CivWiki Newsletter for April 8, 2024

Good morning and happy Eclipse Monday from New England!

Although the eclipse is not passing by my general area, I’m pretty dang close. Funnily enough, I was on the path of totality a few weeks ago, but alas…

This being said, if you’re reading this newsletter right now and you haven’t touched grass today, you might want to if you’re in the US, you might be missing a once-in-a-lifetime event! Go outside and get some eclipse glasses before you start reading, because it’s quite essential to this newsletter!

Ok, you did? Yes? Great!

Well, it’s obviously not essential, but did I get you outside before you started scrolling?

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is a lesser seen view of Commonwealth — at the back of Verdant Valley sits a large wooden mansion on a hill as well as some great apartments, and these builds are extremely well made, even if they’re a couple of years old. Of course Commonwealth is continuing to work on new builds, not to mention their parliament building, but it’s still great to look back and see some very detailed builds they’re less known for. Great work!

Featured Article

The New World was a continent on CivRealms 2.0 that acted as a map expansion to the server’s world. The second expansion after the Thomas Archipelago, its land was hotly contested as negotiations for the continent’s land began prior to the expansion’s launch. Its layout was similar to the initial continent, being a world-painted map retrieved from public sources, and held a variety of climates including jungles, volcanoes, and deserts.

The New World was located 20,000 blocks roughly southwest of CivRealm’s main continent, and several existing nations sought to make colonies on the continent, among those being the Imperial Federation, Norlund, SPQR, and Otonabee. Although initial disputes over land were made, it eventually became a relatively peaceful area with much of the conflict remaining on the main continent. A rail was also made for easier access to the continent, which was slightly faster than travelling by boat. Despite its hectic launch, the New World’s expansion is one example of a successful map expansion integrated into its environment.

This Week Last Year

The News

The courtyard of the Art Museum in Shiroyama, Nara.

Around the Server

• The delayed Easter event was revealed to not be an ore weekend, but an easter egg hunt.
  • They implored people to gasp kill bunnies?! Well, if it’s for special egg drops and fishing decorations from fishing, I guess it’s fine… Please don’t kill bunnies in real life though.
• Mount Augusta mayor Sakana-otoko put a bounty on Coolchacha97.
  • They cited that they continued to “[pick] fights ‘on behalf of mta as a govt member’"" and only gave a government role to “shut him up”.
  • That being said, as a result of his position he continued to incite conflict between Doom City and Mount Augusta, one instance of which resulted in the Doom City Conflict late last year
  • Coolchacha’s response has been generally dismissive, saying that “he was following orders”
  • As he’s generally been labelled as an annoyance, many countries have put up bounties that are significantly more than the 2 iron present.
  • Eventually, he was both pearled and banned from CivMC discord’s general channel.
• Now, as a result, I’ve already seen this in private channels the previous week, however Mount Augusta is confirmed to be moving elsewhere on the map, mainly to remove the political tension between them and neighboring Doom City.
  • Many Augustans are in favor of this, citing the need to establish a stronger, more resilient community and location nearer to their allies.
  • This however, would mean that many of the builds they’ve constructed over nearly two years would be left inactive (although Mount Augusta would presumably continue to own the land, just resettle somewhere else.)
• Pavian Archduke and Monument Bank head BritishWanderer held a fireside chat on Sunday with Toaxbis.
  • They continued making efforts to continue their alliances and spreading peace within the region, as well as efforts to continue expansion of their builds as well as their new territory north of the main city.
• Additionally, Monument Group released their Q1 financial report. Although their revenue quarter-on-quarter dropped slightly, they continue to display continuous growth with a large safety net.
• Speaking of business, the Shiroyama Exchange opened this past week, offering exchanges of several commodities and managed by Kyojin Corp. One thing that is nice though, the light display of which one is currently accepting is really cool.
• Amicitia announced that jjon would be stepping down as Royal Diplomat and would be receiving medals of honour for his service, along with the reassurance that they would not be going inactive.
  • Additionally, they announced they would relinquish most of their claims on Alenarith, citing the need to focus on their current projects.
• The Nara-Mount Augusta line has been fully coppered, double tracked, and lifted off bedrock, which now allows it to be ”[🔥] blazing[ly] fast!”
• Potato_King announced that they would be starting a new nation, the Knight Order of the Imperials after his time in the IF came to an end.
• The Imperial Federation also announced they would be opening their own XP exchange in New Callisto.
• Reggio announced that they have discovered and are selling Reggio Rum, marking the 50% mark of all brews ever discovered on the server.
• Lambat released several territories not in use, namely Kawayan near Lusatia and southern areas in Letos, imploring them to be used for newfriend use.

Metagame Highlights

• Bronnakus released new map render files to replace months-old versions present on the current CivMap.
• I kind of find it funny that “unclaimed land” is more of a guidance here than an actual answer when prompted.

The Fun Stuff

Shockton Mansion, in Volterra.

Cool Things

Well, I think everyone’s taking a break from working overtime on Civ this week, so there’s not much to showcase, but there is some stuff I’ve found I wanna show.

