CivWiki Monday Newsletter for March 6, 2023

Mar 6, 2023 • specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Spring Break from New England!

Yes, that’s right, I’ve suddenly been struck with a case of “vacation”; some might say this is a much earlier spring break than what you’d usually have but I would say, “yeah, you’re completely right, this is way too early for spring break isn’t not even spring yet”.

I’m not even writing this while I’m home, I’m currently in a car driving in the backseat finishing this newsletter, so thanks for all the nuisance everyone! This is now the longest newsletter by length, surpassing December 5th as the longest (that one was long because of the Speedy Coup, if y’all remember!)

Are we ready for (now) the longest newsletter to date, and probably will be for a while?

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is of the Rusty Bucket in Norlund on CivReign. A quiet little tavern built by NeoTide, it’s a cozy haven for tired and lonely newfriends looking for shelter. Plus, with Brewery getting released on CivReign soon (fingers crossed, Rekt) it’s going to be a great place to get your drunken wares. Probably one of the best builds on the server so far with the limited block selection and slow progression, I really have to commend NeoTide for pulling this off. Can’t wait to see what other builds we have!

Featured Article

This week’s featured article was written by Metriximor.

Lusitania’s iteration on CivClassic 2.0 was founded in September 2017 and located in the northwestern quadrant, on a small piece of land carved out of former Impasse land, with a name inspired by the Book of the Lusiads and a government loosely based on that of the United Kingdom. At first it was a two-man nation, with random periods of high activity during the Somber War, slowly growing and building new projects. By the end of 2020, it had grown into a fairly large community of people of all nationalities (mostly Portuguese), which continued to grow until the end of CivClassic 2.0, through the Infinity War, with a small part in defending the city during the Battle of Lusitania.

With a foreign policy of pacifism, it gained many friends and allies such as Lambat that still exist today, and a focus on producing “culture”, Lusitania was home to beautiful buildings like the Palácio D’Ouro, the Veneto Palace, a replica of a Portuguese Caravel, the great Centum Cellas Cathedral, great wine, lots of high quality Civball art, maps, an overland railway, and of course sunny beaches by the Medi Sea. Today, a new iteration of Lusitania exists on CivMC.

This week’s featured image picture is an overhead picture of the city of Portucale on CivClassic, taken by RektTangle.

CivMC News

A render of Cortesia del Mar, on CivMC, taken by Yodabird.

The main servers will be flip-flopping slots each week, so this week it’s CivMC’s turn to go first. What a week for them to be first.

Friendly Neighbors

”CivMC don’t cause a drama spit that results in an extremely long newsletter writeup” challenge, literally impossible

The Onset

Early in the week, Edius made a claims post, which happened to be overclaiming Grand Imperium. Of course, this would normally be a “they’re going to settle this on their own” situation. Many were confused by these events.

Oceanstar overclaimed Grand Imperium land. Gang Shi met Oceanstar after seeing she settled in the region, and promptly became friends with her due to a chill attitude
Gang Shi and Oceanstar alleged that she had no clue that the land was Grand Imperium.
Some in the comments were angry towards them for not recognizing that they were overclaiming, and they seemed to be under the impression that they weren’t doing anything wrong.
Due to the claims, Oceanstar was pearled over the claims by Awesome_Daniel and Matt4Fun9, two people that logged in for the first time in months.
Gang Shi immediately went in and freed her. This lead toward an escalation in arguments toward the leader of Grand Imperium alleging that he was entirely inactive and the claims were removed.
Soon after, Grand Imperium Emperor Attoprak posted a defense against their claims, arguing that this hostile takeover was supported by Gang Shi, with Gang Shi claiming that the only reason they were involved was due to wanting to help out Oceanstar who they saw as a “chill newfriend.”
- The post claimed that Gang Shi were engaging in similar hostile activity to Cordoba, such as bastioning locations, engaging in aggressive behavior, and stealth-TNT bombs. Many of these tactics were something that was uncovered only a couple weeks ago.
- The post mostly goes over Gang Shi’s actions with little concern on how active the country actually is, saying “We seeked only to enforce our claims as so many seem to insist we should, to legitimize the right to even exist.”
- Personally, I can’t wait for an op-ed to appear on here with the line “Those who seem to actively take pleasure in looking through the ass-crack thick crevices of artificial legitimacy”.
The post was generally well supported with many unhappy with Gang Shi’s behavior. Many offered advice for defensive measures, although most were suggesting to relocate or be more active.

