CivWiki Monday Newsletter for August 14, 2023
Good morning and happy Monday from New England!
This week was a lot quieter on the Southwestern front as the Imperial Federation things died down, but hopefully, there’s more to be excited about across the server. And in Civ, we’ve got exciting updates to two servers who are ramping up development again!
And for those who are concerned about my mental health, it’s been better this week. Still got some work to do, but it’s coming along!
Are we ready for the news?
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured article (once again) is Griffin as seen from the sea. Of course, this time is a bit different as what you’re looking at here are the new city walls surrounding Adria and the temple, not to mention Sealeo in the front, but a man-made terraformed mountain on the island. Seriously, the inside is hollow. It takes a lot of effort to build this kind of stuff, and it’s impressive here to say the least.
Sorry guys, if you want your better picture here (that you built on the server), you gotta actually bring up this stuff in the Reddit and Discord!
Featured Article
Citadel is a commonly used Civ plugin and mechanic that allows players to reinforce blocks, which require other players to break blocks multiple times in order to break the block entirely. Although any material could be configured for use, stone, iron and diamond are used as materials by precedence over many servers, representing a low, medium, and high amount of number of breaks. Citadel is heavily tied to NameLayer groups, which allow permissions on who can access which blocks. Additionally, Citadel includes acid blocks, which are special blocks that automatically break reinforced blocks over a long period of time, which does not require the player to be present.
The main use of the plugin has generally been for protecting player-made builds; it allows large cities and defensive infrastructure to be formed without too much threat of raiders. However, quicker reinforcement times have enabled raiders to place hard-to-break blocks very quickly for disruptive purposes, such as creating vaults or “obbybombing” cities. Despite multiple changes and pushback, Citadel remains a critical part of Civ servers in order for nations to grow. (Full article…)
Icenia following the Generic War, with acid blocks clearing grief.
The News
Transylvania’s embassy in Shiroyama, which is nearly complete!
Happenings Around Civ
We’re a bit quieter this week, which is better for my own sanity…
- King Jalhf has publicly commented on the Imperial Federation’s breakup.
- He continues to urge for the Federation to continue while additionally reasserting their claims in Joseon and farms.
- However, he says he’s also “calling [out] Asgard to make the right choices regarding self-determination of Imperia by allowing council members to vote on their fate”, as many territories (that weren’t Asgard’s) were not aware that their territory was being seceded unilaterally.
- People are generally supportive, with well wishes that the Imperial Federation continues.
- On the other side of the country, the Union of the Southern Sea was formed with many former IF states joining the union, aiming to be “an alliance of equal, independent nations in order to foster security coordination, economic development, diplomatic cooperation, and cultural exchange across the region.”
- Southseasia furthermore signed a treaty with the Catholic Church, committing to mutual defense and economic support.
- Whoever’s making the alliance diagram is now going to have a very fun time, in my opinion.
- Sloth announced the Restorationist Party in the IF, committing to, pretty much the same stuff that they always had been doing
- Nara has announced a lottery… although there has been quite literally one person purchasing tickets for it
- The Transylvanian Post is getting a revamp which I will admit is modern, but their logo is not just any toilet paper roll, but a BACK ROLL toilet paper roll. Please vote now on your phones
- Truidencia and Meracydia signed a new treaty, ceding some land to Meracydia as well as cooperation for mutual infrastructure.
- Meracydia elected Ollie as their new judge. They are also working on connecting up their OneDest line to Transylvania. Crossposted from the Meracydian Mouthpiece.
- Kaota is a new state, so i guess Respein is dead
- Amicitia annexed Eire following the latter’s inactivity.
- Additionally, Amicitia also announced an alliance with Mount Augusta (i think i talked about it last week?), a new prime minister (MrMattimation), the City of Lux, and the Guild of Travelers.
- Pavia announced that they would be introducing new diamond exchanges for Essence and Emeralds, two valuable commodities in today’s market.
- Additionally, the country lowered its threat level to “Not Expected”, following a prolonged period of peace. It’s the first time it’s been lowered to this extent since the Generic War.
- Mount Augusta has elected Mayors Emeritus, who (jointly) certify votes, are owners of the city’s reinforcement groups and discord, and maintain laws, among other responsibilities.
