CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Monday Newsletter for June 26, 2023

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Monday from New England! I don’t think there’s much to say about this week because this one just feels like the last, except maybe with less memes about the war and more memes about quitting. That’s quite pathetic, isn’t it. Why do you have to declare that you quit anyway?

It’s been a tough week for some of us and so hopefully people get a reprieve this week and enjoy themselves. I for one, loved touching grass this weekend, so maybe you should too!

Ok, maybe I should shut up and just talk about the news. Ready?

This week’s featured image is jaybird’s house in Mount Augusta. “Oh my god, you highlighted something from Mount Augusta” can definitely be taken in two ways but I just think the building and the picture looks really nice, and highlights a more cozier side of Civ than all the giant wars or builds or anything — a smaller scale that is really nicely done.

Featured Article

Yoahtl’s iteration in CivClassic was a nation focused on commercial trade and infrastructure and culture throughout the iteration and the quadrant. Initially founded near Doom City, the country eventually moved to an area to the southeast of The Commonwealth. Following the Somber War, they became a cultural powerhouse, organizing the First Olympics, becoming a critical part of SATO, and constructing the Great Overland Railway across the server. Despite this, issues arose around leadership and toxicity, with SATO falling apart following continued problems. However, in 2021, after bgbba was unbanned, Yoahtl provided support by joining the UDF during the War of the Coalition and the Infinity War.

The country was well known for its capital city, New Yoahtl City. Focused entirely around a deep trench that surrounded the city, its tightly-packed urban planning philosophy, along with promoting security alongside commerce with its various shops within the city, made it an incredibly successful and competitive trading hub on the server. Throughout the map it also continued to construct the Great Overland Railway, spanning three quadrants and numerous countries and cities. In the late days of the server, the country annexed many of its neighboring countries and allies, including Vinland, Okashima, and Resimere, due to inactivity. Today, Yoahtl plays with many of its UDF counterparts in the SEC on CivMC. (Full article…)

This week’s featured article picture is a view of New Yoahtl City from the sea, with views of their commercial district and statue of Azula, courtesy of Lodish and NeoTide.

Because last week was so hectic and most people probably missed it, I’m going to highlight D_Loaded’s op-ed once again because it’s still pretty topical for right now.

[T]here really needs to be a better tutorial for [Civ], without Kallos and then later Nuts to guide, we would have been totally lost for weeks. If it takes me, a very experienced player, with hundreds of DonFuer members to call on in an emergency, 3 months to really get set up on this server, imagine how hard it would be for a less experienced person to get started. The reality is they probably wouldn’t. I suspect this server’s retention rate for new players is downright awful. The administration, or maybe just the players themselves need to make a bigger effort to explain some of these mechanics for newcomers.

Read his full op-ed here.

The News

An early morning at Truidencia’s lovely train station.

Tiresome War News

I’m still not calling it funny Butt Sex War, what will a newfriend think about that when he comes into our community for the first time?

If you’d like to read the extremely “riveting” and semi-detailed stuff that happened last week, take a look here. Alright, if you’ve finished that, let’s continue:

Meanwhile, pearled Butternutters are now working their way around the Nether:

As of the 25th, there haven’t been much information regarding the war, possibly because it’s been fizzled out over the past couple of days. At the moment SEC leadership has been present in the Arsenio Pact vault and have been waiting for the next attack. Meanwhile Chris is celebrating bewsiej’s pearl, I guess.

Happenings Around Civ

Meanwhile, everyone who is slightly less deranged is trying to live life as normal:

Metagame Highlights

Very few people have noticed but CivLegacy was quietly taken down earlier this week. This the server that TealNerd was running after the death of CivClassic, and hosted maps of CivClassic and nearly all Civcraft iterations.

Hey everyone, sorry it took so long to get an update on this, I know some people have been wondering why the server is down. It turns out we ran out of money, and unfortunately the notices from OVH (the server provider) were sent to spam. This resulted in them deleting the server, with no way to recover it. Unfortunately this may mean the map is gone as well, as I didn’t have a local copy on my PC, but I’m going to see if anyone else has one, and try to sanitize any sensitive data so it can be released.

This unfortunately does mean that at the moment, the CivClassic map is currently lost to history. I’ve asked Squareblob, who, a year ago, said he had a torrent to the map to see if he still has it, but he believes it’s unlikely that he still has it. The only other person that I’d guess would have it and is still around is Wingzero, but I really hope so.

Nobody saw the above announcement either, mostly because r/CivClassic is now privated. This is a big loss to one of the longest-running servers on Civ and loses nearly four years of history, essentially erasing it. I’m hoping to continue efforts to pester Teal to get the subreddit back online, and continue to hunt for anybody who has a map.

The Fun Stuff

Here’s a gif of a timelapse of a sunrise in Pioneer City in Lambat. Cause why not.

Builds

Multimedia Projects

Memes

Non-Civ Content

I’m glad people enjoyed me yelling about Paramore last week. Anyway, none of that anymore…

Poll of the Week

Last Week’s Results

I’m incredibly sorry for the poll not working last week, but it should be all better now, and you’ll be able to submit it right below this time.

Last week, we had about 22 responses, which was better, but still not great. I guess it’s more of a problem because I redirected people to another item again.

I’m surprised there’s actually a good amount of people that actually use old.reddit.com. Maybe Reddit is right about just steamrolling past the Third Party Apps, but it’s tragic for anyone who wants to use the API (me).

I’m glad that you liked highlights this past week. I think I’d be too exhausted to do a highlights every week, but for longer newsletters like last week, I’ll try to use that as an alternative.

Time to Vote!

Now, I promise the poll works this time, so you can click to your heart’s content. Before trying to report a poll not working for me, wait a few seconds and it might work.

A huge thanks to Gjum for giving me “helpful tips” to make this work again, that is, “telling me everything was right and that I just needed to go back to AWS” which is why this is literally just a Lambda function now. That being said, Jeff Bezos now has my money again. Boy, I love cloud service lock-in.

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
Should there be changes to pearling mechanics to protect nether infrastructure from pearled players?
If CivMC were to update to 1.20, what would you like to see changed about Civ?
Select all that are applicable.

That last question was contributed by RedDevel, so you know it’s legit…

Repetitive Cry for Help

Here’s some eye candy from Pavia from marbenet.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! Shorter week this time hopefully? Thanks to BritishWanderer, Gjum, Xcios and RedDevel for helping out this week.

If you haven’t read D_Loaded’s op-ed yet, please do, it’s worth a read.

If you’ve got any questions of the above or you’re looking to write one but don’t know where to start, feel free to message me at @specificlanguage and we can talk.

Thanks, and as always,


EDIT CIVWIKI