CivWiki Newsletter for July 29, 2024

Good morning and happy Monday from the Pacific Northwest!

For those who filled out the nation poll, your compliments have been sent to their respective recipients anonymously this past week. I loved that poll, and I’m glad so many people did too. I’d love to do it again sometime, but maybe only a couple of times a year, so sometime later this year I’ll probably run it again. I’ll give another large vote campaign for it too, because nobody realized it!

Well, it’s been quite a hectic week this time around. Are we ready for the news?

Featured

Featured Image

This week’s featured image is Truidencia — if I recall correctly, this is the first time the country has been the front-facing image of the newsletter! While many of these builds have existed since 2022, I really love the country’s build style and they’ve always been kind and helpful to me as well. From the massive church, the elegant train station, the builds have always been high quality, and now that the country is active once again, I can’t wait to see where they’re going to be expanding next. Thanks and can’t wait to come back!

Featured Article

This week’s featured article is an adaptation of August 22, 2022’s.

The Olympics are recurring large scale community-run sporting events on Civ servers. Inspired by their real life counterpart, first attempts saw Orion hosting Olympic events on Civcraft 2.0, as well as smaller sporting events on other Civ servers. On CivClassic, a newly organized Olympic Committee held their first Olympics within a custom-made Olympic Village in Yoahtl in summer 2018. Subsequent iterations were held in The Commonwealth, Gensokyo, and Mount Augusta, with independent organizers, new venues, and different events for each iteration. The Fifth Olympics was initially planned to be held in Columbia, however after a civil war, Icenia announced in May 2021 that they would assume hosting duties for the Fifth Olympics, which would be held the next month. Columbia was finally able to host the Sixth Olympics in the country in December 2021 during the waning days of the server.

Mainstay events include Spleef, Thimble, Hockey and PvP events, as well as some out-of-game events such as Chess or casual watch parties. Typically, hosts construct large stadiums in their main city or at a dedicated locations and occasionally hold events in other nations, such as CivMC’s Shiro-Swisston Olympics in March 2023. Server population usually results in server peaks during the scheduled events, and some events can occasionally be competitive, such as the PvP events. The next Olympics on CivMC is planned to be held at the Olympics Village in Yoahtl, sometime this summer.

This week’s featured image is the Spleef event at the Shiroyama Olympics, at their custom-built arena (cr: Blatlas)

This Week In Civ

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The News

This is the Gemstone, being bult by TheCrazyGrape. Any reminders of the Hexagon, oldfriends?

Oyster Pearls

This is a headline that is probably three levels of “joke” far too deep for anyone not within the Civ community to get.

The Wet Bandits had a reckoning this past week, with most major players being pearled by a serverwide (but mainly ASN and Estalian) coalition.

• On July 22, a number of players were pearled by the raider group, including stratmatt, Gray, PFP, MechanicalRift, adeadhead, and Seldomshock.
• However, the following day saw Drillage was pearled by auqust with Mantaay was pearled on the same day as well.
• ZibeKabir got pearled when he and dawson attempted to raid the coalition’s compactor bunker; upon attempting to escape ZibeKabir got stuck and was pearled.
• Following this, the coalition led a campaign to outside the final bunker found cqrson just outisde the wet bandit bunker, and after another scuffle cqrson was pearled. (cr: Zolo)
• Chests in the bunker were then burned and all players were freed after a stealth tunnel was dug by Chilfroy and the Swe(de) Team Six (affectionately)
• You may also notice the SOGGYHOBO currently does not show up on the pearl list, because he is currently banned, and no rationale as to why have been publicly known.
• While later in the week, a second bunker belonging to the Wet Bandits was also discovered, it was disabled before it could be activated.
• At the moment, most nations have generally deemed it safe enough to return to normal activities as raids have occurred less over the weekend, but those in the far north may still want to remain cautious.