The Gang Shi response (and even general sentiment) was a little skeptical about the actual activity of the country. Oceanstar, the leader of Edius, was rather apologetic as she had not been aware of Grand Imperium territory at the time, and only decided after surveying that the land had been abandoned.

Ths single windmill in Mons, Grand Imperium. This is what they were fighting over, just letting you know.

The Reaction

So most of the argument has already been laid out and the next few posts only are the same points but again:

Oceanstar says she had no clue, only knew about the server through DonFuer, and wished to settle the dispute peacefully without annexation from Gang Shi. That claim has been generally contested about her innocence.
Later that day, as Oceanstar came into the territory, she was pearled and supposedly secured, promptly being broken out by Gang Shi.
Attoprak the following day made another post outlining more aggression that’s been done, but it’s definitely not characterized properly:
- Much of the evidence was misappropriated into violence, or general disinterest when the meme game is filled with jokes from Icenia.
- The actual meat of the post was that despite Oceanstar’s claim, Gang Shi was intent upon securing Oceanstar’s independence., doing so with most of Gang Shi coming down to secure the hole that was made into a proper bunker.
The post has garnered relative disdain, with many being confused about the lack of snitch logs, supposed unwilling “diplomatic negotiations” on Grand Imperiums behalf despite supposed constant outreach from Gang Shi, and much more.

So finally, the post made by Wilson on Thursday was claiming Gang Shi had only been trying to help all along.

Weeks prior to this incident, Gang Shi took over an inactive Grand Imperium skybunker hole (at the time just an obsidian floor) due to security concerns of it being taken over by foreign powers after raised tensions with Estalia due to Cordoba and Kallos. They made a defensive bunker in its place. The bunker hole was seen to be “easily convertable” into hostile infrastructure with minimal effort.
- Grand Imperium was unaware of this due to their snitches culling until Wilson had given Attoprak a courtesy DM letting him know that his claims went inactive, and shortly after, Gwua offered to return the hole once activity resumed by Grand Imperium.
With much of the situation being blown out of proportion, he showed that he continued to reach out to attoprak following months of inactivity, no logs on the server since late September and concerns about others, like chosentwice, raiding Grand Imperium’s bunker
He continued to reach out to him in the general interest of keeping the area secure from other powers such as chosentwice, citing concerns about continued inactivity from the country, but was ultimately denied. He’s been generally uncommunicative towards Gang Shi until reaching out for negotiations.
Gang Shi also released a video of Oceanstar visiting, seeing the relative innocence from them and continued to help out a “cool newfriend”.

The Fallout

Eventually, Gang Shi gave up permissions on the vault hole in Grand Imperium. Gang Shi leadership reached out to me (or rather, Gjum reached out to them who communicated to me) with this note:

Gang Shi says no further action[s] will be taken in Grand Imperium so long as status quo is maintained and Oceanstar remains free, and they have no interest in claiming/pearling/interacting with Grand Imperium as a whole, and will leave negotiating borders to Grand Imperium and Edius, so long as they stay diplomatic. They also note that attoprak has reached out privately and wanted to hold a forum in Commonwealth that Gang Shi refuses to attend. We looks forward to putting this overblown situation finally to bed.

As a side note, Commonwealth agreed to the talks only if Gang Shi agreed as well, which they did not.

Late on Sunday night, m3ee, the leader of Bing Chilling that’s a part of Grand Imperium, wrote a long post seceding from the country. It gave some important context for those unknown to the situation (me)

Most of the country still was inactive and attoprak was unwilling to administer the territory, and attoprak was being contradictory in his orders to relocate the country he was asked to.
It didn’t help that attoprak believed that diplomacy would not be something that could work in this situation.
Due to continued inactivity from the country, m3ee and Bing Chilling decided to secede in order to better focus on his building efforts. He concluded with hopes to keep good relations but for the time being banned all Grand Imperium citizens.

I think that’s all I can say about this. At least one thing I can say about this iteration: people don’t seem to realize diplomacy is an option.

Around the Horn

Pavia’s skyline with the silhouette of the Town Hall in the background. Taken by Jezza. Totally didn’t include this for any other reason below!

