CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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

CivWiki Newsletter for October 8, 2024

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Monday from the Pacific Northwest!

I hope everyone is ready for Spooky Month^TM this upcoming season, I know I sure aren’t! With the temperature still appearing in the 50s it feels like fall, but the weather hasn’t been rainy yet, so it isn’t hell for me. We are currently in a post-event, in-school lull in Civ activity at the moment, but I think that’s just par for the course as we settle in. For those of you who’ve stuck around, I hope this next month and a half are going to be great!

For those of you in Florida, North Carolina, and anywhere else currently being hit by hurricanes: please stay safe! We care about you guys too!

Let’s get to the news!

This week’s featured image is of the gardens (or, I guess more accurately the reflection pool) of the Kayev Mosque in Ila’Kyavul. When I saw the collage of pictures posted by Fendrell in #builds (after accidentally reacting with a vomit because my phone legit glitched out), it’s so incredible with amazing detail and clever design in the small space that this garden fits in. The trees, architecture and details all contribute to an amazing space in the middle of the city that’s still under construction, and I can’t wait until it’s fully formed!

Featured Article

This week’s featured article was written by Jaydon.

Floating exchanges refer to a collection of shop chests set at various price points. Based on supply and demand, the price—essentially where the highest supply is found—fluctuates among these points, or “floats.” Once set up, this creates a dynamic, self-regulating market. These exchanges typically deal with item pairs, such as diamonds and iron, or diamonds and XP.

The exchange profits from the price differential between buying and selling. For example, if one price point buys iron at 10 iron per diamond and sells at 8 iron per diamond, the 2 iron difference represents the exchange’s profit. As the inventory grows, the exchange can handle larger trades, increasing its revenue over time. With enough data from the exchanges one are able to accurately depict the change of market value on most goods.

Exchanges can be considered a new development, they picked up during the end of CivClassics; however their most prominent application after that was CivCorp on CivRealms, a trading city with lots of floating exchanges). Consequently on CivMC it was CivMarket and later on Monument Group hosting the most free floating exchanges, however several other nations also host their own exchanges based on the same concept.

This week’s featured article image is from a post by Lodish highlighting iron/diamond floating exchange prices as they stood at the end of the world.

This Week In Civ

On the week of October 8* to October 14 in:

2017: Lexington attacks The Commonwealth, and begins the Somber War.

2018: Vinland fights a war with Chanseatic State and Vitelia and lose, they eventually merge with Mir.

2019: The nation of CCCP is established by the union of Maltovia and Pripyat.

2022: (ed. note: oops, still haven’t backfilled this one yet, either!)

  • Cortesia del Mar (CivMC) celebrated its transition of power this past weekend after passing a 136-page constitution.
  • Truidencia has put out a large bounty for the pearls of OLivay and AlexanderTheBest for raiding the country.
  • Icarus, Reggio Argeddina, the Hyperborean Confederation, among others have formed the “Neat Alliance That Won’t Obbybomb”, or NATWO.(ed. note: And they never did.)

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The News

A great angel made of glass overlooking the Kallosian Vault (cr: dredd_kiji/Sanctum)

Armour Trims at Monument GroupArtificial Industries and Monument Group are proud to announce the availability of all Armour Trims at the MG store in Pavia! Get yours now while stock lasts. Visit MG @ 720, -3030 in the City of Pavia!

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The Fun Stuff

Pavia’s new embassy located in Winterbourne. (cr: Tatsu)

Calendar

Builds

Cool Content

Memes

Non-Civ Content

Buy Raven for all your armor or tool related needs! We do deliveries to Pavia, Transylvania, Accra, Yoahtl, and Exilus as well as Lambat Portal and Titan Portal for our pearled customers. Make orders by joining our discord:

discord.gg/nnRdn6CYFY

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Poll of the Week

Halland across the great bay showing the skyline on the city. (cr: mattbruhr)

Last week, we had 65 responses. Things are getting a little more consistent.

Planning vs Doing

In my opinion, Civ attracts two kinds of people — people who love to plan large nations but rarely actually finish their projects (the one-man nation dilemma), and others who love working, building, mining, etc. just for the sake of having fun (the chad workhorse newfriend). I’m not saying you can force people into these two camps, but with every cycle of Civ, I see a lot of people who plan but do nothing. I mean, I see that in real life as well.

So I wanted to see who identifies with that:

I realized I made the question a Multi-Select question, which I guess is a blessing and a curse. But the fact that about the same amount of people make the plan vs execute the plans kind of makes sense, in a way. However of course more people love planning because mind palaces are just too fun.

Increasing Player Retention

This week’s question was requested by RedDevel, so you can blame him for whatever I messed up. I also had quite a lot of responses for this questions, substantially more than a normal Open Response question normally would.

Although, since I’ve looked at the responses, oh boy, some people have some really rough takes who just have absolute hateboners for the admins. But I think that’s not worth talking here. Ok, maybe just one:

If the admins listened to the playerbase more, instead of going with their seemingly set-in-stone doctrines. Yes, more suggestions added to Civ would be a great bonus. But the admins don’t respond to most of them, and to the ones that they do, very few go through, because it’s most likely feature that they planned to add. The ones that get rejected, get rejected generally because of this one reason: We won’t do X, because we don’t like X, and we want to do Y. CivMC has been largely successful as of my time playing it, but it doesn’t hurt for any organization regarding games to listen to the playerbase more.

Hot take: the suggestions channel is actually pretty low-quality, honestly. Sometimes, I don’t really know if the community really knows what they themselves want.