- Mallace was elected as judge, after quite literally nobody else ran for judge in the country.
- Rivia and Yoahtl have announed a Non-Agression Pact between the two countries.
- Flushy (who the fuck is flush?) was elected as Tribune in the SPQR.
- Lambat is combating inactivity by raising flags in their exclaves. Crossposted from LENS One.
Metagame Highlights
The Tortugan/Kaota railway viaduct. It’s no GOR, but it’s honest work.
- On the morning of August 7, CivMC ran into technical issues which caused significant downtime.
- Admin SoundTech came on a few hours later, to discover that they “experienced rapid SSD wearout” — likely from too many writes from Citadel and NameLayer.
- For the above reasons and probably many others, it was decided the server would move machines, with a backup from the previous night. The transfer went pretty smoothly and few services were interrupted, with the notable exception of factories and maparts.
- It turned out that back in June, FactoryMod failed to backup their factories, so the factories for the past few months were lost. As a response, a new ticket type was created to restore factories from the backup.
- Additionally, map arts were recovered since the backup, as they were deleted during the move of the save.
- Although there were sporadic reports of TPS spikes since the move, the move was successful to the relief of all non-grass touchers
- A very controversial post about removing bastions altogether because they don’t exist IRL was made, prompting criticism and mockery
- And then ChrisChrispie posted something semi-serious about obsidian being buffed which I don’t know how to take, despite continuous obby ads
- Funnifishe complained about not getting unbanned despite the rest of the July 30 bans getting unbanned, before he actually did get unbanned, I guess? Bro idk
- MapSync pull requests have begun again, mostly updating some dependencies.
- As promised, VintageCiv has returned this past week, with a massive amount of updates:
- SouthernBloc opened up a temporary server for people to just sandbox on as well as performance test, until VintageCiv 2.0’s “soft launch date” of September 1st
- He’s also looking for patreon funding in order for the server to grow and bring fresh new players to a (hopefully) triple digit launch.
- If they’re really serious about it, this newsletter might have to actually cover VintageCiv news, if it’s able to
- CivCubed has announced their server’s launch for November 30. Let’s hope Janet Ballquill finishes up reworking all of Civ in time…
The Fun Stuff
A view on the Lambatan highways with greenery supplied by MaybeGravy.
Builds
A reminder that to get on here, you need to have a build that’s on the server, not just in the design phase.
- Griffin never disappoints with a man-made mountain, as I already mentioned, but how about their southern wall gates. Seriously, if you go to their discord, their announcements channel is just screenshot after striking screenshot
- Amicitia is showing off their kingdom
- I have to acknowledge that MtA’s nightclub does not make it look nearly as midwestern sprawl as it does from Altelier
- MaybeGravy has been doing wonders at Lambat so a shrubbery couldn’t be much worse
- The Transylvanian embassy honestly blends in really well with the Japanese architecture, great work
- The Kaotan/Tortugan railway line reminds me of the old Tealcliff GOR
- Whenever the Traveler’s Citadel is done, it’s definitely going to get featured
Multimedia Projects
- Butter_villager put all the avengers together for this pic
- Eh, the IMC album cover is kinda generic but the 3D minecraft skin art is good
- Ok, now this is more like it with a Gwua trading card although you know that CivTCG already exists, right?
Memes
- Why is Paviaball getting high, janet must be on drugs
- I thought Icenia had a monopoly on Breaking Bad memes, why is Yoahtl doing stuff now
- But damn, you got the whole squad laughing (I didn’t)
- No, never mind, I think Civ has a crippling addiction with Breaking Bad, there are OTHER good TV shows you know!
