CivWiki Newsletter for July 11, 2025

Good morning and happy July from the Pacific Northwest!

I should also say welcome to all of the new Civ players and readers! I write this (somewhat) bi-weekly newsletter to inform everyone what’s been happening within the Civ or Civcraft genre, more specifically CivMC. If you’re coming from a particular Civilization server video, welcome! This might be shocking to some of you, but I’m actually a player, not an admin — and all of this news is not manufactured, but driven by other players. This week doesn’t have a lot of news, but just like in real life, you’ll see storylines of things play out over multiple weeks or months.

Speaking of which, I help run the CivWiki which aims to document all of these nations, servers, and more in one central place. All of this is organically player-run!

And finally, to spice things up, I highlight a considerable amount of places across the genre, from amazing builds like the ones you’re about to see, nuggets of history from our past, and polls and fun things to keep players interested. I don’t claim to be a great writer, honestly, but as long as it’s interesting…

I hope you really enjoy what comes out of this newsletter, and your time on Civ if you’re new. Let’s get to the news!

Featured

This section mainly features history from the past on Civ, along with a presentation of today’s cover image.

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is something a little unique. I found myself somewhere in the southwest and ended up in this beautiful castle located in Ila’Kyavul. The outdoor gardens filled with peonies and vibrant clay colors is really cool, and the scale of the actual castle is even more impressive in person than it is in the picture here. Or… I guess in game. The country is filled with larger than life builds and it was such as nice time visiting here. Can’t wait to come back!

Featured Article

The America Invasion was a server-wide conflict on Civcraft 2.0, involving an influx of players by perennial HCF factions. A few months after the Recharge War, a series of raids on the shop centers of Hexagon and Shopside in Fellowship and Commonwealth respectively, was headed by the Eagle Crew, a group of raiders headed by Papa_Pound and Lysika_Lantariel, among others. This raider crew would become the “Sovereign State of America”, and several somewhat anonymous players from around the server. Over the course of October 2014, the raider group would grow in numbers, including some now controversial players, threatening the server in early October as they were able to also re-obtain the previously dormant Recharge infrastructure by recruiting several players from the Recharge War.

Throughout the month, several vaults across the server were then raided with these large numbers of players recruited from HCF, with fighting frequently occurring but generaly favoring the American fighters. A major loss in the war occurred in Orion, where their vault was broken, their main city raided and the World Police suffered heavy losses.

However, America made a major blunder after they attempted to move several pearls obtained from the war between vaults, they were intercepted by the World Police. In combination with major mistakes and fallouts in interpersonal relations, the war ended with several of the pearls freed. While there was fallout from several collaborators, the war eventually made peace, and Lysika and the splinter group that was against Papa_Pound would eventually elaborate that they would be continuing America as Forsaken. Many of the raiders associated with Papa_Pound would eventually become the main instigators of the Titan War.

This week’s featured image is the Sack of Orion, during the America Invasion.

This Week In Civ

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The News

This section, of course, is what most people care about…

Attempted Impeachment

Puerto Verde, in Karydian Imperial Federation (cr: Potato_Duke / AcronymT / VictoriVictoric)

I will admit, I am less in tune with the Imperial Federation news space these days, so I am really grateful to TheJmqn, and JP at the Diamond Chronicler, for all their information.

Several weeks ago, the last Imperial Federation parliament was elected at the beginning of June. The majority party elected was part of the IUP, the Imperial Unity Party, a blanket party spanning much of the Imperial Federation. However, the IUP collapsed only a couple weeks following the election, due to disagreements within the party. Today, the makeup of the party is a mishmash of several disjoined parties.

The two main players to know about though, are _BananaBlu_, the Vice Chancellor and VolutionFs, the Chancellor.

• Shortly after the party disbanded, VolutionFs filed a motion to the Senate to remove BananaBlu from the Vice Chancellorship.
• This vote would not go through immediately however, as an incident with Volterra and the Imperial Federation would delay this vote from happening.
  • This turned out to be Toontown & Volterra pearling Lavender_cutie, DrippingAbove, and ZeroQL; the three were doing suspicious activity in ASN territory (to make a long-story short) and the former two were VPN alts who were later banned. A land-ban would be enacted between the IF and ASN. (cr: Plrog via the Pearl Street Journal)
• When governmental affairs finally resumed on July 3, Banana_Blu survived a no-confidence vote as it required a 2/3rds majority vote. Ten senators voted in favor, but both HassDaMahn and Banana_Blu both expected for this not to pass.
• However, Banana_Blu would eventually resign as vice chancellor. A new Vice Chancellor, AcronymT, would be elected a few days later.

Something Nearly Happened

I’d like to give a huge thanks to the Pearl Street Journal, who have done a great job documenting these stories, and would do a considerably better job than I would.

• I meant to run a story on the possible war between Anisso and Kaiyaukuta a few weeks ago, but didn’t have time to interview. If you’d like to see what this near-war was, please take a look at their video here!

German Succession

Vinland Bay as we look at towards its castle on the mountain.

