CivWiki Newsletter for February 12, 2024
Good morning and 新年快乐 from New England!
Yes, I did celebrate Lunar New Year back here at the specificlanguage household — albeit I don’t have the materials to make an Asian dinner, for myself even though I am, nor can I actually speak any Mandarin, but that’s a different story altogether.
I’m sure many of you are desperately awaiting how the heck I’m going to make sense of all the Civ news this week, but it’s not that long. I held off on reporting the “big news” this week, but that does mean next week’s newsletter is going to be a “slam”sletter, if you will.
Are we ready for the news?
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured image is Winterbourne Harbor. Honestly, this is the best thing I could think up for a “Valentine’s Day” edition for the newsletter because as always, the country’s all about spreading love, holding seasonal events and making dank builds. It’s sort of odd there’s only a few pictures from their town because it’s really beautiful — it’s like if Lusitania from CivClassic was a snow resort instead of a summer resort. The designs on the train station the imposing castle are such a great highlight and I wish more people came to tour! I sure didn’t regret my time here.
Featured Article
ExilePearl is a Civ plugin that allows players to exile and imprison other players within a ender pearl, limiting their gameplay to another dimension, usually the End. Originally known as PrisonPearl when introduced during Civcraft, the plugin is known as the main mechanic for player-enforced justice within Civ. In order for players to continue keeping a player bound within the pearl, fuel is needed, usually within the form of essence on modern Civ servers; otherwise the player is freed from the pearl.
Devoted 3.0 introduced an alternative called ExilePearl, which the plugin is named after today. It provided an alternative means of punishment by not allowing players to be present within a certain radius of their pearl, although upgrading pearls to proper prison pearls were allowed. Exiling was adopted by later servers like CivClassic, it was not a popular mechanic, and the prison mechanic has been the sole force. CivMC pearled players play in the Nether rather than the end in previous iterations; due to its survivability some portals, cities and emergent gameplay has formed among pearled players. Although the plugin has been controversial especially in large wars, it is well-known among Civ players as an effective means of player-delivered justice.
This week’s featured article image is of Wayrest, a town in the Nether intended for pearled players. (Credit to iOminous.)
The News
Outside Yoahtl’s massive sports complex in the jungle, built by x1025.
Theseus’ Gambit
Only Greek mythology and Hades players will even get close to what this header is referencing. The Elysian Pact, made up of Estalia, Pavia, SPQR and Volterra, and Nara, suddenly and sharply broke up. Or it didn’t. Or it kind of did? It’s a long story.
- Icenia approached SPQR and Volterra for an alliance. The two parties then notified the Elysian Pact that such negotiations were occurring, but an alliance with Icenia “would come secondary to the Elysian Pact”.
- In response, Lysika_Lanteriel posted this comment that garnered frustrations with Icenian relations.
- This came as a significant amount of players were removed from Elysian Pact groups and discords, since many were administered by Estalia.
- Following this, Estalia, and for different reasons, Pavia, decided to exit the Elysian Pact.
- Eventually, cooler heads did prevail, as those kicked from the discords and groups were reinvited to the discord to negotiate the exits of Pavia and Estalia.
This was intended to be a longer section, however I’ve decided to scale this section down until full details arrive. Because relations are still tense and negotiations currently ongoing, along with requests from member nations to not report on this, I’ve tried to limit the information to what was publicly available.
This does mean however, I can’t wait for next week for all of the details to finally come out!
Around the Server
- CivMC held a fishing competition this past weekend, daring players to try to catch as much fish as you can. Seven tournaments ran for an hour on Saturday, and the same amount for 30 minutes on Sunday. Congrats to all the winners of the competitions!
- Monument Bank opened two international branches this past weekend, one in Shiroyama, and one in Baile.
- They additionally announced to shareholders the possibility for new asset types to be stored in Monument Bank accounts, along with efforts to streamline the banking process online.
- A week ago I mistakenly reported that SirFrenchie was running Exyria; it is actually run by Arconis, who amicably split from Yoahtl along with other buildfriend-related individuals from Gang Shi.
- SlothInASuit found that he had been raided by Kibbles and SquidHasTheBad of about 4,000 diamonds of estimated wealth.
- The duo is still wanted by Icenia for their participation in the Grasslands Gambit, and many were disappointed in their behavior, especially since their motive was to “pay off their reps”.
- Exyria has also affirmed that they were not involved in this raid, and they do not condone their actions.
- Solitaire was elected as an interim councillor in Yoahtl.
- Baile published their very first newspaper… although I didn’t find anything we didn’t find already
- Cicero, Highboy, S4nta, Seldomshock and WishingOnAWendy were elected to the Volterran Senate.
- Okx shows off a pretty good PvP recipe, except everyone knew it was Meth already.
- Greeenkitten posts another round of Blockchainistan forming.
- Pripyat Central Station opened, giving the country a direct connection to the country from Mount Augusta, Danzilona and Nara.
Metagame Highlights
- As .tk domains have been forcibly expired by ICANN due to scams, Gjum’s incredibly helpful map for CivMC has been temporarily relocated to civmc-map.github.io.
- The utilities that were previously present at civmc.tk are now at civmc.netlify.app, however player info and server population graphs are temporarily unavailable. He hopes to fix many of the utilities, such as player activity graphs, as well as add a “new joins per day” feature.
