Reflections on Civ in 2024

Every year, I ask several reputable players within the Civ community for their reflections on the Civ genre in the previous year, as a lookback on how well as a community, and as a game, have progressed over the years. This is the third year I’ve done this now, following from reflections in 2022 and 2023.

Tatsu

Among some of the more successful newfriends in the past year, Tatsu has been an invaluable helper in CivMC ever since he joined Pavia last summer, quickly rising the ranks and becoming the first Prime Minister to survive six dice days this year. As a relative newfriend, I wanted to get his perspectives on where the game stands and how he got into Civ.

As a relatively new player, playing CivMC has been a blast, meeting new people from all across the world and making new friends! Some of my best memories are hanging out in voice calls way too early for me and just talking with friends while we did our own things. I would be grinding out while Gobblin and Paagf would be putting up a spectacular build on the creative server. The banter with Brit and/or Domi and the amount of laughs just hanging out with them. There have been so many new players and new friends that have come to Pavia recently as well and it has been a blast to meet and interact with them!

I can’t go talking about having fun without mentioning Natls either. She has been a blast to hang out, to talk to and interact with. Some days we are working on separate projects and we are just chilling, watching a movie or a tv show, other days we are working on some massive project together. It has been a pleasure to hang out with her everyday and I’m proud to call her my friend!

As Civ cycle turns, it’s interesting as a new player to see all the things that have been accomplished and what new ideas players and admins keep pushing forward! I think the future is bright as the Admins keep trying to add new things, implement balance changing, trying and being involved by interacting with the community. I look forward to the direction Civ is going and the continued involvement with the game and the community!

Tophat

I’ve brokered a bit of a friendship over the months with Tophat honestly, and he’s become a little bit of a Civ darling. As he’s matured into a nation leader after joining back in 2022, I wanted to get his perspectives on how the game has overall changed.

Hello civ, it is me Tophat.

For a while now, I think civ is really going into a peaceful era, sure there were the wet bandits. But that war was confined into the -,- but sometimes spilling into +,- (My home quadrant at the moment)

I really do enjoy the peace and serenity of civ. I did enjoy civ, I remember being in a Khalkedonia VC, Benzo kept yelling something and everyone kept repeating it like it’s a cult, glad I could meet some cool people.

The most major stuff ever happened to me on civ was probably the pearling of “mommygivememilk”. I remember pearling him while I was expecting to die, but wanted to stall just as long until Toaxbis and the other arrive, I was fumbling and nervous when I saw the ggmrap alt on radar.

When I killed him, everyone yelled for my name, for the very first time I felt like I actually helped instead of being a nuisance and a potential “pot piñata” (Nekroz and cissonius were the ones who dealt the most damage to the ggmrap alt, I don’t want more of the credit anymore.)

That’s all folks, I’ll see you soon (probably might open a civ weekly newsletter)

Hakr_

I consider Hakr_ in a similar camp as Tophat, although more of a oldfriendly vibe as before. Although his signature Dirt joke is a mainstay on Civ discords, he’s become a great friend and I wanted his perspectives on how the metagame has evolved.

Another year of Civ down, and a lot of it feels familiar - I had a hard time writing about any of the prompts given so I will ramble a bit instead. I think that we have achieved an insane level of integration between real world and game world that has completely changed the feeling of the Civ genre. I cannot imagine what it must feel like to come into this as a new player. “Back in my day” before the era of Kira, as a new friend the whole server felt raw, and scary - I got by by not trusting anyone, and that’s how I taught people about the server. Now, everything is monitored, and it’s a lot easier to trust people and I suppose share information.

I think botting, and kira, and discord, are all here to stay whether we like it or not. Pandora’s box has opened and we must find a way forward. I hope one day there is a game medium other than minecraft that this genre can move to. We are all meant to be here though

RedDevel

As is typical, I ask an admin for their own reflections on the game from their unique, high-level perspective. This is the second year I asked him for his reflections, although I hoped to get stuff from SoundTech before he retired, oops!

It feels like only a month has passed since I last wrote a year’s reflection for Specific’s newsletter. It is maddening how fast time seems to pass. I have to admit, I had to take a good look at what actually happened this year, and oh my—what a year it was.

Okx joined the admin team early in the year, giving a major boost to feature development. Copper rails entered the world soon after, significantly changing travel on the server. Can you even remember what riding an uncoppered rail was like?! Fishing was released this year—one of my favorite features that still makes me smile whenever I see people take the time to relax and catch some cod. Map copy protection was also released—a relatively minor addition that has nonetheless had a big impact on the server’s economy.

In the middle of the year, players organized the Civ Olympics again, bringing many people together to compete and enjoy the best part of the server: our community. Summer also brought some major updates, with CivMC jumping several versions from 1.18 to 1.20 and later 1.21. These updates brought quite a few issues, but thankfully, they were resolved in the following months. The updates paved the way for new players to join the server and set the stage for a new set of features we worked on behind the scenes, called Heliodor. A controversial plugin released alongside a new PvP practice server.

Of course, we cannot forget the incredible number of fixes and quality-of-life changes made by our community developers over the course of the year. I must thank them greatly and hope they can continue working with us for another year, knowing it can sometimes be frustrating.

Overall, we have had a rather successful year. While we are starting the new year by losing two of our admins, Ahri and Soundtech, I have great expectations for the future. More development and some fundamental changes are on the horizon—changes that have been discussed for some time. These include the infamous PvP update, which is long overdue, and a potential server hardware upgrade to handle the increasing load on the server. More details on our plans for the coming year will be shared in a Reddit post soon, as part of our goal to communicate more effectively with our players.

As a final message I would like to thank you for playing, seeing civ develop has been and is an incredibly interesting thing. May you have a joyful and prosperous year.

Thank you to all of our contributors. The picture credits, in order of appearance:

• The cover picture was a canopying tree in Ceres, Yoahtl (cr: Ironscale)
• Tatsu’s cover picture was Render of Pavia-Griffin, (cr: Seekinq).
• Tophat’s cover picture was a house located in Khalkedonia, (cr: BenzoEG)
• Hakr_’s cover picture was a screenshot of Suramir, Estalia, (cr: Tuomasz_)
• RedDevel’s cover picture was a lake located on Admin Island, (cr: RedDevel)