CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Newsletter for May 13, 2024

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy “anniversary!” from New England!

I hope everyone had a happy Mother’s day and you at least said the word “hello” to your mom. I certainly did.

Now, that being said, I hope everyone also enjoyed the 1.20 update for CivMC — a lot of brand new features that hopefully will inject a little bit of life on Civ.

Meanwhile, it’s worth letting you know the first newsletter launched on May 16, but you know, it’s like a Thursday this year, so we’ll call this part one of the anniversary celebrations. I know that CivMC’s anniversary is still another month or so away, but it’s like a little bit of a pre-celebration right now anyway?

This week, we have the colorful, glazed buildings along the river in Katipan District, Lambat. The country may be a little inactive right now, but the country has some great builds that I personally feel are unappreciated. This is one of the newer developments in the country, around the start of 2023. You may be familiar with this as it’s part of the main areas at the western end of the Great Overland Railway. I always love colorful, urban landscapes with greenery, and this is a choice one. Great work, and I hope to see more like this in the future.

As we’re coming up on the 2nd anniversary of the newsletter, I’m planning to have another big featured image to celebrate, but for now, I’m happy with how this turned out. This was taken on 1.20 with new shaders, so for me, it was at least a good test run.

Featured Article

Imperial Truidence was a monarchy and republic on CivClassic well known for their participation in the UDF and Nordic culture. Located near 0,0, the country was founded in 2019 with Emperor Bez being its leader, establishing a nation quickly in the marsh and forest area. It was accepted into the first iteration of the United Northern Congress and upon its collapse, was one of the founding members of the United Defense Front along with nearby Icenia. Despite having several changes in government throughout its lifespan, the country remained a stable force within the region, and began to build military defense late within CivClassic’s life.

Despite being memed for the formation of a “frisbee”-like grass structure in its initial town, the country eventually constructed major builds including Coram Castle, St. Bez Cathedral, and Barad Dur. The country also controlled several other cities including Northland, Inis Moin, and Ban Ard. Since the beginning of the country, a religion was founded named Bezism, originally committing to serving a duty to serve the Truidencian state rather than the more mystic devotion it formed late into the server’s life. Today Imperial Truidence’s successor state, the Holy Truidencian Empire, is once again active on CivMC.

This week’s featured article image is of Anburon, Imperial Truidence’s capital on CivClassic.

This Week Last Year

On the week of May 15


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The News

The beach alongside striking views of Union Hill, Pavia (cr: Seekinq)

Server Updates

On May 10, CivMC had a new update, 2.0.0, upgrading to 1.20.4.

While you can still use 1.18 clients to connect to the server on 1.20.4, it’s highly recommended you switch to take advantage of all the new features.


Mod Upgrade “Guide”

For those who are still hesitant to upgrade, I’ve quickly compiled a guide for a few frequently used mods on Civ and a quick guide on how to upgrade them. I highly suggest using 1.20.4 as most mods are using this as a target for updating (not to mention the server itself is running on 1.20.4). All links are Modrinth, unless noted.

To transport your scripts, configs, etc. from these mods, copy your /configs folder in your Minecraft instance.

The following mods require additional steps to have your data transferred over from your 1.18 instance to 1.20.

As official versions for these mods come out, I’ll hope to update the links properly.


Around the Server

A clear sunny morning in Vinland’s town center (cr: BritishWanderer)

Metagame Highlights


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The Fun Stuff

The old town within Groveheart, on a partly cloudy, picturesque evening (cr: Gidein).

Builds

There were a lot of great builds shown off this week. Unfortunately, it is an immense tragedy I was not able to show them all this week, but here’s my favorites:

Now, I went on the server this past weekend to test out some new shaders on 1.20, but I’ll keep them in the archives for now so I don’t stuff it down your throat.

Cool Content

Memes

If you don’t see many memes here, it’s because they were mostly spam posts and not quality. At least make it funny and not just a Minecraft face superimposition. I get comedy is hard but at least try to have something that makes a wider Civ community laugh.

Non-Civ Content


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Poll of the Week

Winterbourne Castle among the cloudy skies at night in the far north. (cr: Princess__Bow)

Last week, we had 57 responses to the questions.

World Wonders, Part 4

You know the drill with World Wonders, let’s get it over with:

Not that many people jumped at Adria or the Olympic Area as world wonders compared to something like Pavia, even though I’d definitely consider them both to be pretty incredible in their own rights. Of course people hopped on the Notch Face as a world wonder, but I thought this would be a joke entry I included at the last minute.

Lusitania and Tricon are places that I personally consider really amazing, but didn’t really seem to resonate with a lot of people when I included it. This time, I did include sample pictures so people know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the current standings for the top 12 world wonders, with the newest entries highlighted in blue:


Dead Nation Impact

The next question was about how much impact dead or dormant nations had within the server, and which ones had the most impact on the server today.

