CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Newsletter for April 29, 2024

• specificlanguage

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!

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.

I’m always open for featured article submissions to be put here. Feel free to message me @specificlanguage for any ideas.

This Week Last Year

On the week of May 1

Wow, that was a tough week in retrospect, huh…

The News

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

Around the Server

Metagame Highlights

The Fun Stuff

The Great Tree of Sneedland. (cr: SneedChungus)

Builds

Cool Content

Memes

Non-Civ Content

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.

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
Which of these places do you consider as world wonders?
Select all that are applicable.
Do you feel that your opinions on Civ seem to count/matter?
Do you think AI could learn to play Civ? Why or why not?

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:

All payments should be sent to MB Sort Code HS-7362.

  • Text based ad: 10d/run (see example below)
  • Text must have 250 characters or less
  • You can specify the background color you’d like (except Black or White background)
  • Links allowed, but no pictures
A message from the UNCIn case anyone is confused, there is a tradition of having BritishWanderer make these posts, since he has the best individual relations with the community. It was likely written by somebody who would have been shat all over had they been the one to actually make the post, and I doubt BritishWanderer even read it before he copypasted it here on their behalf.

  • Banner ad: 12d/run (see example below)
  • Image size should be of similar ratio to 768x96 (8:1)


  • Full image ad: 20d/run
  • Image size should be of similar ratio to 768x324 (2:1)

To run an ad:

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!


EDIT CIVWIKI