CivWiki Monday Newsletter for October 3, 2022
Good morning and happy Monday from New England! I’m not slowing down on the newsletter front, but last week just tired me out for no reason — I haven’t been playing Civ as much as I’d like personally, but that’s a me problem I think. At least that makes me impartial to pretty much every news ever.
Sorry for the quick blurb, I didn’t have a lot of time to write something new and I’m way too tired to write new material out on a Sunday night. But are you ready for the news?
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured image is the exterior of the Market Curia within SPQR’s city, Roma. SPQR’s involvement in the Estalia—Rhode Island War forced them to pause development on their city, but now they’re rapidly building out, using large-scale, classical Roman designs for their country’s builds. The country traces its origins all the way back to Civcraft 1.0, the country is planning to hold the Festival of Saturnalia in December and several sporting events next year.
Featured Article
Snitches are special blocks used in Civ servers which players and groups can place to record and relay actions of other players within the block’s vicinity. The mechanic is enabled using a plugin called JukeAlert. There are two types used: Noteblocks, which can only output player entry, while more powerful jukeboxes can log nearly every interaction. This simple tool has allowed players to conduct surveillance of cities and builds, and is commonplace on Civ for monitoring builds and defensive structures for grief.
In conjunction with Citadel, JukeAlert and snitches have been a staple of security and protection on Civ-genre servers and its mechanics have been relatively unchanged. Due to its simple nature, players have made numerous tools for players to view and interact logs in many different fashions, from in-game mods like Gjum’s SnitchMod as well as out-of-game tools like Kira, a discord relay for snitch groups. (Full article…)
This week’s featured image is of Squareblob’s self-described Poorly Illustrated Guide to JukeAlert, which basically said everything I said above but in poor quality graphical form, drawn in Microsoft Paint.
Current Events
The South Beach Walkway in Lambat City, lining the coastline alongside Pioneer Village.
Random Drama
- On Wednesday, wjkroeker supposedly leaked the reason for the Temporal Isles’ secession from Icenia.
- He reported that PhysicsGamer had accused Icenia of “pulling a USA” with regards to XP runs and security reasons.
- However, PhysicsGamer’s response has committed to only work on secession in a peaceful manner, stating that “We don’t wish to go down a path of rising tensions, we all just wish to play the game”, and one or two players were only causing problems to invoke reactions.
- A followup post from Icenian President ChrisChrispie has clarified that neither party intended for bad relations, and were working on removing defensive infrastructure and recognize each other peacefully.
- The Pavian wedding on Sunday between acuhdemic and CutePastelStars stopped abruptly as ChosenTwiceLol pearled CutePastelStars.
- This started a chain reaction of PvP conflict, as three Estalians came to pearl him, and mayhem ensued with Titan fighters joining.
- DockerImage pearled BritishWanderer, and began heading towards Kallos before being intercepted along the way.
- Adderall revealed in the USA discord that Rhode Island was behind the attacks, essentially making them a terrorist group now. Fun!
- A couple of raids by unknown perpetrators have occurred in the Commonwealth, mostly in North Africa
Random Expansion
- The Estalian Transport Authority, or ETA, has been announced, hoping to construct a series of cardinal rails joined at the 0,0 market.
- The Imperial Federation continues to expand their empire by adding Vermont and Stros M’Kai. They also signed a treaty with Icarus.
- Continuing imperial expansion, Kallos has taken over the nearby territory of Florence after Deyan had not logged in recently.
- Supposedly joining the empire train is Danzilona, who have annexed nearly every country on Alenarith, including (but probably not limited to) Nara, Dalgon, Cortesia del Mar, and Doom City, in addition to annexing Gensokyo and Melia in the prior months.
- Commonwealth reached a deal with Estalia to annex territory from the country, it was previously held by the Kingdom of ErrorL.
Random Other News
- CivMC’s second weekly update asks people to fill out a player survey, which brings a thorough evaluation of all aspects of the server’s actions so far.
- The Commonwealth have also elected its first Prime Minister since CivClassic, with AwesomeDracula taking a 3-month term defeating former Hexcorp official Mokuno. Contributed by reffelruz.
- Icenia elected a new set of senators for October, a tie forced a tiebreaker between Seared and JuniorTide. Much of the same senators returned for this iteration of the Senate.
- The Imperial Federation elected JAW689 as its first chancellor to rule over its many territories in the Southwest.
- Cortesia del Mar has recently enacted a whopping 136-page constitution, inviting people next Saturday for a transfer of power ceremony.
- Kaprediem has reported on the existence of Ghost Riders in Lusitania, another strange occurrence in the country which has had a track record of strange occurrences.
- After recovering from the Estalia-Rhode Island War, SPQR has announced its general opening to the public
- CivReign’s latest teaser gives some information about its new genetics system and livestock integration; a first for Civ, as its main focus have been on crops.
The Fun Stuff
Provence at Sunset, rendered by RektTangle. Who would’ve guessed it wasn’t RektTangle at this point?
Builds
- As always, RektTangle is pulling out bangers in Provence, Lusitania
- Verdant Valley, a locale in the Commonwealth, has seen a greenery “griefing” as PergySteel is enforcing the restriction of greenery in every building’s design.
- New renders of nearly every Imperial Federation territory are posted, some of them look stunning and others look like my second Minecraft singleplayer world
Multimedia Projects
- SpeedyJustice and the crew are working hard on CivCast
- Sure, this is a USA PvP video but did they really win in our hearts?
- Cortesia del Mar posts a nice map of their biome distribution
- A Civ Eurovision contest, the Medivision Song Contest has been announced to come to Lusitania on October 15. Obviously, the trailer’s song is on my playlist now.
Memes
- You know, I’m kind of surprised the word cloud picked up a specific phrase in the bottom left corner between the “l” and “o” of “lol”
- If the tour and meme of Lambat was done in Mount Augusta, this would be much more boring
- What did bg mean by this
- Georgeposting
- Boy do I love Game of Vaults, or whatever. Am I actually complimenting this? I was there at the last stand and was barely as dramatic as this lol
- Ohio (/oʊˈhaɪoʊ/) is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated.
- Thanks for the announcement
- Ah, the queue, the good ‘ol days
- Jeb moment
Metagame Highlights
- LordofMarzipan asks whether the Civ experiment is one that has worked
- CivMC’s second weekly update asks people to fill out a player survey, which brings a thorough evaluation of all aspects of the server’s actions so far.
Vibing Cry for Help
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. If you haven’t done so already, please contribute a featured article, it literally takes 10 minutes out of your day and could possibly give you free advertising for your nation and others!
Thank you to GetSkinny, Gjum and everyone in the Icenia voice chat for helping out with this edition.