Around the Server

• Those who have been on the server for a while know that Icenia and Estalia were not on good terms, so I find it funny that this past raiding campaign united them together, and their mutual travel ban has been dropped. Let me clear though, great for them both!
• MechanicalRift was executed in Yoahtl in accordance with the Slime Farm Law, which had the creator of the slime farm (MechanicalRift) be executed in front of the Pigeon in Yoahtl.
  • This being said, an explosion occurred with several players in the pigeon fountain following the ceremony (cr: Jaydon). VilyanZ has claimed responsibility for the attack.
  • The event was not unlike a similar bombing during Christmastime in Pavia — although the casualties were not nearly as big previously.
• Kallos made a couple of major agreements with other nations over the past week:
  • K0mmi was released by Icenia on July 22 with Kallos being really excited for them being back.
  • An non-aggression pact was also brokered with Icenia as part of the terms of releasing K0mmi.
  • They also agreed upon a non-aggression pact with Yoahtl as well. (signatures)
• Pavia and Truidencia signed a Friendship agreement through the CUB, along with the construction of their direct railway to their capital. It’s the first CUB agreement signed by the country since November 2023.
  • Meanwhile, Truidenicia formalized their constitution with the Lex Imperialis (warning: Direct Link for 22 page pdf)
• Exyria became the newest country to receive a Monument Bank branch, located within their capital.
• Nara’s overground rail to Ichinokawa was renovated over the past week, and caused very minor (if any) disruption to rail services in the country
• Reggio promoted matanic1107 as a foreign shareholder of the company, receiving an undisclosed amount of shares. The company also welcomed matanic’s Solsyra Corporation as a formal subsidiary which will be selling Reggio products.
• VINNY74 was pearled by Winterbourne after uncovering an attempted insiding of the country’s vault, as well as an attempt to overthrow nearby Nassau.
• Icenia, as per usual, is having its August round of elections coming up, with 11 candidates already declaring their intention to run as of writing this section.
• Volterra meanwhile, are postponing their elections until next month due to the war.
• Exyria, Northfort and Fempire announced the G.L.H.F alliance promoting mutual aid and diplomatic support. The three countries have cooperated for a while, and this formalized their partnership.

Metagame Highlights

• Civ+ had a changelog which had some minor Quality of Life adjustments to gameplay. A meteor is also planned to drop on Tuesday.
• CivMC made a change to bastions this past Wednesday which made them exponentially more difficult to defend when initially placing them, although made bastion warmup time shorter by comparison.
• I think most people know by now that I distributed compliments to people, as a response to this question in the newsletter from 3 weeks, and I’m very glad that people were touched by each other’s statements.
• Someone has been putting pretty mediocre at best, stupid at worst “ideas” about CivMC that show very little comprehension about the game
• Cowguypig tracked down the original site for Ancapminecraft, Civcraft 1.0’s predecessor
• I somehow managed to squeak in that all backfills from the previous week are working now, so all newsletters are now available on this website once again, all the way back to mid-May 2022. Check ‘em out!. There’s some small quality of life improvements I do want to make, but for the most part the site is very much “complete”.

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The Fun Stuff

The new Monument Bank branch in Exyria. (cr: Flootle)

Builds

• Of course, I can’t wait for the Gemstone to get finished by TheCrazyGrape, it do be crazy (cr: CivRenders)
• Kaltsburg looked great on CivClassic, can’t wait to see a big revival (cr: deyan)
• The builds in Hell do hold up even if they technically don’t have an owner anymore? (cr: Cowguypig)
• Honestly can’t believe that I’ve never visited Reggio before, this places looks fantastic and a great tribute to the Moroccan style (cr: phobitica)
• The Senate building finally has an interior which means the Icenian Senate can meet in person (cr: Enforcer)
• I’m surprised that nobody realized they can put an ice hockey rink on the ice until now (cr: PumpkinPie134)

Cool Content

• Hold on man you sure this ain’t Sephiroth? Ok, Mr. “Archon Armaments”… (cr: Flootle)
• 7misun’s campaign announcement video is Civ content that we deserve

Memes

• SoundTech made a post that is very reflective of the current Twitter environment
• Totally not sigma grind logging into Civ and saying “it’s not for me” (cr: Slowlyfunny)
• Uh oh guys, i think we hurt their feelings (cr: Forged)
• A more accurate title would have been “do not come” (cr: Dr_Bacon_Hair)
• Accurate youtube thumbnail (alternative joke: Average Watchmojo thumbnail)
• “Two guys from Brooklyn’s fight turned meet cute” (only real Dropout fans get this joke)
• Did you know that Boston is one of the few places where an airplane goes over a missile, over a train, over a car, over a boat?
• I do like the joke but I think another image would be more appropriate
• You realize that things functioning explosives make civilization impossible right? Like, the tech tree is so small this would never happen?

