A Backstage Theater

Do you guys remember CivUniverse?

For many that answer might be a resounding ‘NO’, or at least, an ‘I don’t want to’. Of course, there are good reasons for that. There were notorious issues with the admins, it was a pretty short server (four months), and it was never a mainline entry in the CivCraft series. To say the least, there were a lot of problems with the server. But there was one thing it had going for it.

Timing.

CivUniverse came out in December of 2020, some nine months into the pandemic, and during winter break for students. Not to mention that the actual mainline server, CivClassics, was in a weak state shortly following the end of the Infinity War. Even a server with wobbly foundations like CivUniverse capitalized on an equation like that. A lot of new players joined Civ through Universe, even if a lot of them didn’t stick around after its collapse.

One of them who did stick around was me. Having played on the distant continent of Hyperborea, I was pretty far removed from world affairs, and too steeped in povertycraft to engage in the global economy. It was a quiet winter wonderland of Civ-democracies and little squabbles, and I liked it that way.

But when the War to End All Wars started, even we didn’t stay out.

The whole war was a mess that I didn’t understand. I broadly felt that New Vegas was the bad guy in it all, why, I can’t remember. What they did, or if they were even in the wrong, didn’t really matter. What mattered to us in the Hyperborean Confederation was land, and one of NV’s allies had some in the continent. A little colony next to our rival Acadia, which we decided to seize for ourselves.

A lot of attention in Civ Warfare rightfully goes to vaults, which are the pinnacle feature in fights between great powers. Control over pearls and the vaults that store them ultimately tend to make or break a war effort, as the enemy’s numbers dwindle. But of course, not every country has vaults or bunkers. Certainly no one in our sparse, underdeveloped Hyperborean continent did. Our warfare was a smaller, quicker and more intense affair than that.

Right after we declared war, or perhaps even shortly before (it was three years ago, cut me some slack!), we made a mad dash across our little continent. Trudging through the icy hills and mountaintops of Hyperborea, we made it to their colony. It was made up of a number of small, rustic, wooden cottages, huddled together by the coast. Even at the time I thought it looked adorable, and felt a bit bad about going to attack it.

The first step was entering the buildings themselves, breaking down the doors to check for loot. That was a bust. Aside from a great store of potatoes and seeds, there was nothing else to gain from the buildings themselves.

The second step was disabling infrastructure. We descended down into their rail line, breaking their rails and placing stone enforced blocks to barricade the rails from use. Infrastructure is really a huge part of Civ warfare, just like in our real world. Control of rail lines is critical, and seeing as there’s no penalty, almost always results in them being constructed deep underground for protection.

Finally, the third and most important step was disabling their Civ-mechanic protections. Bunkers weren’t too bad, but the snitches were the worst. Digging around beneath the ground, trying your best to find them, as if blindly sorting through a haystack for that tiny needle. It was mind numbingly boring, but it had to be done, lest the enemy possess our exact location.

We did manage that, but it was ultimately fruitless. The enemy forces dashed in before I could even finish building a little Hyperborean flag from wool. They caught us as I was on top of that flag pole; one second I saw a name pop up on the radar, and the second, swords were drawn. It was a pitiful brawl. Caught on my left foot, two against one, I was pearled and slain and that was that. We had to sue for peace shortly after, losing our great advantage of surprise and having little else to fight with. With that, our small part in the War to End All Wars (the war to end the server, as it would turn out) concluded.

I think the key takeaway from this is the… mundanity of Civ warfare. A lot can be said for vaults and vault sieges; something I’ve never experienced myself. But even the act of normal warfare in Civ can be a tad dull. It’s a lot of disabling rails or snitches. A lot of breaking the same block fifty times, to get access to something you break a hundred times.

Civ mechanics do a good job of giving war weight and meaning. It does a good job of creating a real meta that makes war feel like a serious endeavor. But it doesn’t really do a good job of making that war fun, does it? Is that a good thing? Perhaps in our quest for realism and geopolitics, we’ve forgotten that at the center of this, it is a game.

Then again, this is one of the only wars I’ve ever fought. Perhaps it isn’t reflective of the actual experience. But still, it’s something to reflect upon… to civvaflect upon.

I’ll see myself out for this month!

The cover picture (and the second picture) is a skybridge, taken during the JSDF’s siege on the New Vegas vault during the New Vegas War (cr: TheJmqn). Frequent visitors of the CivWiki know this as a front page image and one of the few images we have on CivUniverse.

The first picture is a view of New Turing, a city in Hyperborea (cr: Cortwade).

Pandastical is a Civ player who’s played a variety of Civ servers since 2020; he previously wrote for the Laurentian Dispatch on CivReign and today plays as a historian on CivMC.