CivWiki Newsletter for April 29, 2024

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

I know there’s a lot of stuff going on in the news this week, so there’s going to be a lot to cover. As we start heading into May and summer months, things are inevitably going to heat up, so get ready for some spice!

But besides that, in a few weeks, you might see this top line become something extremely different, maybe something like “Silicon Valley” or “the Cascades”. Yes, it’s a big life change for me, but I’ve promised I’m going to keep doing the news until September, so be prepared!

Until then, let’s take a look at the news!

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is the market within Northfort. This may not be the most glamorous view, but the detail is quite crazy there. The spruce and deepslate town in the tundra fits quite well with this color scheme and they’ve done quite a job building up around here too, this doesn’t include their massive train station and courtyard along with several other magnificent builds around the area. When they said they were building up quickly, they weren’t kidding! Can’t wait to see more!

(Small correction: This was previously mentioned as part of Baile — this was a mistake!)

Featured Article

SATO, formally the Southern Axis Treaty Organization, was an alliance based on CivClassic between many southern countries. Yoahtl, Okashima, Vinland, and Hjaltland desired to formalize the Western Alliance following the Somber War, which became SATO. Later members included The Commonwealth who were part of the Western Alliance during the war, Southshire, and Caledonia. The regional alliance played a major part during 2018 and early 2019 during a cold war between FRIENDS, which included proxy wars in Laconia and Rhodesia, as well as election interference in Mount Augusta, located between the two alliances.

Although the alliance members had always been close diplomatically, by mid 2019, several factors led to its downturn. Its cold war ended following internal issues in FRIENDS would lead to the establishment of NATO. Icenia’s failed admittance would spell further disaster with relations in the alliance. With the creation of newer pacts that offered better security, such as the UNC and the Entente, as well as Yoahtl annexing many members of the NCA, SATO eventually became irrelevant within the wider world.

The SATO alliance’s logo, which is a modification of the SEATO logo.

This Week Last Year

The News

A view down Icenia’s streets. (cr: Forged_Tk)

Around the Server

• Paddington_Bear was pearled by Volterrans while in Volterra Prime.
  • Volterra was observing Paddington while AFK on one of their lion statues, but was seen griefing while unobserved.
  • Paddington alleged it was part of a “funny joke”, and that they were genuinely there to buy wool.
  • Many players, while believing Paddington’s story, showed disdain upon their insistence of pulling off such a shenanigan that would signify as griefing “for fun”.
  • A response rant was posted by Paddington later this week which gave criticism in the ASN over harsh sentencing from Volterra and SPQR, as well supposed lies from Icenia over their “presence on various skybridges”.
  • The response from the various ASN nations argued that they need to rein in their shenanigans as well as to respect other nation’s sovereignty and their own builds.
  • And from someone who is at least semi-self-aware, there is a lesson to be learned to when you are on “thin ice”…
• Meanwhile, a protest movement was launched by Exyria to free various players within the server. Many are alleging that their actions fall under unjust detainment and called upon Icenia to release them.
  • A protest eventually arose in Icenia over these issues, making a “unified stand against what many perceive as unjust detainment.” The protest was largely peaceful, however, unlike other demonstrations we’ve seen this week
  • Protests on this topic are expected to continue.
• The Commonwealth declaimed Hell, a territory formerly held by KOEL near Estalia. Originally, the post reprimanded Henry before being edited to the current text.
  • Byhalia, the player that “Henry” is referring to, asked Commonwealth to hold onto the territory due to personal matters, but was not interested in continuing developing the territory upon his return. Although this was the reason for the reprimand, many it deemed to be quite unnecessary.
• A midterm opinion poll for the Imperial Federation came out courtesy of ComradeSankara, which despite a mixed approval rating from incumbent Chancellor SlothInASuit, shows a wide political spectrum in its territory.
  • Can’t wait for next month’s elections to be like Mount Augusta’s
• The Temporal Empire and Nara change a small amount of land in probably the most verbose Civ document of all time
• Members of the Lyrean Commonwealth assembled in Adria, Griffin for their first summit. Among topics discussed included creative builds, infrastructure projects and recruitment strategies.
  • They might have also discussed Exyria joining the Lyrean Commonwealth, which they did the past weekend. It is funny seeing them on the map as they are pretty much the entire size of the current Commonwealth as well!
• Volterra announced the Order of Nox, which despite its name, is to “highlight citizenry who have made substantial contributions to Volterra”. Its initial inductees are Seldomshock, SirPenrose and ChilfroySigibald.
• Gidein introduced new housing changes in New Callisto, which is a “simple” surcharge for additional properties in the territory.

