CivWiki Monday Newsletter for June 26, 2023
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?
Featured
Featured Image
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.
Featured Writing
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.
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:
- We left off with the CaneCorp bunker being overtaken by Butternut by Tuesday, eventually being taken by the 20th. VilyanZ of Yoahtl, Drekamor of Icarus was pearled during the attack while TheRealJewy was pearled by auqust.
- Later that same day, Butternut attackers turned their focus over to the Bloom vault, where SEC attackers eventually held another standoff.
- While Butternut attackers skybridged the vault, a counter skybridge from the SEC’s side went awry and more defenders were pearled.
- MechanicalRift, Lodish, Huskydog, and onethree3seven all being pearled on the SEC side in the skybridge’s initial attacks, while later on, Matt4fun, Xcios, Lowtuff, Simpology, Hg_80, and Forged were all pearled.
- 7Joshh, Cqrson and bewsiej were all pearled by Shadno during the fighting, especially late in the attack on the 21st; some have commented that the last one has been pretty significant as bewsiej had been the leader during these attacks.
- Elysian Pact fighters, mainly from Pavia and Estalia, were also present at the skybunker attack on the SEC side, originally putting themselves there as reporters. Pearls gained from the vault break were passed onto Elysian Pact hands to be stored at their vaults.
- Butternut were eventually able to gain ground onto the skybunker, taking the vault by the 21st.
Meanwhile, pearled Butternutters are now working their way around the Nether:
- Butternut fighters that include Kibbles, Antea and others are going around the Nether and raiding infrastructure, including those in Icenia, Yoahtl, Icarus, and Cortesia Del Mar;
- Antea has said that “I’m rather disappointed that they won’t confront us.”
- Nearly all of these areas are on the Transport Union’s roads, who decided against giving them groups.
- A possible accident happened with pearled players Antea, Kibbles, and K0mmi using their One-Time Teleports to get out of the nether. Even though this was an unintended feature of OTT, as pearled players are not supposed to leave the nether, no bans were issued.
- PhysicsGamer has also reclaimed his territories of the Temporal Isles following the fall of the Bloom vault. He publicly reinvited many of the country’s former citizens, but declared hefty penalties on Dr_Bacon_Hair. However, everyone believes that he’s so joever
- Kibbles also claimed the nether portals they claimed for their people and would pearl or kill “anybody who crosses into these portals without their say so [sic]” on sight.
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:
- An Anti-Pineapple Pizza Religion was established near Estalia and ErrorL, prompting a call to arms to defend ourselves from this madman, eventually with everyone else calling him a madman for liking Pineapple on Pizza.
- Icenia, for very obvious reasons, decided to call off their July elections to focus on the war.
- CaptainQwazCaz is pearl on sight in Mery and a few other countries for raiding.
- Pavia Daily has been reporting on both their involvement on the Pavian war above as well as other local affairs:
- Several break-ins have been found in the Bedford Commons, and citizens have been warned to keep their valuables safe
- After Pavia raised its threat level to Certain following the CaneCorp vault attack, it was lowered to Probable following bewsiej’s pearling.
- The Monument Group shop has finished its remodelling and has now reopened. They’re also looking for a secretary to handle their now massive operations.
- Jimmy the Jester has thankfully been found in Selano Square Clocktower after a scavenger hunt led by CedarValiant
- Lambat’s 4th Metro Council Election was won by SambonusG, AKJanklin, and… wait a second what the fuck why is Metriximor on the council this shouldn’t happen?!
- Meracydia ratified their first constitution.
- There’s more quitting posts but the only couple that should matter are Nebula’s quitting post after getting permanently pearled, and
- SoundTech announced with the Brewery and PvP updates, they’re working on moving the server to a better machine.
- They’ve also said “Our reddit modmail queue is still very backed up, so we’re still aiming for two week turnaround on non-critical modmails”.
- There’s quite a few people on CivReign discord, which is now essentially the CivMC refugee discord right now, complaining about the poor quality of responses on modmails, given the rate, timeliness and actual responses.
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.
- However, he confirmed later this week that the server has shut down and has no way to recover it:
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.
- Meanwhile CivMC’s map has a brand new settlement layer yay!