The server is already doing a great job in comparison to other civ servers.. when it comes to new player retention:

  • Better documentation. We have a lot of reference sites, tools, and information that have not been updated since classics. Update civwiki, guys.
  • Promote community made materials in-game & out. The existing tip/hint system is awful. Have it link here on mondays.. Or notify when a subreddit post is made. Players who stick around here study the game while they play - thats how these nerdy games work. Give them hints on where to look!
  • We as players need to give opportunities for newfriends in ways other than simple recruitment. Job boards, guides on how to use shops around our towns, little maps that point to where to go.. We talk about the move to discord as a bad thing but it’s not just because thats where chat goes. Ive seen a lot less books in game recently, and I feel like its partially due to how we communicate about the game now.

I like this. If you’re an oldfriend, you’ll remember I got my “famous arc” on Civ started when I used to write getting started guides and I think it really helped at least help people to explore the server a bit. But with less content and direction for newfriends to go nowadays it’s quite hard to attach onto a playstyle, find a decent nation without getting spammed from global chat, or actually find things to do instead of running around the first city you visited.

Players should focus on building the world and thereby the player experience. More culture, more events, more roleplaying. If new players are presented with a well developed world, they will be more able to buy into the concept which brings people here in the first place.

More of a community-wide change, but yeah. I think what makes other servers like Stoneworks and even those stupid Civ YouTube servers is that yes, there’s the grind — but there’s some worldbuilding that I think doesn’t get emphasized here. Everyone’s like “vault” this, and “skybridge” that. When are going to get real culture in this??

Increasing the width of the tech tree. The width would be a lot of small additions that would increase specializations amoungst players. What the admins shouldn’t do is increase the depth of the tech tree like making a new armor set that takes a lot of items to make.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with some of the admins on Praxis a month or two ago, where CivClassics essentially nuked the complex tech tree that was present on Devoted and Civcraft. Having that sense of complexity does eventually lead to some sort of accomplishment and a little specialization, and that shallowness in the current FactoryMod config we’ve been using for half a decade is getting stale. #MakeCivcraftLikeCreate

More activity on the reddit, tbh. Since we’re talking about it as a community right now. It makes the world we play in feel lived in. We killed the subreddit last summer during the wars unfortunately.

Yeah, I would highly suggest that people post anything from their #announcements onto Reddit. It’s not that much effort. Technically, I made this newsletter because of the Discord splinter, and can I just say, it would be a lot easier putting your stuff on Reddit not just for me, but for the whole community to see publicly. I can’t be summarizing a drama post every week, give the Reddit their dues!

I think part of what turns people off from investing time in the server is how strong the current power structure is. Essentially one group is in charge and determines who gets to play. I think the server could use some tweaking to allow for other “cultural” centers to exist without being an existential threat to the people currently “winning”. The correct play as the group in charge is to prevent literally anyone from gaining power that you don’t have some level of control over (groups, social pressure, etc etc). Groups in past iterations have been punished HARD for playing nice and waiting for a reason to stomp out potential problems.

Keeping with community-centric problems, although it’s not necessarily one group in charge, it always feels like the reoccurring same people. On the other hand, r/place still very much had some of the same players with variations, so while I think it’s more present here, I think more targeted recruitment (but not mass recruitment) would be a better solution to this one.

We need server provided, dedicated onboarding space for newfriends. Preferably this would be some alternative dimension (or maybe server), where newfriends initially spawn, and are shown the basics of civ. While nations do still have a role in raising newfriends, the server needs to provide mechanisms similar to pavia’s newfriend guide.

If I recall correctly, Devoted Hell was the last server that made a similar attempt at doing this. I wouldn’t call it successful, because the server had a relatively flawed business model anyway, but it was at least a good attempt. We have a lot of documentation out there, right now it’s just hard to find. If we had an intro world to introduce the basic mechanics of Civ without going too in-depth, I think it’d be fine for the NPE.

Getting started link in welcome book. Less sarcastic bullshit in global chat from old friends when new players ask questions. Better nation awareness/showcase on main CivMC discord. Reduce the grind. Make diamonds more accessible for all. Perhaps this would keep the top nations from duping so much diamonds and other materials. But I think more interactive guide for new friends would help. The rest is up to the nations they choose to treat them fairly…. And other nations as well as it does take sometime to understand the server.

Economy is definitely a tough thing to balance on the server, but I’d honestly say it’s not terribly balanced right now. Sure, it’s hard to get your initial wealth by mining for diamonds, but once you get past the learning curve it isn’t that bad, and when you have a business do you rarely get money.

Better global chat though, that would be very helpful.

So what did we learn from this exercise?

Vote Now!

You know, I do find it funny that at this point the poll section is taking up about 50% of the entire newsletter.

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
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Who would you consider the best builder(s) on Civ of all time?

I am contemplating turning this last one into somewhat of a series. Get your PvP tier lists ready!

Gadzooks!

Gadzooks! There’s supposed to be an ad here but nobody paid for this spot!

Click here to see how you can advertise anything Civ-related here!

S’wonderful Cry for Help

So many players working on their Fishing skills at the Olympic event in Q’barra. (cr: Earyx)

Observant viewers may know that this newsletter was delayed by a day, of course it is technically my gaffe, but I and others were marred by delays earlier this weekend, and I really appreciate everyone for being patient with this newsletter, even if it is very non-important!

A huge, huge thanks to Jaydon for helping out with this week’s newsletter, and writing this week’s featured article.

I think that’s it for me but if you’re interesting in helping out on the newsletter, message me @specificlanguage on Discord!

Thanks, and I’ll see you next week! Until then…

EDIT CIVWIKI