Metagame Highlights

• Southw3st posts a question about the status of the current “fun plugins” on the server, namely Brewery, Fish and Wordbank.
• SoundTech was happy to announce something but apparently had a stroke in the middle of writing the actual announcement
  • What could be happening is that the 1.20 branch of the repos are starting to match up-to-date commits after a while… although that’s just a theory
• Two players from the Imperial Federation have been supposedly banned for alting. While I somewhat can believe this story, as they always logged in or out around the same time, this post is a little too dramatic from my taste. This being said, I don’t think they know what modmail is?
• Despite no new releases coming within the near future, MapSync is seeing a lot more activity recently. In my opinion, probably has the highest likelihood of reaching people outside of Civ

The Fun Stuff

The Great Tree of Sneedland. (cr: SneedChungus)

Builds

• Although not the first of the big trees we’ve seen so far, the Sneedland tree is quite detailed and looks amazing at this angle, great work! (cr: SneedChungus)
• Griffin cannot put on the brakes with their new build of their embassy in Pavia (cr: Seekinq)
• Forged_Tk has been going around with some test screenshots and it does surprisingly look good (my only critique is to lower the FOV)
• Even when from afar, Pavia’s town hall courtyard looks amazing (cr: Stoomer)
• Ok, well I guess cool builds in Pavia keep coming with Chalstone Palace in Windermere (cr: Gobblin)

Cool Content

• It would be a travesty not to put Pavia’s vintage detailed map made by Traumwandlerin in this section, must have been so much work and effort to make this, great job!
• Sure, this is good protest material that is basically just an Insta story, but can you make a TikTok out of this? (cr: Butter_villager)
• Sorry Paddington, but Windows Movie Maker “Fallen Kingdom Volterra” is nothing compared to My Movie
• Darth_Chini posted this great image of the Senate members in SPQR Q1 Well designed!
• “Wow, I like putting dots and lines on a compass!” — dustcloud, probably
• “Hey, can I copy your homework, but not make it that obvious?” - shaded, probably

Memes

• While Icenia and Estalia are technically “cold warring”, I’m personally glad that Civ doesn’t revolve on the Cold War like in the old days
• That obbybombing in Suramir is kinda excessive tho
  • This probably is actually a story in itself, but I’m not going to worry about it this week, please…
• Posting about what’s going to be the next war without giving options I think is actually kinda funny
  • For brit: this aged poorly
• Obligatory “JUST LET ME ADD ONE MORE LANE, I SWEAR WE’RE GONNA FIX TRAFFIC”
• Maybe I just didn’t watch the right cartoons growing up to get this one
• Whoever this is in Paddington’s comments, you are no better than the delusional old lady who gave me a “follow Jesus or die” pamphlet on public transit last weekend, as I left a passover dinner

Non-Civ Content

• Something interesting to look at this week: a rare, unique trio of Jacob Collier, Dodie, Laufey performing together with the New York Philharmonic (and the audience) is something quite transforming — i guess it’s quite natural for me as a lawrence fan
• My average morning:
• Somehow, my Red Sox demolished the Cubs, a team in first place, with an astonishing three position players pitching in Fenway
• Although it’s not the best Balatro run, two stencils on Black Deck go a really long way

Poll of the Week

Griffin’s new embassy in Pavia. (cr: Seekinq)

Last week we had 80 responses, one of the highest vote counts we’ve had in a while.

