CivWiki Monday Newsletter for May 8, 2023

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

I imagine that after last week’s newsletter which got pinned on top of the r/CivMC subreddit, people may not know what this is. If you’re new here, welcome! This is intended to be a semi-serious and informational writeup I do each week about the Civ community on Mondays.

The newsletters summarize things that not only happen on CivMC, but throughout the entire Civ community, and cover everything from current events to interesting builds, content creation, and memes throughout the community. Additionally, we include information about past events and history in the form of the Featured Article to encourage people to read and learn from history on CivWiki, which this is named after.

There is also a running joke since I compile these on Sunday nights, which has been known to be some of the most drama-prone nights on Civ (since everyone has an abundance of free time). But don’t worry guys, I’ve never stayed up past 2am writing a newsletter.

Ok, are we ready for the news?

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image are ruins of a pyramid in Q’Barra in Nara. The Jungle colony has been described by Blatlas as “how to do an exclave and not have it be a glorified field,” and this image really shows how it’s done. It’s worth noting that the ruins were built like this by Earyx, which is doubly impressive since it already takes effort to build a nice looking pyramid like this. The territory, while also known to harvest jungle crops, has developed quite their own build techniques compared to the Japanese-styled mainland at Shiroyama. It’s great work from Earyx and their friends at Nara, and I can’t wait to see more of it soon!

Featured Article

This week’s featured article was written by Metriximor and specificlanguage.

The Battle of Lusitania was a military incursion and invasion of Lusitania during the War of the Coalition. After a series of obbybombings across the server hit Coventhia, Lusitania moved in to help out its friends; previously the country had known the obby bombers were based nearby. After increased Coventhian activity in the area, the obby bombers, known as Ransakistan threatened Lusitania with invasion if they were caught trying to stop them. Lusitania responded by coordinating with Coventhia and Yoahtl helping form what would be called the “Ok Bomber Coalition”, consisting of SATO, Entente and UDF fighters, along with others from Mir and a miriad of independent parties.

Throughout a week in early December 2020, Ransakistan forces sporadically obbybombed unbastioned settlements, while Coalition forces attempted to seek out the Ransakistan vault. A state of emergency was declared by the country on December 11, accepting that anyone who entered the territory would be subject to being pearled. Eventually, a Ransakistan vault was discovered in the border of the Holy Jaded Empire, dubbed the Swimming Pool, close to Lusitania, and was broken only a couple days after the state of emergency. Several players from the Coalition stayed behind in Lusitania to clean up grief.

The battle was the climax of the War of the Coalition and was the only military conflict that occurred within Lusitania’s history. Upon discovering that Ransakistan was supported by NATO countries, focus shifted towards ending the Infinity War.

This week’s featured article image are PvPers having a friendly meeting in the Théspian Hall in Portucale.

The News

A look down Pavia City’s main street, from ArtificialDriver.

CivMC

• Tensions between the Cinian Union and Warmia have started to boil over this past week.
  • Last week, the Cinian Union alleged that Warmia had no right to annex Lesneria-Wlazestan, after Warmia previously passed the Treaty of Houston.
  • However, this past week Oceanstar was pearled by Warmia after attempting to remove snitches from their land.
  • Following their pearling, some Mount Augustan officials attempted to break Oceanstar out of the vault, however they were told to leave by Elysian Pact officials.
  • In retaliation, Warmia has banned the officials from the territory.
  • Warmia eventually released a map of their perspective of the Lesneria-Wlazestan counties
  • Later that week, Oceanstar released the official Cinian Union perspective regarding the crisis. It’s a long post, but the TL;DR of it is that Warmia were acting in bad faith when establishing the territory back in March and during their subsequent exit from the Union.
  • While the Elysian Pact has said numerous times that they would not get involved, Volterra are currently assessing a proper response as well.
  • By Sunday night (ah, yes), Oceanstar was released, with both parties agreeing to good faith negotiations with other members, hoping for demilitarization of the territory.
• One of the more controversial news of the last week was the sentencing of Fastestgrass taken by the SEC.
  • Fastestgrass had previously been sentenced prior to the war for a week for breaking bastions at a trenched farms complex and illegally snitching Icenia.
  • After the war had completed, his sentencing had been consequently upgraded due to placing a large quantity of DRO at Cortesia Del Mar’s public nether portal and his role in inciting Gang Shi aggression against the SEC. Meat312 made a post early in the week arguing for his early release.
• The Great Thrall Clan, once a very active newfriend colony was annexed by Mercutio and Icarus.
• Nara and Estalia announced the NEST treaty, committing the two nations to mutual defense.
• After a long election, HassDaMann was elected as the next Chancellor of the Imperial Federation.
• Gamertime and JuniorTide announced the Pavian Stock Exchange along with its holding company, the Apex Holdings.
• Pavian Crown Prince Paagf II died of a sudden cardiac arrest on Charles III’s coronation day — coincidence? BritishWanderer IV was elected by the Dukes to be Paagf’s successor.
  • One of BritishWanderer’s first acts as Crown Prince was to request a Ducal Diet from all the Dukes, to find priorities that he should focus on in his latest reign.
• Icenia is currently in the process of electing its senate for May 2023 following a short delay during the previous war with Gang Shi.
• Cortesia Del Mar has appointed AvaniSpades to Interior Minister, replacing Complexii. I never thought I’d do this but I’m citing the CivMC twitter…
• Mount Augusta is running their latest Judge elections.
• Transylvanian citizens have elected their first Diet with the Transylvanian Patriotic Movement Party winning the most seats with 4 out of the Senate’s 9.
• GuggaBugga has appointed ImperialRex as First Hand in the Hands of the Earth organization due to his commitment to the cause’s greenification of the server.
• SPQR passed a law to prevent its historic Hercynian Forest to be chopped down eventually creating a national park in upon the Conservation Act’s passing.
• Lambat has announced that Pamapang and Sunnebourg have been added to the country as their own districts
• Azelair has announced three new seers of the Free Worker’s Cooperative of Danzilona, itsADoozy, kingajackh12, and peakman12.
• Henderwicz has announced the creation of a new African territory of Nara, Mali.

