CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Newsletter for July 29, 2024

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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?

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

On the week of July 29 - August 4 in:

2015 (written by Akiyama64):

2018:

2022:

  • The Generic War began with Estalia declaring and pearling some Rhode Islanders.

2023:


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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.

Around the Server

Metagame Highlights


Buy Froglights from Suramir!Get your hands on the server’s exclusive Pearlescent Froglights! Use code SURAMIR in Estalians’ Discord tickets to grab a stack for just 18d until the end of August. Don’t miss out on this awesome deal from the only froglight supplier around!Discord: discord.gg/9Hx879n5HS

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The Fun Stuff

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

Builds

Cool Content

Memes

Non-Civ Content


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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.

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
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) means that this question is required to submit.
How long has it been since you first started playing Civ?
Select all that are applicable.
Do you find that #feedback, #community-support and #suggestion channels are helpful? Why or why not?

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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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