CivWiki Newsletter for February 19, 2024

Good morning and happy Monday from… the air?

You caught me on a cross-country flight! How the heck am I doing this, you might be wondering, but the majority of you probably know that I profusely write these way beforehand (although, as I’m writing this now, I am doing this at the last minute because I was packing). It’s always weird speaking in future/past tense in these sections, you know?

As many of you probably know there’s a lot to talk about this week, so let’s not waste anymore time. Here we go!

Featured

Please note that the below writing pieces will be on CivWiki later today; I am currently busy on a plane.

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is Pripyat, located on the northeastern tips of Alenarith. It’s an up and coming nation, and I do believe the last time I highlighted a new nation on Alenarith it gave them a pretty good boost. It’s a different sort of boost for them though, they’ve mastered the detailed build styles present in vanilla and have done an amazing job bringing it onto Civ, with loads of copper and brick blocks everywhere that make the town feel rustic. Looking forwards to more from them!

Featured Article

Airhaven was a town in CivClassics located in the southwestern part of the map. A snowy, tranquil retreat along the busy HITS corridor, the country prided itself on its builds and peaceful policy. It was built on top of a cave and in extreme hills on purpose to discourage farms ore excessive mining from being made and to focus on builds. The country continued maintaining a peaceful policy throughout its lifespan, enjoying benefits from peace initiatives such as the Order of the White Lotus and healthy relations with nearby Resimere, Pacem and later Yoahtl.

The country benefited from tourism heavily due to healthy reviews from other players, similarly compared to other tourism-focused nations like Lusitania. However, it fell inactive shortly after the Somber War and the country was annexed by Beretia in 2021, but did not change the area. The leader of the country, CaptainKlutz, eventually became a superfriend in 2021 and focused on content creation efforts for Civ afterwards. The legacy of the country lives on in its effort to maintain peacefulness deliberately by its nation placement.

This week’s featured article image is an overview of Airhaven, from RektTangle.

This Week Last Year

The News

CivMC Update

Pacem’s town square at night.

On February 17, 2024, CivMC released a minor update fixing small bugs. The previous update was on February 3, which fixed the 1.25 update, more commonly known as the Fishing update.

• While no big, formal announcement has been made, Okx was onboarded as a CivMC admin, with his name being added to most admin permissions.
• The dog facts (i.e. the server messages that pop up frequently to give helpful tips) updated the map link to the correct https://civmc-map.github.io link
• All player heads that were previously available in fossils were moved to the fishing loot table, with changes to the fossil table to give better returns.
• Several changes were made to block and mob limits:
  • The block changes were removing limits highly requested blocks that could cause lag including droppers, dispensers and more importantly, heads.
  • The mob changes generally move to increase the mob spawn limit to combat issues for spawning mobs, which have been an issue for some power players.
  • However, the mob changes were essentially reverted by the afternoon to prevent a flood of low TPS and high mob spawns.

Alenarith Drama Strikes Thrice

Mount Augusta’s Town hall at sunset.

This section comes at you in three parts, for three completely separate drama pieces that have no relation, other than the fact that they are both continuing conflicts from prior drama spits. Apologies if there’s not a lot of links or proof, most parties had requested not to disclose their logs or information.

