensokyo and Nara. Taken by GTAIV, with the help of the Distant Horizons project.
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter!
A huge thank you to ArtificialDriver, who reached out to me and wrote a featured article for this week. A well-deserving featured article as well.
Also thanks to Yodabird19, Des23, Creepi0n, and BritishWanderer for reviewing this last night. Thanks to them so that this newsletter remains high-quality.
Final thanks this week goes to Red_Steel, who’s been hard at work on the CivWiki and has made this amazing portal page for CivMC this past week. It looks amazing and it’s been a great improvement to navigation across the wiki.
If you want to see your stuff in the newsletter, reach out to me whether you want to write some featured writing or make a featured article. (If you’re wondering, Featured Articles only need a small section on any topic on Civ that has an article on the wiki so far.) Alternatively, you can submit this form, and I’ll read anything you have. Although, I’m very impartial to featured articles.
Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next week!
As always…