Non-Civ Content

• On the Classical music docket this week: Dvorak’s American Quartet
• What happens when a string breaks in the middle of a violin concerto?
• My YouTube recs this week went crazy and I found this channel called Public Opinion in and around NYC which feels very human
• Dropout’s BIGGER! with Brennan and Izzy is probably one of the best comedy specials I’ve ever seen — and that’s a low bar

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Poll of the Week

Mount Augusta in 1.0, cr: CivRenders/jasonbord. A little on theme for this edition, mayhaps?

Last week, we had 72 responses, which is actually somewhat abnormal — we usually hover over 50, and so something clicked this week? I don’t know…

Net Worth

The first question was about how much liquid assets you have, accounting for both diamonds on hand and bank assets.

I asked this because sometimes, MG stock prices and exchange prices are not always a good indicator of economic health.

While we do have a good amount of people with no diamonds on hand, as they don’t participate in the economy or are new, a good number of people (read: power players) have really capitalized on it and have a lot of diamonds to spend, which is honestly quite crazy. These buckets could have extended higher, honestly, but I didn’t have a good enough grasp on how many diamonds people own. I personally see myself in the 100-300 section anyway.

Interestingly enough, there’s a considerable amount of people in debt in some way. This usually means that they paid for stocks on credit, bought a lot of stuff, or what have you, but this amount of people considered “in debt” is actually quite interesting. What did you guys do???

Discord vs. Reddit

The second question was a controversial question: Is Reddit or Discord better for Civ, why or why not? There are those who have made the argument that Discord (and Reddit) have been detrimental to the Civ metagame these days, so I kind of wanted to test that theory out.

About 25 people said Discord was better, while 14 people said Reddit was better (with those on the fence counting for 1/2 each). I will say though, you’ll see later that I think Discord had fewer reasons for it…

Of those who were for Reddit:

Reddit because [it’s] an easily accessible forum where as discord is something you have to be invited to get information

For long term health, having easy access to information that can be googled and that is more permanent than a discord where channels can be more ethereal [ephemeral?].

I like that there’s official links to source when creating wikis [on Reddit]. A lot of cool stuff will be lost in the halls of Discord.

The official discord you have to “Auth” yourself to see all the channels.

I personally like Reddit, but I am biased because Discord screenshots are cringe (and I have to do wiki work too!). On the other hand, those who were for Discord:

[Discord] is more discussion based, and discussion is needed for diplo.

I think CivPVP is best on Discord. You can’t have reactions on Reddit posts.

Discord as it allows an entirely new meta to be played not possible on Reddit.

It seems like Discord is where most of the community [building] actually happens

While Reddit is a great way to share things like big news, it’s Discord that really makes Civ what it is, from the politics to the community building on each server.

There were a lot of people that were for both:

I think Civ works so well because it has both. Nations need their own dedicated spaces and discord works much better for that, but for general announcements and communications the reddit has been essential when it comes to land claims and other news.

I personally wish communication was more in-game focused and more decentralized, but with global chat and social media, the cat’s really out of the bag on that one.

I’m definitely not helping considering… well, this. It is worth noting that:

Teamspeak, return to monke

Before Discord was widely used for Civ, there was a short period where we used Slack 🤮, but serious oldfriends remember that for Civcraft and older servers, we used Mumble, which had even less communication structure and things were even more ephemeral in nature. We used nation subreddits back in the day. I am mostly asking this to sort of see how much Discord has really changed the metagame. Quick communication on Discord is so much more important on Civ that the Reddit sometimes has weeks with very few posts.

Well, that’s my rant over though, take that what you will.

Vote Now!

It’s OK if you don’t know what most of the goal posts here mean. The further down you go, the more cursed you really are, anyway.

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Midsummer Cry for Help

Mr. Archon Armaments, a new art piece from Flootle/butter_villager.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! Something needs to change about my weekend schedule so I’m not panicking on Sunday night…

Thanks to Shadno, BritishWanderer, Derpydiamonds, Ahri, Zolo, Complexii, and whoever else helped with this week’s edition of the newsletter! I know this continues to be a one-man operation, so I really appreciate that after over 100 editions this still is a great place for people to come to get their information after all this time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some not-Civving to do! Until next time…

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