CivWiki Monday Newsletter for May 15, 2023

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

So, guys, we did it, we made it to one year. The 52nd newsletter and still going. The fact that we reached this number in just a short amount of time is just phenomenal, I-I’m just amazed.

Ok, in all seriousness, thank you for everything for the past year. This has probably been the one constant in my life with everything going on, and I want to thank all of you for reading these thousands of words that I write every week.

I believe I initially started this as somewhat of a joke, I was raised on Akiyama’s Monday Mornings back on CivTemp, and was always like, huh what if I tried doing it myself? Surely, it won’t crash and burn like the other two times people attempted it on CivClassic.

When CivWiki started having “Featured Articles” and “Current Events”, I knew that was my chance. I was kind of expecting to burn out by September, maybe October when the server launched considering I was writing stuff MUCH longer than he was. But it kept going on for so long and became just a part of my schedule, in addition to everyone supporting and reading it, that I just kept doing it.

I’m really excited and incredibly glad to have gotten to this landmark. I want to give a huge thanks (he may not even know it himself) to TheJmqn, who made the “Featured Article” and “Current Events” on CivWiki on May 15th all by himself. Of course he didn’t write a newsletter, but without him, this would never have existed.

Right, enough sappy stuff. Are we ready to start reading?

Featured

Featured Image

This week I decided to do something a bit different for our anniversary newsletter, and highlighting four places instead of just one. Granted, it did make the image less ideal, however I think it’s appropriate to highlight each of these nations based on their merits.

• The first image is Lusitania’s Portucale with its colorful row houses on the sea, representing one of the first great builds on the server. I took a picture of this one myself!
• The second image is the sea hunter statue in Venozia, Venne, on the complete opposite side where a new build was completed with diplomacy. This picture was taken by Magic_Maya.
• The third image is around the Mill & Verdant Valley in Commonwealth, where roleplay meets exquisite builds. This one was taken by banyough several months ago.
• The fourth and final image is Santiago, Cortesia Del Mar, along the skyline. It’s actually one of their pictures of the Zocalo, but cropped the central spire out because it’s just weird. Thanks to MrsDoomBringer, and it’s sourced from the nation ad, lmao

All of these were picked because I haven’t highlighted all four in a while, but it’s a great representation of how I sometimes see Civ nations building up — from a small humble village (Lusitania, I promise you’re not just that), to building symbolism and lore for their country, to becoming a growing country with newfriends and spectacular builds around the landscape, to eventually becoming a world superpower with industry.

Thanks to everyone for their pictures and that was a much longer writeup than I should have done for something like this.

Featured Article

This week’s featured article was written by Metriximor. It was first generated by Bing AI, rewritten by hand and then improved/grammar mistakes fixed by Deepl. Speclang’s note: how am I not surprised.

The CivWiki Monday Newsletter is a periodic newsletter published by the CivWiki community (with the main editor being specificlanguage). It aims to provide the community with a summary of the latest happenings on the CivMC server and its associated communities. The newsletter includes reports on the progress of individual nations, updates on server-wide events and competitions, and announcements of new features, plugins, civ servers, among a myriad of other things.

The CivWiki Monday Newsletter is an important source of information for players who are interested in keeping up with the latest developments on the server. It provides players with a comprehensive overview of what is happening on the server, and can help them to identify what is happening in the often times chaotic world of Civ. Players who are interested in staying up-to-date on the latest developments on the server may also choose to use alternative methods such as the CivWiki, civ based subreddits or any of the many Discord servers related to Civ.

This week’s featured picture (while somewhat unrelated) is a gif representing all the countries on CivClassic along with a call to Edit CivWiki!

The News

I mean considering how much crap you guys raised this week, y’all really wanted to get your stuff into the 52nd newsletter huh? Really making me work this week.

Borderlines, Part 1

A little change of pace on the pictures, something a little far — Adria from the hills, by Seekinq.

I recently covered last Monday about the peace settlement that Volterra brokered for the Cinian Union. You remember last weekend that things got out of control, but this seemed to be the minor conflict out of two border disputes last week.