- CivVie is dead and Zombie_Striker is creating an SMP based on that stuff. Yay. Maybe next time, I wouldn’t recode Civ plugins from scratch.
- I think the Victoria 3 people might need to change some things
- Rosegold was updated to 0.11.0.
The Fun Stuff
Here’s a gif of a timelapse of a sunrise in Pioneer City in Lambat. Cause why not.
Builds
- Transylvania is always good with shaders
- But also Pavia is always good with shaders, along with a few shops
- I’m glad Bloof has retired in Acadia with a beautiful chateau
- Lognots has added several flowerbeds but I don’t think I’ve highlighted them in a while
- Haven’t visited Truidencia in a hot minute so here’s their train station that’s barely a slice of their country
- Lambat is starting to make content with this GIF over Pioneer Village square
- Mount Augusta is reforming itself from Cleveland suburb slowly but it’s doing a good job making quality builds
- How about a bunch of row houses in the Imperial Federation, too?
- So Concord in Cortesia is looking real good even with mini fish lady
- I forgot Lusitania was back with a Quadrado that was almost named HSM Square
- Anyway Janet just decided to reveal that Topaz and Hylian Cellist are both creating the hub world for CivCubed so I guess I put it here
- Seekinq is a content machine for Griffin
Multimedia Projects
- sigh, I guess I have to put a JKH pvp montage here
- Fox and Dino are creating a big story arc for the future and meet a giraffe
- Ok, this wouldn’t normally wouldn’t go here, but the fact that Lokilog recreated an SEC mock war poster with Civballs is just so fucking good. I miss Lokilog balls, 10/10
- The Monument Group shows that the prices for diamonds has been really up and down. Something’s going on over there Jaydon
- SailorWillis has a new lineage of Gensokyo and then Ahri realizes he’s been literally Stalin’d out
- Cortwade is opening his workshop for map commissions, his resume looks great.
Memes
- What are you talking about, this is just the war — I do love these kinds of memes though
- Chris is actually delusional, I think this is why he’s not winning the war
- I think PresidentofYes is stretching the Sierra Leone analogy a bit too far
- Now I’m conflicted, I never had a bigger conflict of interest to put fanfics in memes or multimedia
- Most sane Civ player
- this is why, by paramore 2023
- Is a purple dong better than an orange dong?
- I don’t get it but apparently Mercutio does
- You’ll probably see him everywhere, but HenryDraton is messaging in red highlighted code blocks and it’s annoying the heck out of everyone
- People are making quitting posts left and right, most of them are jokes, but like they’re not even funny anymore after like seven years. Like everyone, I hate reading the subreddit right now
Non-Civ Content
I’m glad people enjoyed me yelling about Paramore last week. Anyway, none of that anymore…
- So technically you get three baseball bulletpoints this week.
- Cincinatti Reds rookie Elly De La Cruz hit for the cycle in his 15th game ever. That’s hitting a single, double, triple, and a home run in the same game. Hitting a cycle is incredibly rare, and I want to stress that this was his fifteenth game ever in the big leagues. What the fuck
- British people are [going nuts] because somehow [MLB decided to play three games of the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Chicago Cubs at the Olympic Stadium.] That’s a sentence that just went in the newsletter.
- Lastly and probably least useful, last Saturday Los Angeles Angels hit back-to-back-to-back home runs with little help from Shohei Ohtani as they win over the Rockies with a comical score of 25-1
- Not that anybody cares, but we’re at 1720 AD with my Civ 6 game with Allen and Squareblob and I’m really trying so fucking hard to get a science victory but I don’t know how to play late-game science
- Yoahtl watched Life of Brian this week which is a good movie
- Is it too late to be meming about the submarine? Or Ukraine? actually you know what never mind here’s amogus
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.
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’d like to contribute to the newsletter, feel free to write a featured article! You can write just about anything that has a wiki page, and if it doesn’t, what are you waiting for, write one!
- Writing an op-ed is also an option and I highly encourage people who have any sort of opinion to do so!
- If, for some ungodly reason, you’d like to contribute financially to me, then feel free to donate to my Ko-fi, because idk i guess. Thanks to Vedd for donating $5 this week!
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,