I think I’m ready to talk about Soderrike now…

Soderrike is quite a tricky thing to talk about politically in the Imperial Federation; while they have a constitution and their own system of government, they are under the overall Imperial Federation government structure. More recently, the June Conspiracy saw Softkitten take control after aiding in the overthrow of wormseed as the long-standing popular Direktor. However, Softkitten’s taking of martial law was unpopular.

• On July 4, the Soderrike High Council approved an amendment that would give the citizenry the ability to remove the general secretary (aka, the leader) from power through a simple majority vote, rather than an extended bureaucratic process. This was relatively popular among citizens and the council alike.
• However, softkitten5 exercised his power to veto the amendment, arguing that it would be “instant execution” and making continued threats against any possible opposition.
• Softkitten would continue to make unpopular and quite frankly, tyrannical decisions until he resigned as general secretary on July 5, with Xsyrok becoming the King to stabilize the country while Chancellor elections are set to happen (with Imperial Federation’s Emperor Jalhf accepting this.)

The state has been stable… for now…

Cold Shoulder

• On June 27, jbblocker “unclaimed” Vinland due to inactivity. Vinland was not notified on their part and it was essentially a raid. The post received heavy criticism due to this unilateral action disguising a raid.
• It was later revealed that ThereWalker also pinged snitches within the Vinland vault seemingly marking him as an accomplice due to the raids. He was kicked from leadership in Exyria and LOTUS shortly after.
• While this was being managed by Exyrian’s council internally, dredd_kiji posted Exyria’s vault as a schematic. butter_villager, Exyria’s Holy Emperor claimed that this was an older version of a vault, and said dredd_kiji is unhappy with the way this incident had been handled, especially in prior dealings.

Some further explanations can be found in the Pearl Street Journal.

Around the Server

A gazebo in Pavia’s Town Hall Gardens.

While news is important, most don’t need overly long explanations like the last few.

• Icenia is ramping up their preparation for the Olympics, set to happen on July 25!
• Iaumea saw an attempted coup happen:
  • In short, their citizens were reportedly unhappy with the way JJPM03 (JPM) was running the country, and attempted to remove the country’s valuables to force the leader to resign.
  • However, its parent alliance LOTUS (and later the ASN) would consider all the conspirators as pearl-on-sight on July 1, with DockerImage racking up several pearls. So far, they haven’t been freed.
• Lehnerpga raided Sodderike, with his sentence being 600 diamonds and well-written apology. While he was pearled, BananaBlu ran a timelapse showing him cleaning up the grief.
• While I usually don’t cover the huge number of information coming from Salerno, their latest round of elections saw pekoleco winning the position of Prime Minister of Salerno, along with Bronnakus becoming the First Minister of Brunsvik.
• Following some incidents with Jaydon from the previous weeks’ newsletter, where Jaydon appeared at their vault in duty mode:
  • LOTUS would enact a complicated spreadsheet of banned players in their territory with numerous exceptions. This would prove to be quite hard to enforce and caused frustration among players.
  • However, as of last week, they rolled back their position, now only banning a few members they consider likely to cause conflict, all from Volterra.
  • (ed. note: Now I have noticed, people are still yelling about this drama from nearly three weeks ago. Like how much do you need to care about this?)
• Infrapontem and Arx announced the creation of the Coalition of Free Karydian States, focused on bonding the (only) two independent nations on the continent together with mutual defense and economic growth.
• Pavia announced the death (really just succession) of Empress Amber II, well known for her naps. She was succeeded by big_shadow0, an extremely helpful member of Pavia. (This is essentially a figurehead change, though.)
• Meanwhile, Lyrean Rail and Monument Bank gave a large amount of dividends to their shareholders.
• The ASN declaimed land in Arlivia following their involvement in the area nearly a month ago.

Metagame Highlights

So the main story here would mainly be is that a good amount of our community made a (semi-)concerted effort to show that CivMC is a valid substitute for Civilization event servers that you’ll see in many a YouTube channel. However, since many people reading this are likely from these videos, I’ll spare the writeup here.

• RobbyTheGobby posted quite an interesting essay about the value of the diamond, our de-facto currency across Civ. Although some points were not as well-received, it’s an interesting outside look at our server’s vibrant economy.
• I hope people haven’t lost their minds…
• Here’s a pretty good claims map of the whole world so far, courtesy of TheJmqn. Take with a grain of salt, but maybe marvel at this 3-D map…

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The Fun Stuff

For this section, I tend to post more lighthearted and interesting content that isn’t necessarily “news”.

Builds

• Great builds from Mount Augusta here! (cr: jaybirdino)
• Icenia is doing a great job preparing for the Olympics with a new Spleef arena in Bloom! (cr: Xcios)
• Here is an extremely wide view of the Kayev Coast, but it’s showing how really built up it is!
• Icenia City has been doing something right when they play with verticalilty (cr: ChrisChrispie)
• A nice aerial render of Adria, Griffin showing how Venice it looks (cr: Romanitos)
• Kronnstadt even looks good when on the ground (cr: Nintentoby)
• It’s surprising how little people realize how many builds are in Pavia outside of the main city. Here’s New Voldi, a much more stony city build (cr: Fishsticks47)
• Puerto Verde in Imperial Federation, in a polite sort of way, looks like the Pavian coast! (cr: AcronymT)

Cool Content

• We have a system called OneDest that allows players to navigate the complicated rail system within a massive shared network. Varbo made a great map here showing all of the possible destinations — there’s quite a lot!
• A really great art piece of Basaltington City! Huge props to Dr_Bacon_Hair.
• And of course, I mentioned this earlier in the newsletter, but great work coming from the Pearl Street Journal, very well produced for its first edition.