• Volterra confirmed on Monday that tensions had been lowered between the two countries and resolved the conflict.
• Eventually, the Cinian Union and Warmia came to an agreement by midweek on what would be the future of Lesneria-Wlazestan.
  • The Treaty of Divilam declared that the country would continue to be independent from both Warmia and the Cinian Union, however with smaller territory and would be demilitarized.
  • It did open the door for possible union with other states, but it’s done so in a much more civilized manner than before.
  • General reception has been pretty supportive of this, mostly with many happy that the crisis was resolved in a very peaceful manner.
• Achiuwa eventually returned to the Lesneria-Wlazestan territory and was also involved in the talks that I’ve already talked about
• However, when it came time to “vote” for Lesneria and Achiuwa to enter a union with Warmia, they had a resounding no
  • This however revealed that Warmia had very little intentions of actually upholding the treaty, essentially pressuring Achiuwa to vote and initially believed they would join regardless. There were a lot of slimy things that happened for Warmia, but read the full thread for all of the deets.
  • From their allies to uninvolved parties, many were very disappointed in Warmia’s failure to engage themselves in good faith negotiations.
• Warmia’s sole response has been “We accept the result peacefully.” I even asked Klopsik for a response and he has said “I need a couple weeks to process this.” Same here buddy.

Borderlines, Part 2

An overview of the sprawling metropolis that is Shiroyama in Nara, taken by prawny331. You can also see Dalgon in the background too.

Two sections in, time to exchange some words…

On Tuesday, Nara announced they would be declaiming a part of their southern claims near the world border.

• However, a very strange argument erupted in the comments revealing a lot of the behind the scenes of the deal.
• RektTangle commented on the announcement that the claims were, to put it straight, too small, regarding it not worth it for others to claim.

Ok, so now that you understand what happened, you may be confused on why this happened. The long story short:

• Nara and Truidencia, representing Gensokyo¹, at the beginning of the month both agreed to declaim territory prior to this point after calls to declaim in the Alenarith Forum.
  • Essentially they agreed to “I’ll do the same if you do it too,” and were intending to release all at the same time.
• While negotiations initially were successful in establishing base areas to declaim, they eventually broke down.
  • Many were hyperfixating on Gensokyojin and Truidencian claims being declaimed while they themselves were making vague promises on their own declaiming — which is where the Naran declaim you see today came from.
  • One of the clauses, stated by prawny in their thread, was that the two countries would have authority to approve who comes in the territory. This was mostly because Gensokyo is not necessarily happy about Transylvania having attempting to border them in the past, citing character issues.
• Things eventually started coming to a head when Nara claimed Mali:
  • Henderwicz announcing the creation of Mali last week while calling for declaiming land by Gensokyo was seen as hypocritical.
  • However, looking at the two relevant areas on the map, Nara has a net loss of land, about 70k pixels worth of losses from my very unscientific measurement on Photoshop. The two pictures were taken at the same scale on map.civmc.tk.
• Following this, Gensokyo decided negotiations would be scrapped.
  • Subsequent comments from Prawny and Blatlas in the Naran thread hinted at that initial cooperation and leaving.
  • They also had concerns that they wouldn’t actually go through with unclaiming land, arguably a very natural reaction considering the above.

And so the Naran declaim post you see today is a result of that. Honestly, even though the above was accurate, this still doesn’t explain many of the angry comments you might have seen in this thread. Someone who didn’t get enough credit is GenericWarloq, who spent agonizing hours basically becoming the messenger between the parties, and did not deserve much of the blame.

So what comes next?

• Janet Blackquill claimed that section of Naran land for a Toki Pona nation also after submitting two other posts that did not have the picture
  • What’s confusing to me is that reception of this has been generally mixed or negative by both Gensokyojin and other Naran folks.
  • As in the previous post she was supportive of Gensokyo, or rather more anti-Nara, but Gensokyo was a little bit pissed and thought they arranged the claim beforehand (although I’m somewhat sure that was not the case, as she’s not really involved with Nara like at all)
• By May 11, Truidencia and Gensokyo eventually held up their end of the bargain and declaimed a good chunk of territory, and also found a nation, Meracydia, that was deemed “good enough to take their land.”
  • People were at least generally happy that the declaims happened regardless of the stink that we saw earlier this week, but hoped more would occur from both Gensokyo and the rest of the nations on Alenarith.