Other Servers

• CivCubed has announced they would be entering a beta stage very soon, join their discord to be allowed on their server.
• Return of the Civ is starting to implement some Civ mainstays in their server, including OneTimeTeleport, coming soon.
  • The server’s seen a good increase in activity, up to a regular number of about 6-7 with peaks to about 10 since its launch of beta, mostly coming from Vintage Story recruits.

Metagaming

• GuggaBugga asks for Civ conspiracies which opens some cans of worms
• TransylvaniaMan proposes bedrock support for Civ but gets quickly shut down
• GDan proposes rebalancing PrisonPearl, one of the main plugins of the genre and arguably causes the most problems
• Lon probably forgot that hockey exists
• CivMC has started advertising on semi-official accounts on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Join their discord for some of their posts and to give them some content to post.
  • They’ve been posting everything from nation spotlights to current events, along with having a website being created…
• At the moment, now that we have an absurd amount of servers, that by technicality are live, there’s been discussion to cull the amount of the servers that are shown on the front page of the CivWiki. Feedback is welcomed!

The Fun Stuff

A nice quaint market in Amboise by EVDan. It took a while for it to get featured, but the market’s a great gathering place for people to hang around.

Builds

• So that Q’Barra pyramid was really cool but what if there were more pictures from that?
• Along with Q’Barra that was highlighted today, Prawny also released a render of Shiroyama earlier this week
• ArtificialDriver is taking pictures of the newly renovated shops down Pavia Main Street
• Aetherix & Cuppy have started building some Imperia brownstones in game
• Here is an album of some of Klopsik’s builds around Warmia
• Vedd is also pulling out some brownstones himself in Cortesia Del Mar!
• Plupsnup is compiling a CCTT map in-game with copper
• EVDan somehow got some good specs to take pictures of Amboise
• Seldomshock is highlighting some beautiful stuff in Shockton
• MTA’s highlight on the Twitters came with a nice image thread as well
• MrJeremyFisher is showing off his Flickr page with beautiful and mindbending pictures of Icenia

Cool Content

• Gwua and HEGS industries has teased “Game of Pearls”, a dramatic retelling of CivMC history based on real events
• I just like the cute little flags on Respein’s map
• Hass has a very good campaign poster for IF Chancellor, which might be why he won
• Slushhi made me laugh by pearling HydroKnight so I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with me
• I like metro maps and of course Lambat has some
• Look closely, and you’ll see that this travel poster of Adria is not just a mere screenshot, I love subtle things like this
• The CivCubed ad looks kinda cute -No comment about the war but Warmiaball is cool
• Fox and Dino are visiting Truidencia this week

Memes

• The 1-Minute War
• When is Reggie Fils-Aime going to play CivMC
• Too much balkan for my taste
• Oops we did a stinky
• In the AN only spawning if you afk a while
• Ahri doing a little self-invitation
• In case anyone is confused, there is a tradition of having Oko make these posts
• One of these quotes is going to get someone cancelled one day
• I cannot qualify this as “cool content” but janet blackquill has some poetry up their sleeve

Non-Civ Content

• Christopher ChristopherCake is mourning the death of the Gordon Lightfoot
• He is also looking for good music and has also shown me his dog
• Speaking of pets, here’s Hg’s cat
• Your Baseball Bulletpoint^TM this week is a visualization of the longest/shortest outfield walls in baseball. Obviously this doesn’t account for height, especially Fenway’s Monster

Anticipation Cry for Help

The Not-So-Yellow Submarine in Mercutio. Huh, I’m highlighting Mercutio for the second week in the newsletter as the last image.

We’ve got ONE MORE WEEK, guys! One more week until the 52nd and one year anniversary of the newsletter!

Thanks to BritishWanderer, Gjum, and nasion for helping with the newsletter this week, saved me quite a couple of headaches with some other things that I have going on this week.

I don’t have a lot of time for this section but please write a featured article if you’d like, it helps me write less! Especially helpful next week considering it’s the 52nd newsletter so if you submit one you might get to be the coveted featured article slot for that special newsletter (it’s not that special).

Ok bye guys time to take an exam! But first…

EDIT CIVWIKI

• < < < Last week’s newsletter (May 1)
• Submit a featured article - Come on, you know you want to be the 52nd featured article
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• View a shortened version of this newsletter on CivWiki