Memes

Some of these relate to news from the previous newsletter.

• I may have misinterpreted Jaydon’s pearled position…
• This must have been the reason to strike their meteoric iron enrichment facility
• “I did not have worlddownloading relations with that vault!”
• r/AnarchyChess going off right now
• You know, I think this joke about claiming exactly one block is hilarious
• AI will only get scary once it can figure out how to make a vault

Non-Civ Content

• We got a sports channel! (admittedly, it is only a thread inside the larger #media channel, but pour one out for the victors!)
  • Meanwhile, the Dumper is Dumping^TM more home runs
• I procrastinated on this newsletter a lot this week — part of it was July 4, but part of it was me playing a bunch of Stardew Valley again…

Poll of the Week

A view over the canals of Danzilona.

Last week, we had 48 responses. I have noticed people don’t seem to scroll down far enough, so we’ll see if people actually read this far down. Please say hi!

Anonymous Reddit Posting

One complaint that I’ve seen recently is anonymous Reddit posting, that is when new accounts (or seemingly new accounts, as the typical default name is basically [noun]-[noun]-[four numbers]) with no real names. The question specifically posed was Should Reddit posting (and commenting) be tied to player accounts (like CivMC Discord)?

Of course, I asked and wrote this section prior to all the newfriends coming here, so take this opinion with a grain of salt.

It is incredible that it is overwhelmingly in favor. It does make sense though, not knowing who has created a post is confusing at best, and deindividuative at worse, especially when the comment/post is harassment towards an individual or group, which has happened numerous times in the past. Especially if it’s an alt of a banned player, where there’s no moderation in that space.

There are too many throwaway accounts on the subreddit. Too many people who are banned players still commenting on Rhode Island affairs for example. To participate in the subreddit in any way, accounts should be linked to an in-game account, just like Discord. Too many future felons commenting.

anonymous reddit account commenting is weird and it removes a lot of the accountability that comes from saying things. it also opens the door for weirdo bad actors to jump in on burners and say whatever

Meanwhile, there are some reasons why not to do this.

I don’t want Reddit posting to be tied to accounts because then JuniorTide couldn’t spread his wise words of wisdom.

Well, I guess that’s one. I think one of the few arguments left to say here is that this will introduce a barrier to entry on the Reddit where you need to verify your Reddit account with (Sha)Kira, but that hasn’t really stopped anyone from doing so on Discord, right?

I guess this will stop any random Kru Alliances from showing up, right?

Map Mods & Tools

I actually expected this question to be slightly more of a bloodbath than it ended up being. So, there’s two questions packed into one for this question:

Websites

One of an increasingly bigger visible divide is who uses which map website. While still a minority, there seems to be a more vocal crowd about the use of xFier’s civmap.com versus Gjum’s civmc-map.github.io. These maps, despite their names, still currently serve two different niches. I personally find xFier’s map better for a higher-level, extremely detailed map for analysis purposes. However, I find Gjum’s map tends to be better for navigation and getting around.

While more people have been calling to use civmap.com, (ed. note: opinion) for me it doesn’t provide features yet like rail navigation (which I would imagine a newfriend would need…). Now, to be fair, I probably would switch to civmap.com, but I am waiting for it to be near feature complete for me to move over.

Additionally, it is also nice that there’s competition between the two map mods, so inevitably civmc-map.github.io needs to evolve to compete. So, win-win I guess?

Map Mods

This was supposed to be the more tame part of the questions. Ever since VoxelMap has no longer been a critical part of the typical Civ mod suite, it does seem many of those users have migrated to Xaero’s. JourneyMap is at least in a healthy second place.

big map xaero funny haha

However, one thing I didn’t include on this poll because it released a little later than last week’s newsletter is a new map implemented in CivModern, currently in beta. So, I guess for this person:

isn’t voxel just a vein marker?

Congratulations! You have a new vein marker mod!

Sorry MapSync, I am not sure if it counts as a map mod if it’s just a synchronization layer…

Vote Now!

Patriotic Cry for Help

Me (right) and ArtificialDriver (left) on Wii Moo Moo Meadows in Mario Kart World. I won, of course.

Thanks for reading this newsletter! I thought this was going to be a slow week, but as you can see, a lot of the news that happens on Civ tends to be on Discord. Just like a real Civilization server does, huh…

I am always looking for writers and contributors to help collect and write news, please contact me @specificlanguage for more information. There’s a lot of news to ruffle through when your scope is the entire server, so I really hope you appreciated the writing.

You should expect the next newsletter to appear around July 25. I’m trying something a little different on the schedule…

Until next time, enjoy Civ, and as always…

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