• A visit from Kaowta leader Plrog turned awry as Transylvania pearled him during his visit.
  • Although relations had largely cooled, Transylvanians were slightly on edge due to the continued issues from prior incidents, such as their secession from the country a few months prior.
  • Upon his arrival, the country offered Plrog drugs and alcohol as a peace offering (which is very odd to say), but kindly refused. Plrog said that he hoped to repair the relationship between the two countries; however talks were not initiated right away.
  • Although the visit continued, the interaction became sour, with Transylvanians alleging he griefed the country’s railroads, placed obsidian and sent ominous messaging. As a result, X_an pearled him.
  • Both sides were understandably frustrated, with Plrog frustrated about the justice system and Transylvania with the lack of negotiations on Plrog’s side. (This is oversimplifying a lot, but if this does need to be changed from either party, I will do as quickly as humanly possible)
  • They eventually did both agree to terms for his release, under the condition that Plrog would have no interaction with Transylvania and would not slander the country in any way — and vice versa.
• Meanwhile, Mount Augusta Mayor Sakana_otoko, among others were pearled after an encounter of what seemed to be malicious trespassing occurred in Mount Doom territory.
  • Once again, relations between the two countries had been generally fine between the two countries following the Doom City Conflict, although both were still wary of shenanigans.
  • Sakana was contacted by Metallic to help them at the Doom vault before other Doom City people logged on. Ibis then continued to tell them to come with PatrickBateman shortly after.
  • The trio reached the vault and continued to explore while Sakana was streaming on the CivMC voice chat, with many players who were supposedly Pearl on Sight for Doom City.
  • Ibis did go further and continued to break bastions and fire arrows, although Patrick and Sakana did not engage in these actions.
  • This however, is further corroborated by an attempt by Ibis to break Doom City’s vault the prior day.
  • GiveMeNoods eventually pursued all three at the vault upon arrival. Sakana remains pearled, while PatrickBateman_ was released earlier this week, and Ibis is still on the run. Sakana is set to be unpearled following continuing negotiations — although Doom City is still upset about the situation.
• In the south, the Red Brigade raided Swisston and intentionally deceived people into helping.
  • They claimed land south of Nara the previous week, and raided nearby Swisston soon after. Side note: Please don’t make your maps blur out the nation names, there’s something called a zoom feature on the CivMC map…
  • Although not much is known about their raid on Swisston, they claimed that they represented the country following Danzilona’s relative inactivity and that they needed help defending their territory.
  • Northfort players eventually came down to give some advice, however the Red Brigade’s leader since basically run off the server, so, I guess this was a waste of words.

Did you think a certain Alenarith-related event should have been here? Well, too bad!

Around the Server

Commonwealth’s under-city, featuring several different shops.

If I missed your news, it’s not you, it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

• For those wondering on the status of the Elysian Pact, I don’t have a status update as the negotiations between Estalia, Pavia and the rest of the Pact are still ongoing. Although one thing is for certain though, Temporal Isles definitely did not win
• Speaking of the Elysian Pact, although that Mat_Potato_King was pearled by Estalia for breaking and entering an unmarked bunker, he gave a really good review of the situation and was thankful for the reasonable settlements, and, if anyone has any doubt, he said “they could be way harsher if they wanted to, just to flex, but they weren’t. I honestly applaud their justice system for its speed”
• Monument Bank opened their third international branch in Shockton, Volterra, and unlike other branches, keeps with the theme of incredible Volterran architecture
• Icenia is preparing for a construction of a new train station. The Icenia train construction woes never end.
• Mount Augusta re-elected Sakana-otoko as their mayor of the country. This is ironic as they are currently pearled.
• The IHL resumed matches with the Vinland Vikings beating out Malina’s Mandarins, 6-2. Time to fear the north once again…
• Amicitia discovered yet another wall of water near their claim of the Reluctance vault, but disappeared hours later. The statement also stated that they have no intention of ever remilitarizing the territory.
• Baile is looking for builders to fill out their city. They’ve got a bunch of schematics and willing to pay in a fashion similar to Pavia.
• Princess Bow of Winterbourne reunited with their lost daughter MaNaMi from Baile
• Meanwhile, they also celebrated Valentine’s Day with a beacon in the castle.

Metagame Highlights

• For Civ developers, it is worth noting that SoundTech and Okx are working on moving over the Civ development platform to a monorepo, which is why that you might be shocked by several messages that included 756 new commits on the daily
• I do like seeing that good fossil drops are somewhat back
• Squidhasthebad_ released a download of Butternut’s vault prior to the hole being griefed, for “vault science” purposes.

The Fun Stuff

A neat little news stand along the canals of Adria, in Griffin from none other than Seekinq.

Builds & Other Cool Stuff

You’ll probably see some of these builds in the coming weeks as I deliberately stockpiled my picture library for the upcoming week. Anyway…

• As I toured Mount Augusta once again I saw a really well textured blackstone house that doesn’t look well on renders, but extremely impressive
• I took a few screenies around x1025’s impressive Olympics sports complex in the jungle — it’s so impressive all around, but I don’t think any of the pictures I have really do it justice
• Of course, I took a whole bunch of pictures around Pacem this time, and this time, I believe that quality is better than quantity
• x1025 actually did the same thing as me and took this really cool picture of Dalgon, but also stopped by Pripyat and Mount Augusta too.
• Unlike pretty much the rest of their builds, Transylvania brings a really giant tower and church, and that’s a good thing
• On the cozier side we have another Q’barra build from Earyx in the savanna
• On the bright colors side, Tortugan in Kaowta does have quite the glowup with the vibrant hues
• Did I say already that Monument Bank’s Volterra branch perfectly blends in with the country’s architecture?
• Aetherix shows off a new map art, which is a classic fox tapestry available in Pavia. Really well done, great work!
• Once again, I miss things but found this amazing ad for Baile from a few weeks ago, I like the graphic design