I’ve learned by now that I should not analyze in depth for drama for things that aren’t concrete yet. Anyway…

Eastern Affairs

Pavian rumors last week eventually led to BritishWanderer revealing that negotiations with the Elysian Pact are currently undergoing to for the country to leave the alliance.
- In general, this has most likely a result of continued negative perceptions around the Elysian Pact following the Purple War and intervention.
- Somewhat related but there was a huge discord VC in CivMC’s main discord on Thursday following this announcement.
The Monument Group’s most recent share selling resulted in over 1,650 diamonds being spent for a total 150 shares in the company.
Lambat did a shuffle of its territories to “better management and allow local autonomy”
Lambat’s February census also showed that there was a small increase in Lambatan population this month
Danzilona (or, now rebranded FWC Danzilona) expelled most of New Swisston from the country following modifications of discord and NameLayer perms. This is a fancy way of saying this was a coup.
- The post was followed up by a portal issue, with an eventual ceasefire between the “junta” and the Danzilonans. Reminder that this all stems from a communication issue.
- The junta was eventually expelled late on Sunday night with the Worker’s Party taking over the government and creating a truly socialist state. SwissFalls, the leader of the Worker’s Party, has said that they are actively seeking enemies of the state.
- Nara has been concerned about the political stability leading up to the Olympics, however Danzilona has said it’s not a big deal.
Nara released the schedule for next weekend’s Olympics, with three jampacked days of events across two nations.
Winterbourne released 13 lanterns on Saturday night to celebrate upcoming International Women’s Day, each representing one person in her life who has been a victim of domestic violence.
- Similarly, Cordoba (it’s a new Cordoba) also released 6 lanterns for those who were victims of domestic abuse and violence.

Western Affairs

Icarus joined the SEC, which now means that the previously unbelievable prospect of Icenia allying with the Temporal Isles, not just with a protection agreement, is now a reality.
Icenia has also completed its council election for March, with five veteran senators returning; a tense runoff between three candidates for two seats resulted in Rinvincibl3 and MrJeremyFisher winning out with Raeders just missing out by three votes.
I didn’t include this in the actual story because it just adds more fluff, but Warmia has signed a treaty with Edius for mutual extradition and defense.
South Bruma has passed a housing citizenship bill and also accidentally approved coolchacha97 due to staff error
The Commonwealth’s Blue Cross brought a small amount of aid to Grand Imperium in the wake of their crisis.
Warmia released several territories this past week for political reasons and are looking for an exchange of territories.
The Imperial Federation re-elected ComradeSankara for his second term as the IF’s chancellor; he aims to revitalize the country to better the reputation of the country both domestically and internationally following a few months of internal toil.
Mount Hassaan unclaimed a large amount of land this past week, with the propsect of seeing towns grow!

Administrative News

Several longstanding issues from HiddenOre and RandomSpawn were fixed this past week on CivMC, especially considering that ComradePotatoe made a surprise appearnace in the RandomSpawn config and literally nobody noticed that was the reason it was borked.

This was a much shorter summary of events on CivMC than I’d usually expect but I guess the whole Grand Imperium thing really took a toll on people and nobody wanted to post a lot about it.

CivReign News

The CCTT on CivReign, and it’s *totally* not what every country currently looks like at the moment on the server.

Scarcity and Polarization

Much of the news surrounded the general scarcity of the server. And people are being really toxic about it:

For the past week, the most sought after mineral at the moment is tin. It’s suffered from abysmal drop rates (for lack of a better word), and has many people frustrated about not being able to move up the tech tree.
It’s the most important mineral in order to make bronze. Many people are frustrated about the lack of tin ores, similar to how people were really mad about diamond vein spawning on CivMC early on the server, but you don’t see people complaining about it anymore…
In an effort to get a more unbiased view, janet blackquill released a survey on Monday to get more information on how people think about the server’s progression.
As a result a few people have been speaking out against the scarcity practice stemming from this frustration.
- One person said that “the whole situation with tin and copper, the ridiculous tech tree, and other issues will lead this server to a screeching halt.” To be fair, he did say “the admins were not listening to the community”, which you’ll see is generally not true in a few paragraphs or so.
- janet blackquill has also expressed concerns that the devs were not being consistent in their communications and vision of the server, which spurred a really tense argument of admin beliefs and concerns over actionable feedback, resulting in her leaving the server altogether.
  - This one I’m incredibly saddened, especially considering she was running a rewrite of MapSync as well as a CivMap of the server at the time.
- Some have been critical of the playercount in recent days, with some arguing it’s sharply declined. This was observed on a pretty late Saturday night, CivMC and CivReign both maintain similar playercounts.
In general, this has been a slice of the toxicity stemming from the admins’ decisions of the much slower tech tree compared to CivClassics or CivMC.
Admins have said that they are open to communication with any nation to give direct feedback in front of their faces (or as close as you can to them, which is just a VC), and have been generally responsive to user frustrations. I can at least attest to that.

