CivWiki Monday Newsletter for April 24, 2023
Good morning and happy Monday from New England!
Yeah, it’s the same old week, with the exception that I’m graduating from school very soon. I’m scared to grow up, you know.
But it’s also another week of talking about Civ, yelling about Civ, figuring out whether Civ is stagnating as a genre (it is), trying to find ideas to improve Civ (impossible challenge), and more. Honestly everybody is talking about the same stuff over and over about it being boring, but there’s no new ideas besides “modded Minecraft” to really push it for that. Maybe it’s time to try? Well, that’s a story for another time.
Are we ready to start worrying about Civ?
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured picture is the Imperial Senate, a brand new towering build in the Imperial Federation in Imperia. Wow, I realize I’m saying Imperia a lot. Built by Juicy_Watermelon and Aetherix, it really does remind me of those old French or British museums, like for me it looks like a cross between the Musee d’Orsay, the V&A and Royal Albert Hall. That’s a mishmash, but all that is to say that they really nailed down this style perfectly. Can’t wait to see more from the capital!
Featured Article
This week’s featured article was contributed by RedDevel.
Civ101 is a comprehensive explanation of every server mechanic that a new player could possibly need to know. It starts with easy, step by step guides for basics like reinforcements, factory usage, diamond mining, and ExilePearl. The guide then leads players into explanations of the more advanced such as Acidblock, Bastions, Snitches, XP production and more. While other extra mechanic explanations like Brewery, Railswitch, Castlegates and Wordbank are still in the works, the basics required by any newfriend are there and ready to be used.
The guide hopes to serve as an up-to-date searchable compendium for experienced players when certain facts slip the mind. No more having to search through many different wiki pages and guides for your answer or resorting to the community for basic facts. It even contains a suggested list of Client-side mods that could be of use while playing the server. Feedback for the guide is encouraged as well! (Full article…)
A picture of a diamond vein currently in progress of being mined.
The News
The waterlilies outside Nara’s “Bannedsions on Shiroyama.” I don’t know about that name, that was on GDan’s posts…
CivMC
Something that I should probably talk about is that I modified a little bit of last week’s newsletter to change some voicing issues on the news; in general I am trying to get perspectives from all sides but I forgot one last week, so sorry about that. There’s not much big drama this week though, so here we go:
- The SEC announced that Yoahtl would enter the alliance as an Associate member state, after several months of mutual cooperation. Crossposted from the Yoahtl Times.
- Icenia pearled fastestgrass last week by entering Icenian territory against direct orders and illegally snitching Icenian infrastructure after continued issues with snitch groups between Icenia and Gang Shi.
- fastestgrass claimed he was building “a tower” as a form of protest due to JuniorTide removing Gang Shi from snitch groups which were associated with snitch groups in their territory.
- fastestgrass was already POS in Icenia multiple times for trespassing after breaking bastions which had led to the removal of Gang Shi to snitch groups.
- However, although Gang Shi and Icenia agreed to keep out of each other’s land prior to the pearling, upon discovering this (along with snitches placed by fastestgrass in the nether), they decided to pearl him while helping K0mmi in Kallos.
- Although both sides are on good terms, they’re hoping further incidents don’t happen again in the future.
- Meanwhile, he and SlothInASuit are getting married next week, in none other than Pavia. Spring truly is wedding season.
- Transylvania elected their Legislative Diet this past week, with the Greater Transylvanian Party creating a coalition with the National People’s Front. However, updates to the election were semi-excessive and my discord Mentions feed wasn’t happy that day. More information about the election & parties can be found on the Transylvanian Post.
- Transylvania also brokered two treaties with two separate nations:
- Plrog announced his resignation as the leader of Respein this past week; elections for his replacement are currently being held.
- SambonusG, AKJanklin, and Magnileve were elected to the Metro Council of Lambat this past Wednesday.
- Crown Prince Paagf has announced further rules for the Chamber of Commerce in Pavia.
- The Imperial Federation and the Arsenio Pact have made the aptly-named IFAP alliance, focusing on economic and diplomatic cooperation.
All the Other Civ Servers
Gonna be honest, I did get tired writing a CivReign header when there were three bullet points, sooo…
- CivReign has continued their spring festival event into the coming weekend, with a 2x ore multiplier ending the 26th. They’ve also increased diamond mining rates, buffed factory times and leather hides.
- There’s been a lot of rumbling continuing though, as we still don’t have a lot of players on but there’s a lot of crosstalk with CivMC players who are generally noticing and trying to point out flaws with its supposed inactivity, but it’s not like either side is particularly wrong.
- TTastic has responded that “we have made a lot of changes and still plan to actively develop regardless of player count. I would love to get your feedback if you’d be willing to come back and try out things with all the new changes we’ve made and fixes we’ve put in place.”
- The only problem is that you don’t just have to change the game, but you also have to give people an incentive to play.
Meanwhile, in the Vintage Story corner of the world,
- Return of the Civ updated their mods as well as the server to 1.18, currently the latest version of Vintage Story.
Develhof in Mehri, from RedDevel.
