CivWiki Newsletter for July 4, 2022
Good morning from the place where the shot was heard round the world, and happy Independence Day for those in the United States!
Thanks to all the wonderful feedback about the visual writeup, it’s now a permanent feature, and the text-only will be discontinued. Eventually these will be moved to a full website or on CivWiki in the future, but for now, I’m hosting them on HackMD.
Today’s currently featured image is the Sauron Eye, built by reffelruz from The Commonwealth on Petrichor territory. It’s a reference to the End Citadel on CivClassics, a fortress that Peter5930 built while imprisoned by Lexington in the End. It’s a reminder to many about the history surrounding the server and a great monument of the now ever-present King Peter in Commonewalth.
Anyway, it’s time to do the newsletter.
- Contents {:toc}
Featured Article
The Free City of Pacem, or simply Pacem is a nation on CivClassic and CivMC, founded on June 12, 2017. The city-state is focused on commerce, culture and diplomacy on its CivClassic iteration. Its city was widely known for its expansive Art Deco and Beaux Arts architecture reminiscent of a 1920s-era New York City. Originally a city-state, the country became an autonomous state of nearby Yoahtl between May 2019 and February 2020.
Many of the city’s landmarks in CivClassic are named and inspired by Classical Liberal thinkers, including the Ayn Rand Opera House, the Frederic Bastiat Bridge, and the Herbert Spencer Tower. The city also housed the Hayek Market District and played host to a vibrant economy providing many XP material shops and architecture firms throughout the city. Pacem also was the headquarters of the Liberty Gazette, a classical newspaper highlighting major domestic and international events. Today, the country exists on CivMC, hoping to exceed the level of building that was present in their previous state on CivClassic. (Full article…)
This week’s featured picture is an overhead render of Pacem created by Captain_Klutz, taken near the end of CivClassic’s lifespan.
Current Events
This section’s featured picture is a small hidden garden within the streets of Nara, taken by Bronnakus.
It looks like everyone unloaded their drama last week so thank god there’s even less this week, you may notice I am grasping harder for straws this week.
Alliance Building
- Estalia brokered many non-aggression pacts last week, many with nations that border them. They include CivMarket, Butternut, The USSR, and the Kingdom of ErrorL (KOEL), with the latter posting a map beforehand with a map error before the actual treaty got out.
- The March Pact welcomed the similarly-named Arsenio Pact into its loose alliance, which include all of its associated nations including Eddie Murphy, Wolken, Crystalis, and others.
Gatherings & Announcements
- Sunday saw the beginning of the auction of the first CivMarket plots, a CivCorp and Carson-like neutral shopping grounds for vendors across the server. In a shocking turn of events, nearly all plots have active bids, with more “high value” plots planned to be sold tomorrow.
- In addition, the first highly-backed Diamond/Iron exchange is also available at CivMarket.
- The Hyperborean Confederation held its first election this past week, and reelects SpacemanSpleef as its president, in addition to electing Flock of Crows as its Vice President.
- The Holy Truidencian Empire also held its first elections and Hylian Cellist, jbomb & PortalMage were elected as senators, with Hylian also being elected as Konsul. Davydboing was elected as judge.
Pearls & Goosechases
- The Free Danzilonan Republic was ambushed by lintlicker578, killing some Danzilonans before leaving. This triggered a bounty and a wild chase for him and his associate, Monopolistic1, to pearl him. Cortesia Del Mar signalled that he logged out in Mount Augusta shortly after. The next day, word came from The Commonwealth that lintlicker had logged on within their borders, and within the day, Icenian fighters pearled lintlicker successfully; Monopolistic is still at large at the time of writing.
- Madman4162512, a griefer on past iterations such as CivReign, was pearled by Pacem, who raided material chests in the city.
- Binchymonkey was pearled by Icenia for griefing MrJeremyFisher’s home. However, binchy has since made a post that he is “thriving” in the nether, despite marital issues
Odds & Ends
- Captain_Klutz has finished compiling a brewery list for CivMC admins after taking public suggestions, signalling that the long-awaited Brewery plugin will be coming soon.
- More context to the Mount Augusta/September/ParadICE situation was given through another post by Headshot of Venne, and that is all context I will attempt to summarize, you go form an opinion yourself..
- CivMC’s population during weekday US peak has been dipping lately but hanging around 100, a server low as the server’s mainstays and basic infrastructure has been quickly built up.
- A new civ server, CivVie, was announced the previous week by Zombie_Striker. It includes a full rewrite of all Civ plugins in a little over two weeks. Its beta was scheduled to launch last Friday, but delayed to next week.