These graphs are quite big for their size, so I’ll probably size them down in future weeks.

World Wonders, Part 2

With our ongoing wonder series, here’s what last week’s responses looked like.

And here’s what it looks like in the wider graph (with blue entries being the new entries as seen above).

It’s no surprise that Pavia won the top spot this week. But I didn’t seed too many Pavia builds, so not every bracket is going to be an outright winner. Glad to see though, that Punk’s statue is still in the top 5 so far. This might change quickly.

Now that you know the results, I do wonder if it’s possible that people are going to start rigging the polls for their nation. You guys certainly wouldn’t do that, right?

Weirdness

Our second question was about how weird you are.

This question was sourced from a Tom Scott video, if anybody remembers this one. I do find it interesting that many people find themselves fairly normal, or just a little bit weird. Obviously, you’re playing Civ so you should find yourself a little bit weird, but so many people thought themselves as normal that it’s very odd. Maybe it’s normal in relative to the rest of Civ?

Better Tools

The open response question last week had to do with what kinds of mods/tools would help you in Civ gameplay. Besides the obvious “add gun” and “cannibalism” responses…

Debug Stick

Well, more specifically, just to get more blocks accessible. Not for vault manipulation.

Brewing

A brewing mod that tracks information about different brews, with a timer, ingredient notebook for notes on how to make certain brews. I imagine this might be interesting as a mechanic similar to like Thaumcraft, where things get discovered and be revealed over time.

Citadel

This had the most indepth response and I believe a mod does exist for this — although as always, I don’t think Gjum has updated it in a while.

Shared in game to-do list

It’s an idea lifted directly from Stardew Valley. Of course, these days we have Discord to do an in-game list, but it’s an interesting idea.

Simple Voice Chat

Proximity chat is something that’s to be desired on Civ for quite a while, it’s perfect for a game like this. That’s pretty much the only thing I wish was in Civ that isn’t already there.

It seems people were pretty stumped on this question — it doesn’t necessarily help that the game has been so optimized on how to play, that there’s not a need to actually have anymore tools than we already have.

Vote Now!

This week’s world wonder preliminary bracket is number three out of nine. See previous responses above.

Adtacular Summer!

With the rising number of businesses on Civ, I’m opening up advertising space in the newsletter once again for the rest of the summer (or really, until the newsletter ends!) There are generally no restrictions on the ads themselves, with the only exception being that all ads must be directly related to Civ. Any ads for non-Civ purposes will be automatically rejected. (I also will not accept IRL money for these ads.)

This time, the price of the ad will be determined by size:

To run an ad:

• Pay at Sort Code HS-7362, along with a message containing your ad, either as a link to an image or the ad read itself.
• All charges will be due at Sunday, 9pm Eastern time for the following Monday (e.g. for next week, May 6, all ads are due on May 5, at Sunday, 9pm Eastern). Please check your time zone for proper timings.
• If your ad is rejected for any reason, for either Civ-unrelatedness or violation of content policies, you will be refunded 50% of your charge. This is non-negotiable.

As a side effect, this does mean that newsletters will be published every week for the next five months for consistency’s sake.

For any questions, please send them to @specificlanguage on Discord! Looking forward to seeing your ads!

(For future weeks, please see the ads page for more information.)

Selling Out Cry for Help

An amazingly detailed medieval style map of Pavia.

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! I hope you’re enjoying a lot of the changes to the newsletter so far, I’m trying to make in a sustainably good state for the future. I don’t want to make this impersonal and boring, but I also don’t want to make it too involved for anyone who dares to continue this in the future.

As always, if you don’t want to write or make an ad, I’m always open for featured article submissions to be put on the top of the newsletter. Feel free to message me @specificlanguage for any ideas.

Thanks again for all the support and I hope to see you next week. Until next time, folks!

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