- Ah yes, Gwua is Oppenheimer now I know the movie isn’t Oppenheimer in the video, I am making a joke
- I just saw ChrisChrispie fall to his knees at a Sam’s Club
- Seriously is Civ going into metaschizo-schizoposting? Can we please stop
- I thought the commandments said that “You shall not worship false gods”
- The most obvious factor is that with the loss of Imperia, there is no way that LeBron can beat their Olympic team and rename “Lebronperia”. Rest in peace to a real one
- Uh idk I just like that Lambeau is just French Lambat
- Joever? Barack? What are you talking about man? You must have hit your head hard. Come on, let’s go look at rage comics and adviceanimals…
Non-Civ Content
- SpeedyJustice will literally kill me if I don’t talk about Michael Lorenzen’s debut no-hitter in Philadelphia, so there it is man
- After visiting Maine, I’ve forgetten to mention the distinctly (but not really) New England style choice, the Life is Good shirts, with their tongue and cheek pastel colored shirts and cheesy catchphrases. My only gripe is they keep phasing out Jake
- I played Overwatch 2 for the first time in a year, for those who don’t know I used to play it a lot but then fell off quite hard and, goddammit, those Steam reviews are deserved, because the only thing that felt good was playing Flashpoint
- I think Topaz has a new modpack out that’s Touhou themed, she DM’d me it but I haven’t paid too much attention to it, sorry!
- Computer chip walk
Poll of the Week
Last week we had only 44 responses. I get that some people may not be as interested in the questions but man!
The first question was Where do you think Civ advertisements are/were most effective?
Some of the more orthodox methods of advertising get high marks, such as r/mcservers and r/worldbuilding due to their frequency. YouTube, I’m also not surprised since we are a very video-focused community too.
However, TikTok is one that surprised me because as of note there’s been very few advertisements outside of OreStaya’s videos, to varying success. It would be interesting to move into the TikTok space because people love discovering random shit because the average IQ of people on there is less than the average /s. I mean, all I know is that people eat up Hank Green posts so short-form content could be pretty lucrative.
Anyway, I put some other stuff down there if people remembered the other attempts we did:
- r/gaming was successful but Squareblob forgot to put the name of the server in the comments lol
- r/Minecraft has been successful but powertrip mods are quirky and stupid
- r/place was successful…last year
- I don’t remember other subreddit advertisements that work, but there have been some on r/tokipona when there was (is?) a Toki Pona nation
- Janet blackquill posts on Tumblr but that gains like zero traction
- Twitter and Instagram are platforms that CivMC wants to advertise on, but haven’t :)
Maybe an instagram post would be cool for the newsletter, it would make it pretty marketable.
The second question was What kind of Civ advertisement would you (or more preferably, others) click on the most?
There honestly isn’t much to say here, but I think the playerbase on Civ leans towards hard essays and stuff about Civ because they like to complain. But I personally think build showcases are really the right recruitment method on Civ though!
Voting Time 2: Shiroyama Drift!!
This week’s questions have to do with playtime (and metagame interaction time).
Wildfire Cry for Help
Gwua, ComradeNick, and Fastestgrass at MtA’s new nightclub built by Altelier.
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter!
For anyone counting, this is the 62nd newsletter this week. I wonder what happens 7 weeks later?
Connect Up!
If you’d like me to not raid your discord channel every Monday, here are few steps to get newsletter announcements straight in your Discord every week:
- Open the CivWiki discord
- Click the “#newsletter” channel
- Press “Follow”
- Select which discord and channel to send the announcements to
- Leave the discord (if you’d like, but stay if you edit the CivWiki a lot)
- Wait for Monday
Now to cancel your subscription all you have to do is open the app, click the recurring tab…
All The Usual Shills
If you’d like to help contribute to the newsletter, though…
- Reach out to me,
@specificlanguageif you’d like to write a featured article, it’s honestly not too bad if you think about it, and it’s a short exercise on writing succinctly, research and interviews, and communication. - If that’s not your fancy, an op-ed will do too, where you can just speak your mind on things that irk you on Civ, isn’t that cool.
- And if for some crazy reason you’d like to support me financially, please do so at my ko-fi. If you do, you’ll get a shoutout like, Akesi Jan for donating this week, thanks! (but also unthanks because you wasted $8 to someone who doesn’t need it).
Ok, but on a serious note for money:
This past summer, I did take some time off, and part of it was near Lahaina in Hawaii. As those in the US know, Maui, particularly in Lahaina, have been hit hard with the worst wildfires it’s seen in literally centuries. Although I’ve yet to plan it out, I’m thinking about doing a fundraiser to support those on the island, and if I do, it will probably happen sometime late in August or early September. I enjoyed my time on the island, and it’s incredibly sad to see the historic town go, so I want to support what I can.
Thanks to you all, and I’ll see you next week.