- VintageCiv has fixed a long standing climate bug, which now allows climate in the world to change in real time between the client and the server.
The Fun Stuff
This section’s header picture is the currently planned citadel in Samchester, the winning entry of the Build category in the Petrichor Summer Arts festival.
On the brighter side, a lot of good quality posts were posted this week so this section is much larger than I expected.
”This is good…”
- The Commonwealth has built a replica of the Sauron tower present in CivClassic’s End Citadel, as a memorial to King Peter and past iterations of the country.
- Nara highlights its many builds including a secret garden, the Royal Academy of Sciences, SpeedyJustice’s mansion, and much, much more in its city of Shiroyama. It looks amazing and I can’t wait to see more of what their city has to offer.
- Utopia builds a Fallout-like vault in its territory, honestly can’t wait to play Civcraft 76
- The winners of Petrichor Summer Arts Festival include:
- A currently planned build of the Citadel of Samchester, Southshire, in progress by Gibcake
- “Feed the Love”, a very good song written by LiquidStereo
- An illustrated map of Pavia, made by hitobashuru
- A totally human-written story of Yoahtl’s founding posted by Lodish.
- Honorable mention to an illustrated map of Nara, created by Dynamicbee, and “Just a Man and his Pickles” by Elithys, who both lost the illustrated category by a few votes.
- The Foogle tower built by Solomon Industries and xabadtheman has been completed in Mount Augusta this past week, which probably is the tallest structure on the server so far.
- Cat paddle pool is cute
- New Duskwood’s new walls remind me too much about TealCliffs
- Varathia’s bar, the Crimson Chin does look very nice but what actually looks cool is their lettering
”…but I like this”
- Solomon Industries has been advertising a lot, and among the many ads that djmeffy and Co. have posted this past week, my favorite is really suffering from too many upvotes
- What is this, are we keeping shitters as pets now
- One small price to pay for string
- Me trying to read Augustan drama be like sifting through bgposts, but it’s actually Nickposts now
- Time for the newfriends to all head to Yoahtl and Aki clearly has 100% justified reasons for them to head there
- Technically, Binchymonkey’s pearling counts as a shitpost but whatever
- Fuck
- Fuck again
The Other Non-Gameplay Highlights
Even though Technoblade was only tangentially part of the community through PvP, I think it really inspired a lot of people in the community to either get into Minecraft again and touched many lives in the Civ community. My first video of his I watched was him winning Minecraft Mondays with Jschlatt, and it was most stupid fun I’ve ever had. Just had to give an honorable mention for him since it would be remiss to not mention it.
Sappy stuff aside, and speaking of YouTube…
- Captain_Klutz went the extra mile this week and made the most compelling CivMC advertisement in weeks
- Another CivMC Claims map gets released from TheJmqn, now showing newly formed alliances or communities between nations.
- Another nation size analysis was created by prawny, another good Data Science post outlining good research.
- Advertise your nations in yet another cliche General Recruitment Thread this summer
- As you may remember, the New Danzilona Hockey League was highlighted a few weeks ago as the featured article, and the Free Danzilonan Republic has started playing Minecraft hockey again this past week!
- Lodish posts another one of his regular Political Compass survey results on Civ players, send more if you’re willing to!
- Lodish has also created Civdle, which is exactly what you think: it’s wordle but you can only submit Civ words
- TheJmqn also has a few more endeavors: posting a new MtA property map and writing and offering up a Civ Jeopardy! game show
- Icenia’s election results from last week were nicely distilled in a clean graphic created by Lagiacrius111
The Last Stuff and the Cry for Help
This section’s header picture is an illustrated map of Pavia created by Hitobashuru, the winning entry of the Illustration category of the Petrichor Summer Arts Festival.
Thanks for reading this week’s Monday Newsletter. I’ll try and keep it short this week: If you want to see your own features in this post, including featured articles, current events, and anything else (including ads, opinion posts, joke posts, etc.), then look no further than this Google Form below.
https://forms.gle/SZbWZQRDBxhPUNQF9
This week, contributions were made by Shtim (Pacem), SpacemanSpleef (Hyperborean Confederation), and Zeldrin (HTE) for their contributions this week. Thanks to them for their articles and current events!
Additionally, if you want to put more information about your nation to potentially use it for advertisement for later, why not edit CivWiki? It’s a great place to practice your writing skills and you might see your article on this list. After all, this newsletter wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for CivWiki, surprisingly.
Thanks for reading, and as always…