I think a lot of this has to do with the slower progression on CivReign, — considering we haven’t gotten a CivRealms-like iteration in a while, people aren’t quite used to that yet. I personally don’t think it’s the Dark Souls of Civ, but I do understand that a lot of hype was built up for something that feels really grindy. I know some hope that the faster progression after steel may bring people back once it’s easy to make it.

Although, a 20-day growth time for saplings for optimal biomes is actually absurd. Come on guys.

This nicely segues into…

Continued Administrative Updates

Admins have been continually integrating feedback into their changes to bring people back from their slow launch. If the admins won’t provide a succinct changelog of the hottest changes, I will!

On Monday, a slight buff of copper and tin rates occurred alongside general buffs to overall gameplay to make things move faster, including tree growth and animal spawning and traits.
Tuesday saw the inclusion of One-Time Teleport, a hotly requested mechanic that should make initial migration easier. It also came with Bronze Anvils and what do you know, tree growth changes
Thursday saw a buff of tin rates to further decrease scarcity of the server. There was a small mooshroom invasion that covered the server but was resolved a couple hours later.
Friday increased XP crop rate growths, creating an artisans (more of a coloring) factory and new trinket items to fossils.
Finally, Sunday saw various citadel and combat updates as well as a change to the absurd notion of putting diving helmets under sinkable armor

This last update might have been due to…

Around the Horn

There’s no definitive source at the moment, but Okx and Doom_Weaver are raiding much of the Western Continent. Really late on Sunday they also raided Vangar, destroying their steel mill and other nations are hoping to help and also have notified them to log out if they are present.
jazz has announced that Orecaidum would be taking over administrative duties in the Duchy of Courron, Alexandria’s successor state, due to real-life issues.
Laurentia also announced a diplomatic and trade agreement with Courron on Sunday night
Britisher and Zhirall have been adamant about their citizenship policy in Laurentia, with them expelling potato_king for undisclosed reasons.
As of March 1st, Pol’sha Litva moved off CivReign and is currently migrating over to CivRev’s large map., citing its slow progression (see above).
The Paradise Bridge from Osna has been completed.

I haven’t been able to get that much news from CivReign nations, most of this was based on either their public announcements channel and one conversation in CivReign #general and I don’t really like that. It’s definitely just early server days.

Everything Else

Griffin’s recent builds in Adria, it’s honestly a last minute addition but it looks so good!

Other Servers

Everyone probably already knows this but the PVP server affectionately called “Bunkies”, simulating Civ-style PvP has transferred over to CivRedemption, with Citylion heading the server. Join their discord here, you’ll need to get whitelisted.
Due to the CivReign exodus, it’s surprisingly getting a little activity due to its quicker start and easiness for buildfriends. Not that I can’t say too much about it, but it was interesting to see the discord chats blow up a little bit for it.
- It still is quite broken, and it’s not expected to move out of beta for at least a few more months.
With Vintage Story moving up to 1.18, server population has definitely declined as it’s no longer easy to log into the 1.16 server. SouthernBloc is currently unable to develop the server until well into August, if at all and so unfortunately activity is sharply declining after a period of relative success.
CivCiv, formerly CivBalls is planning to create a small beta server “in a month” to test out factories.

Metagame Highlights

There have been a couple people curious about Civ and/or are new and are weirdly even asking “how the EP is being perceived” which is a big leap for a new player to be fair.
- This only continually emphasizes the fact that you all should edit CivWiki with your own content since you all have a better understanding of each topic than I do. Honestly, as long as you don’t write extremely terrible lore (I have a really low bar for quality) and are nice and reasonable then everything is fine
meat312 is complaining about Netherite usage and scarcity on CivMC not unlike CivReign tin rates (haha!)

The Fun Stuff

”Some town in the south of Mount Augusta”, per Gobblin. It’s definitely not Doom City.

