CivWiki Monday Newsletter for August 21, 2023
Good morning and happy Monday from New England!
It’s a shorter newsletter this week, as the dog days of summer are winding down and everyone’s heading back to school, it’s time to reflect on how your summer went. Good? Bad? Just ok?
To me, it was a summer full of ups, but a good amount of downs and I’ve yet to figure out what to do. I might be doing the newsletter for a few weeks or a few months, we’ll see how it goes.
Time to get on with the news!
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured image is reffelruz’s view of Verdant Valley and the Tricon Industries building in the Commonwealth. After a couple months of delay (oops!) I’m proudly announcing it as the winner of the picture competition. Its wide variety of build styles, structures seamlessly built into the landscape, and integration of nature into every aspect is something else. A well deserved prize for a well deserved country!
Featured Article
Kaltsburg’s iteration on CivClassic 2.0 was a German-themed monarchy focused on amicable foreign relations and realistic builds. Founded near Varkonia in 2018, the country received significant support from SPQR in their early days due to continued raids in the territory. The country maintained amicable relations with most nations on the server; the country was never involved in any wars and became an observer state of the first United Northern Congress and the Council of the Medi Sea. The country had several provinces, whose leaders made up a council to advice King deyan. After a hiatus in 2020, the leaders decided to move the country over to the western quadrants for more land.
The country focused on both infrastructure and exporting their German culture, with its simplistic yet distinctly baroque European builds, and building up a trade network through construction of a market and the Great Overland Railway passing nearby. They also established a national brewery, which experimented with the Brewery plugin. The country’s Italian-spiritual successor, Florence, briefly claimed territory in CivMC, but were annexed by Kallos following the Generic War.
This week’s featured image is Die Haupstadt, Kaltsburg’s capital.
The News
Suramir Market, in Estalia. We’re facing Gmall!
Happenings Around Civ
Even shorter this week…
- The Commonwealth was set to hold a Maester ceremony to induct Jensen3rd and ImmediateDescent into the Maester Alliance, but ImmediateDescent could not make it.
- The Imperial Federation elected ImmediateDescent as their newest chancellor, hopefully resolving their crisis
- Meracydia is facing a narcotics epidemic with foreign suppliers, drunkenness, and animal transformations. Don’t believe me? Read the Meracydian Mouthpiece for more.
- Transylvania has elected fastestgrass as their newest President, with their inauguration ceremony set to be held in the Icenia nether portal.
- Nara announced due to waning interest, all megadraw lottery entrants would be refunded. I do want to see a successful lottery happen on Civ, it would be very cool.
- Mount Augusta inducted its newest mayor, Podly to grand affair after a close election with Flameoguy. I hope he doesn’t mind me saying that Flameo’s “consolation prize” was becoming deputy mayor, along with several other high-ranking officials gaining positions in their cabinet.
- Lambat is electing its newest Metro Council, with so many left-field candidates including me, and Creepi0n, and even Kaprediem that things are just getting stupid
- Pavia offering incentives to build more, with more diamonds going into their bank account for completed schematics.
Metagame Highlights
The Ally Tree in Fempire, the third place winner for the picture competition!
- The Civball Map of the World is back in development, hopefully seeing a release of it soon!
- Hands of the Earth has a new wiki page.
- Golden Nations, a survival server, has announced they would be using Citadel (and subsequently, the entire Civ plugin suite) for their next iteration of their server. It’s with mixed reception although quite a vocal minority
- It’s kind of related but if you’re not aware in the Minecraft community, people have generally declared 2b2t’s recent 1.19 update as the death of the oldest anarchy server in Minecraft. Is it time to make another run for advertising?
The Fun Stuff
Blacklight in Gang Shi, which is a recreation of a place in Half Life 2, built by alexkyry.
Builds
- Amicitia has built a big castle which will become the country’s parliament building.
- Maddog443 of Rhode Island hints at their Blacklight embassy which is a nice recreation of everyone’s favorite cartoon villain’s evil lair
- Around the same area is Walker Burger with Walkers as an employee!