This was a question that was posed by TheJmqn when I asked for stuff in discord.

A lot of the nations picked were nations that played a major part in shaping the server as it is today, which is the soft way of saying “these are the losers of the major wars on the server.” Both statements however, are not incorrect, because they are pretty much the reasons why the server is the way it is, because they got defeated by a major world power (in some way or another).

To balance it out, I tried to include nations which had a more cultural impact on the server, like Gensokyo, Arsenio, Cortesia, or Lusitania, but their footprints are much smaller, which may be why you don’t see as many responses as you see for the others.


Nation Reputation

The final question was Does nation reputation actually matter, why or why not?

This was a question that was suggested by Highboy from Volterra, so thanks to him for that! I believe when he gave this question, it was a matter of hearing opinions who don’t have as strong of a voice in the political landscape.

The overwhelming response to this question was pretty much:

Yes, and…

The answers afterwards, definitely changed depending on your viewpoint:

I’d say so. Even a heavily militarized and hegemonic power needs to have a solid reputation behind that military and their diplomacy … and for any power not looking for a strict military hegemony, then cultural and diplomatic reputation are extremely important for securing wealth and significance to guarantee their safety.

There’s a lot more to this specific response, but in general, I do agree. With every nation having their own reputation there needs to be some specific niche in doing so. This response eventually talks about Estalia, and Pavia/Mercutio in particular for the two examples, and both are pretty good. I’m really sorry that I’m grading this like an essay, but you’re right since both military and cultural reputation matter in their own respects on this server.

There’s a line where it doesn’t matter. If you are powerful enough, it doesn’t (really this is only estalia). For everyone else, I’d say yes it does. Pavia with a bad rep would be dead. Nara with a bad rep would have succumbed to wars. Hell, even Icenia for as powerful as it is would have fallen if it didn’t have a good enough rep to get allies willing to rebuild it so many times and go into the shit-pit with it as people fuck around.

As a somewhat foil to the first answer, this is true as well, but Nara and Icenia have both had drama and relatively negative reception in some right as well. Today, most nations have a generally good reputation so it’s not as a big a deal to many…

It’s kinda like branding. A good brand can incentivise trade or activity while a bad brand can push other states against you and feel threatened by your presence.

personal rep matters more than overall nation rep imo. if you’re in a shitty nation, but are a decent person, you’ll be fine.

This is something that we’ve seen argued a couple times, especially for “buildfriends” in a “shitty nation”, most notably TolypeVelleda in several nations. It’s arguable whether this is correct, but personal reputation has some worth. I mean believe me, this newsletter is basically built on my oldfriend reputation. But people’s reputation definitely plays a part — I think national is more important on a global scale, but personal reputation is good for others.

I think national reputation matters in terms of being considered trustworthy, because negotiations always break down if every interaction is assumed to be in bad faith.

National reputation is so important to negotiations because if you keep screwing people over then it’s not very likely that you’re going to get a good settlement or negotiate in good faith. We sort of saw that in the last few major wars, so at least it’s a good indicator. Definitely more of a causation then correlation here though.

no because if nation is a shithole but their powerful it dosent matter

I wonder who this is…

Vote Now!

For wonders questions, here’s an album of the wonders up for vote this week. We’re on bracket 5/9.

You can probably tell I wanted fun questions this time around.

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.
Can you swim? (This means that if you were thrown into the deep end of a pool, would you drown?)
What's your favorite/funniest Civ-specific meme?

A message from Lowball LuxuriesHello I am Highroll, and my partner Invader and I are proud to announce the opening of Lowball Luxuries in the nation of Pavia at 722 -3091, grab some of our 20d netherite repair pics and more! Go to the discord to see all the products we offer!https://discord.gg/tjntDPEn

Anticipation Cry for Help

A postcard from Exyria from the Lyrean Commonwealth Bureau of Tourism. (cr: Seekinq)

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter!

I want to give a huge shoutout to… RedDevel, Tophat, TheJmqn, Highboy, Xcios, Asgeir, Forged (for helping me out of the Icenia pit), ArtificialDriver, BritishWanderer, Raeders, Motoko_Kusanagi, SoundTech, Kingstell, Highroll, DockerImage and probably many, many others for some assistance or another with this week’s newsletter!

  • If you want to advertise your own businesses with pictures or the texts above, send some ads over!
  • If you want to help write in any capacity, (whether or not I’ve reached out to you already), let me know at @specificlanguage on Discord. I might be busy and not be able to assign anything to you, but I kind of want a new headcount to see what the future of the news looks like.

While I don’t have anything special cooked up for next week’s anniversary newsletter, I do want to thank everyone for reading through long intermissions and slow news weeks, and I’m so happy that all of you are supporting the newsletter after nearly two years of publishing.

Thanks all, and as always…


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