CivWiki Monday Newsletter

A (mostly) weekly newsletter for Civ servers supported by the CivWiki


CivWiki Newsletter for March 4, 2024

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

Thanks for all the good greetings on my trip, I had a great time. No joke, I was publishing the newsletter on airport wi-fi at 5am last week.

I’m sure you had a good couple of weeks without me, and I think from here on out you might see a more weekly structure from the newsletter. There was quite a lot that went on these past couple of weeks, and I know you’ve been waiting for this one. Without further ado, let’s get ready for the news!

Oh, but you might want to read to the end on this specific newsletter if you’re a regular reader…

This week’s featured picture is Shiroyama Harbor, which is part of their newest additions to the area. Interestingly, it’s been a while since I’ve highlighted Nara, but this is picture is well worth it. The whole Arsenia conflict allowed Nara to expand their northward river into a bay, which allowed for amazing Japanese ships to dock within spitting distance of the city. I really love the execution on this, and can’t wait to see what else they’ll do with the new space. A huge shout-out to intentgames for this picture, and I can’t wait to see more.

Featured Article

The Mount September Ice Road Conflict was an incident between the UDF and the Augustan Federation over defensive infrastructure on CivClassic. The dispute initially started over an ice road built during the War of the Coalition which overlapped plans for a vault in Mount September, along with other grievances from Icenia over the community of Mount September, particularly minemaster933. A court ruling in Mount September in late August found SirTwiggles of Imperial Truidence guilty for trespassing on NebulaSSR’s bunker on Icenia’s ice road nearby. UDF interpreted the ruling as being unable to use the ice road without consequence.

After a continued public argument against UDF and Augustan Federation officials, several fully armed UDF officials appeared at Nebula’s bunker, ready to attack. Although they continued to confront each other, no PvP conflict was made, despite the misnomer. Both sides made peace and players from Kallos and Mount September helped clean up the damage. The conflict came at a time when the last major war (the Infinity War) had concluded a year before; Punitive measures were placed on Mount September citizens, and started the general unravelling of the Augustan Federation outer allies such as Lambat. The image that resulted from the conflict remains an iconic picture of Civ, and the incident itself shows a success of diplomacy on the brink of a possible war between major powers.

This week’s featured picture is a confrontation between UDF fighters (left), and NebulaSSR (right), defending his vault.

This Week Last Year

On the week of March 6, 2023,

Why did all this juicy and now completely relevant news come one year ago, and where is it now?

The News

Let’s see, how much did I miss this past couple of weeks…

Server Updates

Pacem’s main square. I did stockpile this picture several weeks beforehand, thanks for asking!

On February 25, 2024, CivMC released their Transport Update (1.26). Depending on where you’re counting, this is both the fastest update since the re-release of 1.25 (22 days), or the length of an average update since the initial release of 1.25 (69 days, nice).

As the title suggests, many of the changes focused on transport, specifically faster rails and horse travel.

Among notable minor changes, this included:

As expected however, several issues occurred following this update:

Around the Server

We don’t see a lot of pictures from Icenia, but here’s a rainy day among the skyscrapers of Icenia, taken from Drugs and Alcohol Abuse Park.

Metagame Highlights

A great view of Shockton City over the marketplace.

The Fun Stuff

This one is of the grand transformation of Adria, Griffin. It’s kind of incredible how much got added in the past two years.

Builds

One interesting quirk this past couple of weeks in CivMC was before/after and timelapse pictures, and we’ve got some really fun ones this week.

Anyway, here’s the normal builds section we were looking for…

Cool Content

Memes

Non-Civ Content

Poll of the Week

Last week, we had 77 responses to the poll.

Our first question was specifically about upcoming Olympic hosts, and which one would you rather have host.

Yeah, it’s a tight one (that’s what she said). I was in Yoahtl voice chat that week, and they’ve noted that they’ve been working hard to set up a very long-awaited version to the olympics. Likewise, it was only then that I heard that SPQR were also gearing up with the addition of Vinland. Just wanted to see what people had thought about something like this, since both have heavily highlighted their sports offerings in recent months.

There’s surprisingly a good amount of people that would have neither host; not sure if it’s grievances against either country or they’re trying to plan their own Olympics that I didn’t know about.


Our final two questions focused on rail infrastructure, specifically routing systems, and which players prefer.

In many nations, routing systems are a somewhat minor but very impactful point of contention, as those in charge of certain systems are passionate about their decision.

In general however, it doesn’t seem like that much people care; trunk lines are a little less since the burden is placed on the user for going in the right direction, I would suppose, but nothing is too crazy.

There are a good amount of people who think RailSwitch is dumb though, which I think is a slap in the face to Okx, who developed the plugin in the first place, LOL.

Among some respondents on their decisions were:

It’s important to remember that onedest still allows for direct rail lines to function normally and be onedest compatible. People often act like the two systems are mutually exclusive and one is more superior than the other, but the two can happily coexist if well designed.

Moving from a “dumb” to a “path finding” rail switching plugin could solve many issues. RailSwitch is hard to understand since new players expect the plugin to do the routing for you. This would also reduce the situations where new improperly built junctions break the OneDest system. But this is just one more thing on the already big #codeityourself pile, and with the current system mostly working well enough there are more pressing issues.

It would be nice if the map included more end to end rails that exist rather than just onedest ones.

And a lot of people are just like,

Just build iceroads, smh my 5head

I rode my horse on every rail i could think of, still. OneDest is preferrably better

Which leads us to…

Everybody Vote Now!

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
Which of these (lesser used!) currencies do you trade with the most?
Select all that are applicable.
What mode of transport would you prefer when travelling long distances?
CivMC is planning an update to Minecraft version 1.20. What would you like to see the most?

Important Announcement

My home in Pavia. Well, it’s quite new, but it’s my home.

After months of hard work, I have the pleasure to announce (but probably to most readers’ displeasure) that this iteration of the newsletter will end regular publishing in September 2024.

I’ve said multiple times in previous months that I wanted to eventually stop publishing due to burnout and my general lack of involvement and interest in Civ these days. However, this newsletter has given me a purpose throughout the past year, and once I found a direction IRL, I resolved I would eventually stop publishing to focus on a brighter future.

After months of hard work, I’ve finally gotten something off the ground IRL — for those interested, it’s a graduate program. I’m saying September as a stopping deadline because that’s obviously when the graduate program starts. Although I could have made this could be sooner — as I’m also in a relatively later stage of consideration of a job position — I determined regardless of my future outcome September would be a far enough deadline where I could scale down over the next few months, no matter what happens.

Now, don’t get your hopes down too quickly though.

This is why I really hope that I think while this iteration of the newsletter will end, newsletters as a whole will not. Sure, it’s a good amount of work, but I believe this is such an integral part of the community and is something that anybody can do that it’s very possible this will not go away anytime soon.

Please Don’t Cry… for Help

The killer hockey rink in Shiroyama — with a lot of fish flopping around.

Ok, like I’m pulling a Tom Scott and setting a deadline for myself. Fun fact, he actually announced his departure literally six months beforehand (and supposedly a year, but I can’t find a source) and despite that everyone’s seeing this as a shock, so I’m expecting everyone to be like “holy crap, this guy’s leaving, Civ will die!” Come on guys, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

So, you’ll probably forgive me when I say,

You’ve only got a few more months when I can publish cool stuff under my voice! In either case, message me your pitch at @specificlanguage, my DMs are always open.

Thanks for reading once again, and I will see you next week. And as always…


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