- ALSO in the same area is the Half-Life clone I mentioned a little bit earlier
- Mystave shows some late night fishing while in Corvos
- TransylvaniaMan really do be trying to hype up a tree
- I took this picture of Gmall without their permission
- I like the theming of Jeb’s in Lambat, fits well with their true colors (see what I did there?)
And our winner and runners up of the screenshot competition
- Commonwealth’s Verdant Valley continues to have striking builds and even strikinger scale, sense for nature integration, and more
- In second place, although really outdated, is a render of Griffin’s expansive territory, stretching from the flower fields to the Adrian canals.
- And nothing to scoff at but in third place, the Fempire Ally Tree is a testament that no tree is truly too big.
Thanks everyone for participating
Multimedia Projects
- A great piece of art from iinkuu depicting the pearling of Matt4Fun9
- Butter_villager posted Gwua’s profile picture
- Gang Shi has released a new map of their internal territories from alexkyry, which is very clear and well made. This also confirms Edius is now part of Gang Shi territory, after being a close ally for many months.
- alberlb96 shows off the SPQR territory map to r/imaginarymaps
Memes
Slowlyfunny’s new Amogus in Icenia. I’m obligated to put this here because of him.
- I may? I think I’m aware enough to know that I am stupid
- Ah yes, my favorite picture, GhasNews.exe not found
You’re serious? That’s all the memes that I have this week? What the fuck is wrong with you guys post your bullshit on reddit more…
Non-Civ Content
- Many will be incredibly happy that the New York Yankees are all but collapsing with 6 losses in a row since Friday. From sluggish trade deadline trades, to incredibly weak offense (along with historically great offense from a single person), scandals, umpire temper tantrums, and SO much more. As a Red Sox fan, it’s only more amusing for me to see!
- So after the calmness of Pikmin 3, the next game to look at is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a game reminiscent of the Jet Set Radio games on the Dreamcast/OG XBOX. Play the game all you want, but for me, my money’s on the killer soundtrack with techno artists and original JSR composers alike. Every song is perfect for this game and keeps you funkin’ along.
- I’m trying to make changes by not starting coding projects that take incredibly long times but I have big ideas that I have to keep burning on the backburner so uh, coding moment
- Nara did a funny gaming night! I don’t think anybody was there though :(
Poll of the Week
Last week, we had a total of 72 responses. I think it might just be the appeal of the questions that are getting this amount of variance in the responses.
The first question was “How many hours do you play Civ per day?”
It seems all the people who didn’t play Civ is no longer here. Did I scare you off?
I kind of expected the first two to be high, because of the logins and daily essence getters being so plentiful on Civ, but what’s surprised me is that we don’t have a steady taper off, but that we have a large peak at 1-2 hours a day taking over the entire landscape. To be fair, I game for like 1-2 hours for relaxing time at the end of the day too.
The second question last week was Roughly how frequently do you look at non-game Civ content?, usually colloquially referred to as the “metagame”.
This is one I think more of us expected. While Civ is a game that is played on the server, unlike other anarchy servers, the metagame, from the politics and news and dramaposts, and so much more, is integral to being able to integrate within the Civ playstyle. Heck, you’re doing it right now reading this post!
2 Vote 2 Furious
This week’s poll is about a very topical topic (and totally not because I had nothing else to think about this week.)
I’m mostly asking this question because as some of you know, 2b2t’s update to 1.19 has been an unmitigated disaster. My offchance thought is if Civ would want to capitalize on its failure.
Concluding Cry for Help
The inauguration of incoming mayor Podly in Mount Augusta, taken by Altelier.
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! Some things you may want to note:
- If you’d like to contribute to the newsletter, my DMs are always open
@specificlanguage. Honestly, writing a featured article is easier than you think. - If that’s not your fancy, feel free to write something and bring it out to me, whether thoughts on Civ’s metagame or just other things you wanted to rant on.
Additionally, while I’m still trying to figure out how the hell I can do a fundraiser (hint: I’m lazy), I can at least direct people to a couple donation areas to help support Maui following their wildfires:
- The Maui Strong Foundation is focusing on providing general aid for all of Maui
- The Maui Food Bank is helping families stay fed during this difficult time.
I’m hoping something good comes out of the newsletter very soon. Thanks for your support!