Builds

Verminblight is starting to come into its own as of late
I remember hearing about the trench warfare idea a few months ago and nice to see it gets implemented as role play in CW, funny it didn’t actually happen during Imbolc though
No builds, but MaybeGravy’s pictures of nature around the server is honestly really amazing
A quaint little build in the mesa is pretty nice honestly
Icarus has a really cool bathhouse, and totally not because of the extreme shaders
I don’t think Bow has actually shown off Winterbourne that much, this is really beautiful and I want to see more of it
Average Pavia picture from Jezza
Kiesstadt in Konigsberg has a good start being a Nordic stony shore village town, although I wish the buildings had a Nordic theme
Frexax has a really cool house, although it has no windows that like 50% of Pavian houses so
Brewyern had some really nice structures, honestly again, one of the better places on the server this early in the game
West Virginia does not look like Fallout 76

And now the featured images:

Never mind their constitution, Cortesia Del Mar’s expansive city is really growing
I don’t really know how Griffin keeps pulling out really good builds, like this is honestly insane how much they’ve been able to do this past month or so
I really wish I knew what the town name in the South of Mount Augusta was, I don’t think Nick has ever advertised this. Don’t say South Augusta
Probably the only time I will highlight a CCTT build, only because it got rendered by RektTangle in his free time
Norlund’s Rusty Bucket is really good this early on the server, and it quite literally only took roughly 3 hours for the structure to be built!

Multimedia Projects

A little sneak peek of the Olympic Gold Medal CivTCG card
Despite the drama above, I really like the pixel-art map of the Edius, it’s great
And also despite the drama above, I have to commend Bing Chilling for this map because it’s also well done and well done despite the absence of Gang Shi
Totally accurate PvP tier list as of the start of March by JuniorTide and Ch1pr
A very ominous trailer for the Great Thrall Clan…
…along with a complete 180 with a picture of their cheerleader Rebecca
I stole this Lambat map from Kaprediem without his permission
SandFalls needs to modify the “Communism in Civ” textbox considering the very Soviet themed YFSR folks’ poster
God bless ThePayman for this CivReign Mining Counter website to make everyone’s mining experience slightly better
Can’t wait to see people yelling about Lysika leaving out every nation again
Shadowvdark says “Embrace Fashwave” and then posts an image of a vaporwave ISP logo
tfw Petergrad is making a “North African ethnicity”
Did not quite see it last week but the Laurentian Dispatch is another newspaper that seems like it’s going to follow in my footsteps, and that’s great, can’t wait to see more from Mat

Memes

At this point, I’m only doing the ones that actually made me chuckle (and that’s a high bar) instead of putting every single meme that was posted because quite literally everyone posted a meme on any subreddit this week

Non-Civ Content

Please touch some grass guys, we only have so much time in this world

I caught Truidencia playing something other than Civ, a Paradox game…
Average Gensokyojin with anime event
Most reasonable vim vs. emacs discussion
Unironically, my soundtrack for editing this newsletter, also what I think about all of you

Longposting Cry for Help

A picture of Princess Bow releasing 13 lanterns in commemoration of International Women’s Day. Read more about it here.

Thanks for reading the magic number 42nd newsletter, and as of now the longest edition of the newsletter! I have to stop summarizing every drama as verbosely as possible. I probqbly missed something too. It didn’t help that everyone’s officially mad at everyone this week on Civ so that’s pretty cool. Anyway…

If you want to follow the newsletter and have this show up on your discord feed,

join the CivWiki discord,
go to the #newsletter channel, and
press “Follow” and navigate to the discord and channel you’d like this newsletter to show up in.

I promise this will only show up in your feed once per week and also prevents me from doing my discord tours of r/CivMC/new.

Thanks to Metriximor for giving up his gracious time writing this week’s featured article! He did a great job even though he really thinks he’s a terrible writer. Thanks also to Gjum, Red_Steel, JuniorTide, GamerTime and Cortwade for assistance, especially Gjum who has been my consulting guru.

Now if you want to help make this newsletter as long as it possibly can:

If you want to write your own featured article, contact me or feel free to fill out this form! Either this or I will come for your free time to force you to write something people will find mildly interesting.
If that’s not your cup of tea, feel free to write an op-ed or any opinion article regarding current events nowadays. Come and let me know!
If you’d rather support me financially, donate to my ko-fi, there is once again no benefit to doing so besides a shoutout on this newsletter.

I’m thinking about starting a Civ images competition akin to Pavia’s, with the newsletter contributors all being judges as we arrive towards the first year of this newsletter’s creation (and 1 year of CivMC’s creation.) Would be a nice way to cap off the year.

Ok everyone, I believe that’s all we have for this week of drama on Civ. As always…

EDIT CIVWIKI

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