I suspect however, that we haven’t seen the last of this drama. If Meracydia becomes inactive, we’ve essentially set ourselves up for another round of more screaming, kicking and yelling from everyone.

Footnotes

¹ - Truidencia essentially represented Gensokyo at the talks during the Alenarith Forum; few direct interactions between Gensokyo and Nara were had, but were addressed here as “Gensokyo” as one group, but was essentially “Gensokyo/Truidencia” in negotiations.

A Short Swim

Icenia lighting up the sky as The City That Sometimes Sleeps, taken by MrJeremyFisher. A little blast from the past, you might say.

Three sections in, three more to go…

• On Friday, Troll_Bebek posted claims for a new nation called Kroven. The issue however, is that if you look at the map, it’s under the ownership of the Leibniz Confederation.
  • You may remember that the country was inactive, most notably when Venne had to wrestle Venozia’s island out of the country for one diamond several months ago.
  • Okx took it upon himself to pearl Troll_Bebek, and he was stored in Dalgon’s bunker.
  • In response and unannounced, Yodabird19 and the SEC went to Dalgon’s bunker and attempted to break vault bastions to attempt to break out Troll_Bebek, prompting an adverse reaction from meat312.
• Dalgon eventually freed Troll_Bebek in due time and told Okx to not store pearls in their vault, however they were disappointed at the stark lack of diplomacy.
• What set off the next set of events was that JuniorTide had told Okx that Kroven was a part of Cortesia Del Mar, and so, Okx declared war on Cortesia Del Mar.
• Now the issue is declaring a war while you’re not “actively” playing Civ is that you’re not actively playing Civ.
  • So when some SEC forces went to the island to retake it for Kroven, they basically met zero opposition and considerable lack of infrastructure and reclaimed the island for themselves. Additionally, Yodabird made the most based “war victory” post in the history of Civ.
• ChrisChrispie apologized to Dalgon for the failures in communication the following weekend.

Constitutional Crisis

Sparkling Regentsburgh Harbor on a clear, cool night, from King_Cupar back in January. I would have done Imperia’s work in progress, but it’s a little too work in progress to show off right now.

Four sections in, it’s 8:30pm…

Now I was initially confused that the war in Vermont was part of this conflict, but it’s not. You’ll see that pop up later. But the real thing to take a look at is:

• The new constitution of the Imperial Federation had been in the works for a few weeks now to accomodate the new states joining the country.
  • Announced on Wednesday, the country intended to revamp the constitution to bring more cooperation to the country’s various states.
  • Essentially, the TL;DR of the changes is that the former direct democracy system transitioned into a bicameral parliamentary system.
  • Additionally it emphasized that while each state has general autonomy, national interest may override that decision. While passed nearly unanimously, one outspoken individual against that has been…
• Plupsnup, who’s been heading the Cooperative Commonwealth of Tenants’ Toil since the beginning of the server, gave an ultimatum to the Imperial Federation for secession following their upcoming constitution’s projected passing on Monday.
  • He was concerned about the country’s ability to modify the state’s territories (despite numerous officials signalling that they were not intending to do so for the CCTT). Additionally, he believes that another section is directly targeting the CCTT as “inactive” as it does not meet the citizenship criteria.
  • These complaints were already addressed to the chancellor previously.
  • Alexis quickly responded with a long post outlining that the CCTT has benefited greatly but has done very little to help the state, and is leaving when it benefits him.
• Unfortunately despite these complaints, they clearly did not come into fruition.
  • He proposed a vote to amend the constitution for the stated changes above failed.
  • The CCTT eventually seceded this past weekend.

Everything Else

Pacem’s towering streetside lighting up the night sky, from shtim.