Memes

• Gonna cry? Blaze your pants, maybe?
• At least in a non-recession my Pavian newsletter taxes are slightly less
• Something something another metallic meth breaking bad post
• You know, technically Sapporo and Oslo have relatively the same climate
• If you don’t know what the countries on Civ are, it’s ok man, even with people thinking I have a vast array of knowledge of Civ I truly don’t know like half of these
• One does not simply walk into Doom City would have probably been a better meme image for this but it’s still good

Non-Civ Content

• Hey baseball fans, another update from the software development side of me… what could this be?
• Internet oldfriends can claim their very old YouTube ticket here with Tom Brier’s sight read of Yoshi’s Island
• Continuing our endless cat picture column of this section we have Knight__Jacob’s cat with a bow
• But of course, we have Finn greenscreened on the country of his choice from Bronnakus

Poll of the Week

Last week, we had 57 responses to the poll.

The first question was about which of the admin-run events you liked.

There’s two obvious standouts here — fishing competitions added a new dimension to the game and even on a Friday night after the competition people are still fishing for stuff and finding legendaries. That’s not to mention the new decorating options that builders now have.

But double ore weekends, as cliche as they are, do bring numbers. It’s not like mining is so crap these days, but the ore rate is low enough that it’s somewhat of an inconvenience, and a double ore weekend incentivizes more people to come online and go into the mines. I had a meme that I was going to make of this picture, but I just don’t have enough time to make it today!

The second question was, Would you like to see more community-run events or admin-run events?

This feels like a dumb question but it’s worth it to see if people enjoyed one or the other more. I think people just want to see more events, as long as they’re relatively well organized.

Finally, I asked about if you had any comments about how admins ran events. Among the standouts that weren’t just “I enjoyed it” or “GREAT JOB” were:

“The admin events are good, but you can participate in a vacuum. Civ events could stand to encourage more socialization and focus on interactive activities”

“Sometimes I feel like we’re pushing the boundary of admins not getting involved in the server.”

“Overall, I think they do a great job running the events and breathing a bit of newness into the game every once in a while. They strike a good balance in running events that let players get involved if they (or your town) want, but also letting players opt out of participating if they are not interested.”

“Admins need to remember when running events over the weekend that there’s more active timezones on the server than just EU and NA”

“Of all these, fishing is the best, because it’s not just mechanically different---it also engages players with each other in a way that doesn’t otherwise occur.”

“This is one of the few servers where admin-player reactions are actually tangible and fun”

In general, I think it’s generally a good thing that people are pretty happy about different events, and that it just strikes the right balance of admins being involved but not drastically influencing gameplay, which Civ has struggled with as a format. I think in general, these events do a good job of being compelling, but they either want something more interactive than double ore weekends, but as mechanically interesting as fishing. That’s a tough balance to strike, so I’m looking forward how CivMC will deal with the impossible soon enough.

A special unthanks to the stupid idiot that pasted the lyrics to Love Sosa by Chief Keef in the chat, that was not appreciated when scrolling through all the responses because it took up so much space.

Vote Now!

Now, BEFORE YOU VOTE you might want to look at some screenshots for sports in:

• Yoahtl:
  • Main stadium
  • Hockey rink
• SPQR/Vinland
  • Main stadium
  • Hockey rink (with ongoing hockey game)

Jetsetting Cry for Help

The Vinland Vikings and Malina’s Mandarins face off for another IHL match in Vinland.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! A huge thanks to ShadySauce, Sakana-otoko, Plrog, X_an, BlueBox92, Mat_Potato_King, NeoTide, MechanicalRift, and BritishWanderer for helping with some news and context this week. There was a lot to get through and I’m in a bit of a rush, so if I didn’t get to you, very sorry.

As a result of me flying around so much, I’m going to have to skip next week’s newsletter because of crazy circumstances around time zones and flying. I’m sure there’s going to be some spicy stuff going on, and it’ll be fun to see. Gotta blast! Until next time though…

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