CivWiki Newsletter for January 22, 2024

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

In my neck of the woods, it’s way colder and snowier than before, and I’ve learned that I’m a wimp when it comes to driving in snow. But in Civ it couldn’t be more quieter as many players are focusing inwards on building amazing stuff.

There have also been a lot of exits however, after the past month where we saw a lot of YouTubers call it quits, a couple admins and players on Civ have done the same. It’s the year of laying back a little, and I highly suspect this is not the end.

I know you all have been waiting for this for a while after I’ve delayed it enough, so are we ready for the news?

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is the Rijkspaleis in Icenia. One of the most stunning recent builds in Icenia’s expansion into the Butternut territory, it features a beautiful garden and exterior in the wilds of the savanna with a Dutch twist from ButtScoot and MineForgeCwaft. While this picture makes this look extremely small, this thing is incredibly huge, it’s on the scale of many Pavia builds which is very unlike Icenia, but we love it for them. I can’t wait to see this fully complete on the other side, not to mention this becoming the new Versailles palace. Great work!

Featured Article

This week’s featured article was written by reffelruz.

Peter5930 is a Civ player mainly known for playing within the Commonwealth during Civcraft 2.0 and CivClassic. During the early days of Civcraft 2.0, he faced many conflicts with Carson as well as being a double agent during the HCF War. When he returned for Commonwealth’s iteration in CivClassic, Peter was pearled by Lexington during the Somber War due to continued grievances following the HCF War. He took on the mantle of King of the Commonwealth following brinton bestowing him the title. During his exile, he built the End Citadel which provided respite for imprisoned players in the end.

Although he was released and spearheaded renovation efforts in Westminster, Commonwealth’s capital, he remained a stoic figure and slowly became inactive. However, his slow disappearance despite his position of power granted several players, led by reffelruz of Meditat, to idolize him and founded a religion around him. The Commonwealth’s revival on CivMC established this philosophy with the Declaration of the Eternal King. The religion with scripture, construction of temples, and the coronation of Bowilla as king following in his footsteps, have continued to this day.

This week’s featured article image is of the End Citadel on CivClassic, built by Peter5930 while in exile.

This Week Last Year

The News

Server News

The still-snowy beach of Shockton in Volterra.

There’s actually a good amount of news around the Civ community solely involving servers.

• SoundTech announced on January 18, 2024 that he would be stepping down from his admin position on CivMC.
  • He cited the continued stress of being an admin and the want to focus on real-life for his reasons for leaving.
  • SoundTech did continue to say that he would continue to facilitate development going forward, but wanted to taking a break.
• Wingzero further announced that Diet_Cola would also be withdrawing from his admin position for similar reasons.
  • Wing also announced that they would give Superfriends full access to the #support channel and allow admins to focus on secure modmails.
  • However, he understood that the pace of updates would slow as they wanted to ensure server administration first.
  • The community has been relatively supportive of this effort and appreciated the transparency of the admin team.

From a macro perspective, I’m happy for SoundTech and appreciative for all the great work he’s done to keep the server running and active. However, the departure’s ill timing cannot be avoided following the previously anticipated fishing update last Christmas that has not been redeployed.

Meanwhile, on the upstart side of the community…

• SouthernBloc has been reviving VintageCiv for their next iteration.
  • He announced development had started in early January, with weekly updates currently focused on updating the server to Vintage Story 1.19.
  • This also would come along with major overhauls to Bastions (renamed Sanctuaries), world exploration, agriculture, the tech tree and world generation.
  • The server is also hoping to push their community focus over to their subreddit.
  • Additionally, the server iteration name up to a community vote, which resulted in the subtitle “Revival”.
• As a reminder, CivCubed is wrapping up its first beta on Tuesday, February 6 in a few weeks.
• In an interesting twist of fate, Civ is actually upstream on a server for once. GrimurRP is a role play server using a healthy amount of Civ-developed plugins like FactoryMod and Realistic Biomes, although forgoing protection based plugins like Citadel and Bastions.
  • The server’s owner had played Civcraft in the past, explaining the expansion here. But they do add guns, though!
  • Not to mention that they have their own server-endorsed newspaper 🥰.
  • It does feel like a return to Civ-lite RP-style servers, as there are strict guidelines on how wars should be carried out, but the community is quite passionate with nearly 25 players on a weekend a few weeks after launch.

The above is not an advertisement, but an investigation of what this server entails.

Now that we have so many servers on the CivWiki page though, I’m hoping we’ll clean up the list eventually…

Around CivMC

New buildings going up from Ironscale in Altepetl, Yoahtl.