Five sections in, we’re almost there…

Declaiming Land

First, let’s talk about the OTHER stuff that was declaimed on the continent that wasn’t Nara and Gensokyo:

• Danzilona had also declaimed a portion of their land with an agreement with Nara, proposed several weeks ago to agree with Transylvania.
• Dalgon showed everyone else how it’s done and declaimed a significant portion of their southern strip, leaving only their core part intact

”Somewhat Underwhelming News”

• Pavia announced they had their thirtieth main street shop open in their city. Truly, it’s a marketplace for the ages. Gabon would tremble in fear.
• Despite this, Pavia and Mery got into a bit of a scuffle, over guess what, another territorial dispute! This time, it’s mostly due to access to ports and disambiguity regarding their shore borders.
• Several territorial changes also occurred in Pavia internally. Take a look!
• Princess Bow has lost Storm, her horse, while transiting from Winterbourne to MTA. Fortunately, her horse was found off the coast of Pavia.
• Yoahtl has elected NeoTide, Solitaire7, ArkenX, and Nukinmouse01 to the council, electing NeoTide to be Axolotl for his third term.
• Commrade_Potatoe has found an unethical and very disturbing looking sheep farm in Lusitania. Please make of that what you will.
• Mallace has won another judge term in Mount Augusta.
• A new nation Meowshima, announced their claims northwest of Shiroyama, however Magnileve has said that he’s already in the territory with his own nation and reached out for contact. Let’s hope I don’t have to write about this next week.
• Transylvania elected its first president, Salt_Furry, with a majority of the vote in the first round. He also appointed his first cabinet (although, maybe next time, he should announce it himself…)
• Birmingham— I mean Cliqueston was founded in the Arsenio Pact this past week after having a very troubled creation process involving the classic newfriend in vault, “raiders” and forced annexation.
• Miday was founded by the guy who made Respein. Sure.
• The Imperial Federation annexed the United Tribes of the Southern Sea into the country, along with annexing Pridelands back into the country as a national park.
• Additionally, the Imperial Federation also announced the United Constitutional Party after the merger of two others.
• Slothinasuit was pearled by Volterra early last weekend after “randomspawning and attempting to die”; a plea bargain from the Imperial Federation allowed him to be temporarily freed for two weeks.
  • There’s probably more to this story than what’s listed; I got some of this information late on Sunday night which is why there isn’t more to this story. Apologies and someone else will comment about it soon!
• Vermont was also the site of a small civil war.
  • The Socialist Republic of North Vermont separated from Vermont proper due to worker’s oppression and exclusion from the senator’s election. See the link for more about their manifesto.
  • As a result the People’s Army of Vermont was mobilized and fighting occurred in the streets, with about 1/3 of the territory being taken.
  • Eventually the South Vermontans fought back and sent an ultimatum
• GuggaBugga encouraged the Hands of the Earth to greenify the spaces around Estalia.
• StarkOverkill has written the first volume of CivMC lore on the server, available as a book.
• Kingstell, Shadno, Gjum, Anvil, Eddie, and Slusshi were elected to the Icenian senate. But wait, there’s seven slots and there’s only six you listed…
  • Raeders eventually withdrew from his position and so a runoff election was held.
  • However Rinvincibl3 and Orinnari were tied to win the runoff!
  • Rinvincibl3 eventually withdrew once the tie was announced — it would have resulted in a THIRD round of elections.

Admin Noise

• Everyone’s favorite ban list was one of the stories this week but I didn’t think it deserves a section. So it comes down here!
  • Admins recently turned back on their promise to release a banned list with reasons why. SoundTech said that “it brings reason to bring a lot of [unsavory people] back into the limelight.”
  • Despite this, they later went back again on that, releasing a subset of their banned players, mostly people who have been banned as part of the Generic War. They’ve released this mostly because of association with any users on this list will result in a ban for you as well.
  • The rationale has been to prevent any of these people having a pathway back into the Civ community which is generally reasonable, considering that these are the most unreasonable, and cause a considerable amount of IRL problems out of all the banned people.
  • As a result, many people have kicked them out of the community to prevent a ban. I’ve retroactively removed a mention of part of their community last week, and we’ve also banned one of the members of that list on the CivWiki due to association issues.
• Finally, Kira had some considerable issues this past week. Among Civ developers, everyone knows that it’s the worst coded plugin in the entire Civ suite (not to put it past you, Max)
  • So nobody really thought to check whether someone had permissions to delete a relay — so HenryDraton accidentally deleted [!] - the global relay.
  • Now, this wasn’t just HenryDraton to be fair that deleted a critical relay, Hakr deleted the skynet relay the same night as well.
  • This would be patched pretty soon, after being quickly addressed on Sunday night for debugging purposes, so now nobody’s metagaming got delayed ever again

Other Servers & the Metagame

The Emerald Isle on Return of the Civ.