• Shockton Mansion above, is quite detailed and it’s a great place along the rail lines there
• Swung around my ""alma mater"" Commonwealth and took a number of pictures of their new and old builds
• Then, visited Nara and took a peek of their [art museum], and White Castle under their “castle”
• A little delve into the IF channels finds this lovely garden in Regensburg by PumpkinPie134, worth the pain of custom trees, in my opinion
• Meanwhile, Jalhf’s home in Groveheart looks spectacular among the forested landscape
• The bridge at Feline and Vouxia looks awesome as well, matches well into its landscape
• CatistStudy posts a short tour of Baile, with admittedly an AI-generated song, but it’s well produced for their first foray into video editing!
• Well, I did say it’s a White Castle, I guess…

Non-Civ Content

So kind of to supplement the good response to the April Fools newsletter, I’m going to try to obtain a wider variety of content in this section, but of course, like five people read this section so…

• Still working on the baseball pick’em app again, with some new features to show your picks from the previous day… as you can see though, I wouldn’t win in vegas
• But who cares about that? Go touch grass, there’s a total solar eclipse in the United States today!
• One of my favorite books, Turtles All the Way Down is getting a movie adaptation released later this year on HBO Max, which is very exciting and looks great!
• For one of my potential schools, the cost of tuition might upwards of $100k a year. Is it really worth it?
• Everyone in the Northeast probably felt a pretty big 4.8 earthquake near New York the other day, could a big one happen sometime soon?
• Do you nitpick me for mispelling words? Well this might be a fun game for you!

Poll of the Week

Last week, we had 33 responses. Now I think this is partly because of two factors: The poll looked extremely long, which it was, and it came after an April Fools edition. I’m really sorry for so much content that maybe people weren’t so interested in. So, maybe take these responses with a grain of salt since it’s very plausible many people were not interested in responding to a large poll.

Our first question was a poll of various categories of the direction the server is going.

I’ll probably do this again sometime with different categories, since these were pretty well received across the board. Though, this being said, I’m very happy many of these questions are much higher across the board.

Now, there’s a couple I do want to bring your attention to:

• Player/diplomatic relations has a sizable enough minority of those who think it’s been worse. I’d say this would be more likely because of people who’ve been generally marginalized by the community in one way or another, but it’s worth at least being reasonable to all these people and negotiate in good faith, which I think has been going pretty well on Civ so far.
• Player activity/mood was the only category where the plurality was that the direction is going worse. If I were an optimist, I would say this is just a general symptom of long-running Civ servers and stagnating gameplay, if I were a pessimist, I would say this is a general symptom of long-running Civ servers and stagnating gameplay, along with nothing really present to excite me anymore.
• PvP has been the only category that’s been staying stagnant, and that’s almost entirely because the PvP meta hasn’t changed since launch. Now, CivRush and other splinter servers are attempting to experiment with 1.9-style PvP soon, so fingers crossed that the meta change will carry over to mainline.

Again, nearly all of these categories were generally positive, and I’m glad to see it, but I’d love to do another sequel poll for more controversial and community-based categories in the future.

Our second question just regarded some information regarding how I executed the April Fools joke…

I’m glad at least people liked it, even if they don’t want to see more. I don’t think I’m going to launch a second newsletter in the near future, but I’m glad people enjoy stuff they saw. I’m probably going to include a greater variety of content in the Non-Civ Content section in the news to reflect this, but nothing really much more. I did get into a journalism program though…

The final question has to do with what people consider to be “world wonders” on CivMC. Now…

• There were a lot of people that said “Pavia”. Now, I’m not going to deny that Pavia is a world wonder, but there were just a lot of people that said “Pavia” on its own, without any building indications, since the country is actually quite large with the amount of builds they have, like the town hall, or cathedral, or Vetranio Castle, or whatever.
• I’m also most likely going to discount anything that has to do with me, which I appreciate, but uh, I don’t think people should count as world wonders.
• This being said, among some other widely mentioned answers are the SPQR Coliseum, buildings near Shiroyama, Altepetl, and Suramir (the 0,0 market in Estalia).
• However, with that being said, I’m going to run this poll once again this week, because while there are a good variety of answers, I think I’d like to see more varied answers out here!

You also don’t have to list just 7. Feel free to put as many builds as you like!

Vote Now!

As a result, I’ve tried to keep the poll short this week. Kind of helps so I still have questions to use.

Wonderful Cry for Help

Oops, ran out of pictures, sorry!

Thanks for reading and a thanks to BritishWanderer, Toaxbis, reffelruz, and meenos for some help while heading around their respective nations this past weekend. Not much to say this week, but as always, if you’d like to help contribute to this newsletter, it’s always appreciated! I’d love more contributors to make it a celebration of Civ (and maybe find a successor?).

Anyway, thanks for reading and I will see you next week, and until then…

EDIT CIVWIKI

• < < < Last week’s newsletter (April 2)
• Submit a featured article - Advertise your nation!
• View and post comments on r/CivWiki
• View a shortened version of this newsletter on CivWiki