• There were a few players leaving this past month, not to add on to everybody leaving above:
  • After signalling his departure for a few weeks, Kaprediem handed off leadership powers to Prime Minister SambonusG.
  • King Bowilla of the Commonwealth announced he would step down, citing personal issues but appreciated the opportunity to lead the country.
• MippyMagic, a newfriend recruited by Baile attempted to raid several nations, and was pearled in Mount Augusta following a large coordinated effort from many countries who he had raided.
• Several new nations were established during January, including Delos, Aotearoa, Northfort and a revival of Verda.
• Northfort also signed an economic and defensive alliance with Baile following their shared construction of infrastructure.
• SPQR has introduced steep fines for “rogue behavior that reflects poorly upon the SPQR”
• SneedChungus (amazing name) was imprisoned in the Imperial Federation last week and was freed by SpeedyJustice & Associates.
• Yoahtl has elected their latest council, with NeoTide, x1025, Yergo, and Arconis gaining seats.
• SlothInASuit was pearled by Doom City leadership following his trespassing of their vault for a tour earlier this month.
  • Coolchacha97 posted something defending him calling for his release although it’s not well structured.
• Speaking of which, Coolchacha97 was pearled by S4NTA over the weekend while in Mount Augusta when attempting to disable Doom City traps.
• SQOpenSpellbook was repearled following his breaking out prior to the completion of his sentence.
  • On his way to being turned in, he and Ban1shed_ passed through SPQR and were pearled for being former Gang Shi associates. Ban1shed, although not tied to Gang Shi, has since been freed while SQ is serving his sentence until January 30th.
• Amicitia annexed a former Arsenia territory, Parva (not Pavia) with SQ’s blessing.
• It’s not news, but Blatlas points out that the Olympics haven’t been scheduled yet — anybody willing to run one? This server desperately needs it.

The Fun Stuff

Winterbourne Castle and the surrounding town, taken by RedDevel.

Builds

Clearly January is a building month.

• We haven’t seen Winterbourne Castle in a long time, but it’s hard to not say this looks great, even RedDevel snuck a peek with some of their players
• As mentioned previously, ButtScoot and MineForgeCwaft show off an amazing Dutch build in Icenia
• Groveheart Village has an incredibly solid architecture style
• Shockton still looks good even with snow
• Elyras is a great sanctuary in the caves, amazing job building structures that look like ancient relics
• Amicitia shows off their new library plus displays a bunch of books they’ve written so far — Maester Alliance, get on it!
• Gidein’s lighthouse somehow always keeps reminding me of the Breath of the Wild stables
• Yoahtl’s skyscape continues their vibrant colored exteriors
• I honestly thought squ8i’s Mexican-style pyramid temple was in Yoahtl, but no! Looks incredible.
• Amicitia is working on a new Entertainment district with Lady Fabula at the helm
• What a cute little fox by Fauxless
• Asgeir’s new Overland Rail will have bgbba foaming at the mouth
• There are more pictures taken by RedDevel like in Mount Augusta, Pavia, Danzilona and Icenia and much more but I’ll use these pictures later :)

Cool Content

• TheJmqn displays flags of 32 states of the Imperial Federation
• NordCo gets free advertising, and actually quality advertising at that
• Introduce your nation in the most sarcastic manner ever, even CivWiki can do it!
• So it’s nice that Sloth has somewhat mapped the Nether

Memes

• Instead of covering holes kiwigamer placed a bunch of signs that nobody will read
• I love people risking their life visiting places they shouldn’t be visiting
• “Like I said, I did nothing wrong, make Pavia great again” - Paddington, probably
• Sirboss creates incredibly accurate morning routines for
  • Pavia, Icenia, Kallumbia and Estalia
  • MTA, the IF, Nara, and Gang Shi
  • and the TV routines of SPQR, Temporal, IF and MTA
• Now this is slander, Icenia slander
• The quality of this ChatGPT response is dirt cheap
• What a great summary of Civ, Arcandria, 100% accurate to everything we do
• I am behalfing on behalf of Coolchacha97
• Guys, I know how we can win this trial against Coolchacha

Poll of the Week

Last week we had 64 responses on topically separate questions.

Our first question was about when the next war was going to be. In reality, it’s more of an ask about how peaceful the current Civ climate is:

I find it very interesting that many people think next war won’t happen for a while. Sure, it’s peaceful, but I think there’s a need for a new group to poke the flames and start another war, but more realistically it’s probably due to school schedules. On CivMC, we’re in somewhat of a Cold War where everyone knows the next war will be massive and gamechanging. But for now, I hope we can continue this peace, as somewhat tense as it may be.

The second question was whether you would like to see more wiki competitions in the future.

I think it was nice making the last competition very general and easy to insert yourself into so anyone could compete, but this made it so easy for anybody who didn’t know the Wiki competition was a thing to win stuff. In the future, I would love to make another competition or recurring thing such as this, but I’ll have to find a way to make it as accessible as this but allow people to opt in or out if they like with low commitment.

Vote Now!

Departing Cry for Help

Groveheart Village in the “heart” of the Imperial Federation, also taken by RedDevel.

I promised myself I’d have speclang’s best of 2023 by this time but I don’t because I’ve been so busy doing other stuff. You can kind of tell that this is rushed. But I might have a sneak peek for a sports thing I’m making too and I thought I’d have that in time but didn’t quite have it this week either.

There’s actually nobody to thank this week, nearly all of this was written by myself, but a small thanks to Walkers, Butter_Villager and SQOpenSpellbook for some supplemental information when answering questions.

I know I’ve telegraphed for a while that I’m planning to leave, and I don’t want to make a full announcement yet. But if you want to learn the ropes on how this newsletter is made, I’m planning to (eventually) edit together a video that details how this newsletter is made, especially for those who are going to work on it if you want after I’m gone. It would be nice to get at least a good amount of use with this iteration of the newsletter website however, so this might continue for a little while longer.

Well, I think that’s about it for me folks. See you all next time, and until then…

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