Six sections in, it’s 11:30pm, we’re almost done…

• Return of the Civ updated to 1.18.2-rc4 and transferred to a live host so we don’t have to yell about it going down. Although, player counts have been declining a little lately.
• CivCubed continues to develop with fruit textures being developed. That being said, progress updates have slowed a little, possibly because Janet’s been occupied with making a new nation on CivMC.
• Rumor has it that once again, another Civ server is under development from someone who has a lot of money from fintech. Maxopoly has given his words of wisdom of “you’re going to regret it a lot.”
• I’m in the process of creating an information sheet for every Civ server, ever. Yes, really. Summaries for all these servers are encouraged if you think you can write them.

What Did We Learn This Week?

What did we learn this week on Civ?

I think I can’t really trust diplomacy anymore. The one thread through most of the stories was a lack of diplomacy and communication so it was very sad to see it crumble apart. Maybe I’ve lost all hope on Civ…

The Fun Stuff

A quiet isle sunrise at Pavia Harbor — you might recognize this island when approaching the city from the sea as the lighthouse island.

Builds

Each of these could have nearly made the newsletter, but I wanted to highglight stuff we’ve seen over the past year. So all of these are virtually new and you should open the links to see the great stuff!

• Griffin has made a bridge connecting up the theirs and Pavia’s expansive road networks
• Pacem has built some more blocks so it’s not just one block anymore!
• Pavia has taken a few pictures of their Main Street in celebration of their shop
• Lambat is building a few cool row houses in the recent weeks
• Emperor Estates opened in Nara on the 13th, but the problem is he forgot to include a picture on the Reddit post…
• The walls of Aethia are coming up to protect themselves from the Titans (that last part is a joke)
• Lusitania have built large statues of the country’s founders, Metriximor and banyough
• Plupsnup is making some kind of cube thing for the CCTT and he has explained a lot but I still can’t understand it
• Going to keep plugging MrJeremyFisher’s picture album because that’s the only person taking pictures in Icenia
• Even when slightly causing small international problems, Pavia is still nice about making the builds in Mery
• A little more low-key but how about a bridge through a jungle in Volterra
• There’s three creative builds, Imperia in the IF that has amazing looking row houses, Gobblin’s MTA-ass looking tower and a cute little cafe from M3ee, and a not-really-special shoutout to SpeedyJustice making “baseball.” I hope all will be on the server soon.

Cool Content

• I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, StarkOverkill has written the first volume of CivMC lore on the server, available as a book.
• ArtificialDriver has put out a really high quality map of all the shops in Pavia. Great job!
• Speaking of which, sucker for pastel-palletted maps has once again made me like this territory map from Pavia
• I don’t watch the Wire, but Mount Augusta has something that parodies it
• Fox and Dino are in, where else, Lusitania relaxing by the beach. Hope to see them in Yoahtl next week!
• ACCoker presents the Newfriends Going to War

Memes

Honest to god, I’d think that a lot of the situations this week would eventually result in tons of funny memes on the subreddit, but I guess that didn’t happen, did it? Maybe nobody had a really stupid title they could parody and meme, so I think that’s why.

• Warmia does a little warmongering
• Elections sound fun, why aren’t they more like Individual Runoff Vote?
• Ch1pr might be the Civ personification of Will Smith
• I’d like to retire as much as the next guy but I really don’t get the Papa Johns meme, like at all. What was the point of this?
• Zolo be like

Non-Civ Content

At this point, you may realize that I have only logged into Civ once this week, and have mostly occupied my time with friends, baseball, streaming television, and what have you. Not playing Civ is pretty fun, you know that?