- Well, if people knew that Paper is a fork of Spigot which is a fork of Bukkit, I don’t think we’d have this enlightening discussion
- TheJmqn posts the 24th claims map of CivMC, ironically saying “it’s a perfect time for players to take a break, relax, improve, and administrate”. Oh boy.
- VintageCiv is still working on development, albeit in a slower capacity, and are working on a revamp of the weapons and PvP system.
The Fun Stuff
A fishing village in Q’Barra, Nara.
Builds
- Earyx shows off some nice decoration by the fishing pond in Q’Barra
- Obviously, I just went to Winterbourne and the pictures there always look grand
- Always find Yoahtl’s massive sports arena complex an amazing sight as it got built over the last few months
- Seekinq continues to upload photos from Griffin that are sometime unbelievable that it was built in Minecraft
- HurinThalion posts a very dizzying picture of a large storage chest array
Content & Clown Content
- The Volterra announcement post is really well formatted, in my opinion, such well made graphic post.
- So this is directly related to something this week except there is no context given, so good luck understanding the context to Balkanization!
- But when is Titan?
- hello we have confirmed your order for one monument bank
Non-Civ Content
- Wait, what’s this, me working on stuff?… what the hell it’s a baseball thing? more updates on this coming soon^TM, but I highly doubt any of you are interested
- For those who I messaged on Sunday and didn’t respond for ungodly amount of time, I truly apologize because as a 49ers fan-adjacent, I was sobbing, but then as a Taylor Swift appreciator I was marginally happy
- And for the random programmer, here’s a funny and very knowledgeable talk about Git, from one of the founders of Github
- Along with your regularly scheduled very cute Finn picture, we also have the “cutest picture you’re going to see this month” from phobitica
Poll of the Week
Last week, we had 54 responses to the poll.
The first question was “What are the most difficult Civ plugins/mechanics to teach to new players?”
In a way, this was mostly just to figure out what the community should focus on when guiding new players. HiddenOre just barely won out this time around, which is understandable, diamond veins is a hard thing to teach, not to mention it’s the de facto currency and pretty much the first thing people speedrun in Minecraft. NameLayer and FactoryMod are among the next, which also makes sense because they’re such vital parts of the game with regards to group management and one-upping crafting tables & furnaces in every way possible.
Citadel being lower than Bastions is actually quite surprising, because the amount of times that newfriends have just not built on reinforcements is, from my experience, is a lot, unlike Bastions where they have a marginal effect on an average newfriend’s gameplay. And for the most part, Bastions don’t necessarily matter to new players as much as you’d think, so not sure why that’s so high.
Our second question was What’s your favorite memory playing Civ? Now, unlike other questions, I won’t provide any commentary, but I’ll just paste my favorite responses below.
The release of the second continent on civmc [editor’s note: civrealms?], having 40 people in VC boating around, watching movies and then eventually finding this huge beautiful new continent. 2nd place has to be hell war on realms, such an insane war with almost 100 people on one side fighting together at once.
Two contenders, either the SerraNova vs ComeradeNick MtA Mayor debate on Devoted 3.0, or a wedding in Okashima on CivClassics. It was a small affair but I look back on it fondly.
Getting stuck in a tree in pavia then almost died to fall damage when someone manages to get me out. 10/10 very nice architexture[sic]
Watching EP ground tunnel Arsenia’s bunker and getting a screenie with the EP. Tal (butter_villager) made art of it and it is still my profile picture on Discord to this day. Pretty peak.
Blasting BIG CHUNGUS for hours on end while sieging a vault (OGs remember)
Definitely the first run of exp in Icenia, there have been more exciting moments since but SOTW had an incredible vibe of cooperation where everyone came together to work on different farms, bunch up the resources, and finally produce those wonderful emerald blocks. Also chris logged in back then :glad:
Starting the server. It was simpler back then
EotW on civclassic. It was a huge event, and so many people participated and spoke.
Spending a day with NoTruePunk and bringing her machines to life.
Being brought to Mount Augusta by ToastedSpikes and realizing that there were like people in towns lmfao
Although, whoever said that my newsletter is the best memory of Civ is seriously lying.
Vote Now!
This week’s poll questions were suggestions from CivMC admin RedDevel. Don’t worry, responses all stay anonymous as usual.
Valentiner’s Cry for Help
A polar bear gifted by Suleisil to swampbog (pictured) on a date, who are now happily engaged (probably not pictured)
Two notes on this week: Low key, I like being Carmen Sandiego on the server because nobody knows where I’m going to be taking pictures of next. If we can get the IHL to hold a Super Bowl-like event for their championship, that would be a really fun community-run event. Blatlas, get on it!
Ok, but in all seriousness, I do want to say thanks to everyone who helped contribute some information or insight into the reporting this week. This includes BritishWanderer, RedDevel, Gjum, Walkers, ShadySauce, Mickale, Mark_Antony, Bronnakus, Swordmaster, Blatlas, Quanton_Biscuit, and Nekroz09, among probably a whole bunch of others that I missed. Yes, I really did contact this many people this weekend and I’m probably going to do it again.
I hope you and your imaginary Civ e-girlfriend have a wonderful week and Valentine’s Day on Civ! Until then…