Metagaming
We all know that all of this news happens on Discord anyway, so let’s see what hell the community raised this week:
- Hoover is trying out doing a CivMC Mock Trial, and is accepting Public Defenders and Witnesses. E-Lawyers, this is for you!
- During GDan’s routine Minecraft subreddit advertisement rounds, his posts on r/Minecraft were removed as well as the Pavian town hall post that was there a few weeks ago. We know that r/Minecraft has gone pretty downhill since then.
- That being said, I realized there were quite a few newfriends on CivMC this past weekend. Was it because of that post? Who knows…
- As many of you may know, Imgur is removing images that were not uploaded by accounts and in doing so, a lot of images from Civ are going to be lost to time. If you know you uploaded something anonymously, try to find them! Most likely if you played on Classics or Civcraft, something of yours is going to be deleted; go through your post history to find old images and upload them on the CivWiki!
The rest of the posts have been reiterating the same point we’ve been hearing since Devoted 3.0:
- ChrisChrispie posted a big meta post on how politics matters less and really the friends and the cliques you make is more important
- Flameoguy posted on r/CivEx(?) with thoughts on future Civ servers, nation development, and grind
- This has kind of led many people to consider if Civ is actually fun once again.
- If we’re currently in the midst of a stagnating genre, and community feedback isn’t actually being taken into consideration, are we really staying alive by doing the same thing over again?
The Fun Stuff
Babe, it’s time for your monthly Pavia pic, this time from RedDevel (again) of the bustling market outside the town hall.
Builds
- RedDevel is building Develhof and it’s finally done, it looks way too fucking good
- He’s also been on quite a tear lately with views of Pavia as well!
- How about another incredible shaders picture in Pavia’s town hall from ArtificialDriver that totally doesn’t highlight how dusty the town hall is
- ”Now that’s a lot of Pavia, how about a little more?” - Jaydon, probably
- Nara hid this view of the cherry blossoms somewhere, super underrated. Anyway, nice to see it get 1.8k upvotes on r/worldbuilding
- Imperia is starting to finally get built up after months of inactivity and no desire to build lol
- If I haven’t said that there’s progress in Mount Augusta, here’s some progress in Mount Augusta with their town hall, looking completely different than 8 months ago.
- A smaller build on CivMC, here’s a bridge in Norlund with good shading and block mixture
- Transylvania is getting built up
- Here’s another image from Concord in CDM, they are building like crazy
Multimedia Projects
- Plupsnup has done some funny flag redesigns of Dirt and some of the IF states
- I am leaking Lambat citizen announcement chat to post these nice drawings of Lambatans
- ACCoker has not just one big episode this week from Yoahtl, but another big one too
- GDan compiled a great post on r/Worldbuilding and has done a great job gathering updoots for the server, but also huge props to Nara for making an extremely great city to showcase
- PercJackson digs up all of his recordings with NoOneTruePunk and its very nostalgic
- Fox and Dino are in Mount Augusta this week
- RedDevel, during his image documentation this week, has made an incredible timelapse with views of Pavia over 18 minutes of bliss
Memes
- I too, had to stop my non-existent bot from playing the game
- Is Kibble the delusional here?
- I made it out of the country, 4/20 stars
- I am stuck at the border in the immigration office, 6/9 stars
- Eventually there becomes a point where giving continuous bad takes aren’t funny anymore
- Wait, my bad it looks like Fox and Dino are literally nowhere
Non-Civ Content
- Baseball bulletpoint of the week is the Oakland Athletics, a franchise of 60 years of history in the area, is moving to Las Vegas as every Oakland sports team does.
- If you want something more joyful though, here’s Mets closer Edwin Diaz walking out to a live performance of his walkout song. Who says this game isn’t fun?
- As you can kind of tell, I’m getting more enjoyment watching baseball, which is just a notch above drying paint, than playing Civ.
- Did someone put Regentsburgh in HOI4?
- SoundTech is way too excited to get Warhammer as a game
- Although tbh, I’d probably bring that to my Board Games club too
- Yes, I do like Farenheit 451, thanks John Green
- Programming is not as easy as it thinks
- But then again, I feel like a loser for being a graduating CS major with currently no plans
April Showers Cry for Help
Mount Augusta’s city hall, as seen by RedDevel.
Thanks to everyone for contributing stuff this week! It’s been pretty busy round these parts so I’m really thankful for everything that came in (so I can do my job less!!)
Thanks to xcios and fastestgrass for helping with the Gang Shi stuff, and also Yodabird, BritishWanderer, Creepi0n and Hoover for also doing some editing work this week too. If you’d like to contribute:
- Contribute a featured article! Quite literally anything about your country’s history is probably worth it, and if not, feel free to do some research on an old country or event on the CivWiki.
- Monetarily fund my stupid endeavors! All of it will be going to the newsletter’s upkeep, if you can really call it that
- Share this newsletter! Of course it’s helpful but people will generally see that there are things happening and the more support for Civ the better.
Additionally, I’m very excited to announce that we’ll have a screenshot competition for celebrating the newsletter’s anniversary! While I’m still cobbling together the details, there will be two categories:
- one for builds, and
- one for general event screenshots, such as these.
Dig up your screenshots now, more details will be coming this week.
But anyways, thanks for reading! And as always…