• Please be warned if god forbid you’re in a red state, you may be subject to a terrible and abusive healthcare system if you’re an “amoral person” in Florida, which is the most god-awful thing ever
• Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show was a great show just to sit back and watch an angry scotsman do a thing, one of the late night shows of all time
• If you’re more of a brain teaser kind of person, try out Only Connect, a tricky gameshow about lateral thinking.
• Your Baseball Bulletpoint^TM this week: TODAY at Fenway Park, a classic Smash Bros. Matchup: George Kirby vs. Masataka Yoshida

Special Thanks

Westminster Union Station in Shopside in Commonwealth on CivClassic, one of my most well-known builds on Civ. I built it in 2017, during the eve of the Somber War, and had been the cornerstone for rail travel across the southwest.

We’re coming down to the end of this one now and I have a little more writeup that I wanted to do, so bear with me.

Civ has been kind of this weird part of my life where it’s been so oddly consistent and I’m really appreciative of not only the support for this newsletter, but for all the reception of the content that I’ve made over the past eight years.

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been playing since my freshman year of high school and honestly am incredibly shocked that my stupid drawings, content and more have been so well received. I even quit before freshman year, remember that? And to put the cherry on top, I’m graduating from college this weekend. (Actually even better, I just looked back at that post and I did return for my senior year, Chris)

I’m extremely grateful that I’ve been able to practice my writing and journalism skills in a place that people might not appreciate it. It’s even crazier that I’m writing extremely regular in decent fashion, I was a pretty shitty writer in high school and I certainly didn’t write for my college newspaper, barely even a semi-annual journal that cared about international relations. This newsletter kind of allowed me to understand my own writing process and realize how the hell it’s done, and I think you can kind of see that throughout the newsletters over the weeks. Civ has weirdly been the biggest boon to my humanities minor, so oddly I owe that back to Civ.

Additionally, I want to give a huge thanks to the newsletter staff. I started bringing on people back in August of 2022 to help with featured articles and fact corrections, at a time when accuracy was slightly lacking in that regard. These people have been These people include:

• Metriximor (CivWiki admin)
• Gjum (CivWiki admin)
• Lodish (CivWiki admin)
• animeme_master
• BritishWanderer
• Cooliomoose
• Creepi0n
• Des23
• GetSkinny (Eunice)
• ItzHoover (holy crap I’m hooving!!)
• RedDevel
• Red_Steel
• reffelruz
• ShadySauce
• Thraldrek
• Vedd
• Xcios
• Yodabird19

Finally, there are a few people who have written for the newsletter but not actually been on the staff, mostly writing Featured Articles or contributing a huge amount to news cycles. Thanks to…

• Gamertime
• ChrisChrispie
• Topaz4293
• prawny331
• fredhun14
• AmandaCC
• Kaprediem
• TheJmqn (for starting this stupid thing off)
• Ahri & Cortwade (for doing the 2022 wrapup)
• and much, much, MUCH more (I’m certainly forgetting a whole bunch of people, but in the interest of time, I gotta stop)

Additionally, something cool that I’ve done is made an archives page on the wiki, so now you can rummage through all these words, words, words to find the exact source of the thing you want. There’s even summaries of the top stories for each page!

Anniversary Cry for Help

Fox and Dino lounging about by the beach in Lusitania. Oh, who’s that in the background?

Well, it’s about that time then.

I can’t wait for every living creature under the sun to post one of two things in the comment section:

• “You did such a great job, congrats on one year of the newsletter and we really appreciate your effort”
• “You ****ing asshole you left my perspective out of the newsletter and you are full of lies how are you a valued journalist”

So I can’t wait for my inbox to fill up with both of these today, considering what was in the newsletter this week.

If you’d like to help me out in the coming weeks, there’s definitely a few things you can do to do so:

• Write a featured article, way easier than you think and you can just suggest something if you’re lazy.
• Donate to my Patreon/Ko-Fi/moneymaking ponzi scheme because money is cool, but I hate talking about it
• Submit a build picture or screenshot to the newsletter picture competition! You don’t have to make something for this, feel free to reach into your archives by next Sunday to compete.

Thanks for reading newsletter number 52. I honestly don’t know how much longer I can stay up at 12am. Until next time…

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