CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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

CivWiki Newsletter for November 25, 2024

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Monday from California!

Whoops, today I just happen to not be at my usual location today, visiting some family for the week. I’m still going to deliver what I can!

At least the server’s died down from talking about all the meteoric iron stuff, right? Right?

Well, let’s just get to the news and we’ll see.

This week’s featured image is Icenia City, around the north side around a few nature-themed shops. I actually honestly like the more organically nature with some planning as it allows for places in the city like this, where you have great views of the skyscrapers while also having small, quiet spots like this scattered around the city. The city may not be building at the same rate as they used to, but the environment and urbanism is still here and I really love it. Looking forward to more.

Featured Article

This featured article is a repeat of November 20, 2023.

Realistic Biomes is a plugin commonly found on Civ servers to adjust crop growth times. Used normally to balance experience production, Realistic Biomes adjusts crop growth and breeding to be dependent on biomes, and light visibility, as well as adjust crop growth times to take hours or days for a crop to be fully harvestable. Optimal growth times usually are around three to eight hours, but are lower in less corresponding biomes, for example, potatoes grow well in winter-themed biomes, like taigas or tundras, but do not grow in hot biomes, like deserts or jungles.

Originally debuting on Civcraft, it became a mainstay of Civ servers to this day, as it slowed player progression down to prevent quick enchantments. Clay can be used to speed up growth times to up to 33%, and glowstone or lamp-like blocks can be used to simulate greenhouse environments underground. Crop growth is also persistent, meaning that it will continue to grow while chunks are unloaded. Development on the plugin continues to this day and has been used on every mainline Civ server since Civcraft.

This week’s featured article image is the fields of Lugano, Pavia.

To place an ad here, take a look at the ads page.

The News

The NoOneTruePunk statue in Fempire, pictured on Transgender Day of Remembrance (cr: Shadno).

Around the Server

The good thing is that being on PST means the news cutoff heads right around the server restart time…

Metagame Highlights

To place an ad here, take a look at the ads page.

The Fun Stuff

Sailing out on the sunrise in Winterbourne (cr: Finkov).

Calendar

Builds

I don’t have as many builds to stash and I’m running out of time, so sorry this isn’t bigger. I’ll give a much bigger view next week.

Cool Content

Memes

Non-Civ Content

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!

To place an ad here, take a look at the ads page.

Poll of the Week

The Cathedral overlooking St. Rafael, Karydia Imperial (cr: Urzork)

Last week, we had 48 responses.

Did You Like the Update?

If you aggregated the responses down to positive/negative, it’s interesting to see that it’s actually 27/17, in favor of positive, which for the comments that definitely would not be seen as the case.

But for now, I do think it’s kind of interesting that it’s, in general, a good update. However for the wider Civ economy, there’s a very, very interesting divide, for good reason honestly.

The admins should attempt more changes where they ignore people arguing about it for 7 weeks. Implementing and then hotfixing on the fly is much more enjoyable (however very controversial!)

I have heard this take a couple of times. While I do personally value player feedback, sometimes there are people who are offering devil’s advocate feedback at best, and obstructive at worst. As usual, this is the part of the newsletter where I advocate for a parallel, experimental Civ server to try out changes and implement them as much as needed. Alas, being the only Civ server…

i think it’s good to have a late game wealth sink but i wish it was less PVP-centric. the ability to upgrade factories is already big, I don’t know if we also needed big changes to which of the sweaties now becomes even more invincible

I agree with this point, so, so, much. While I think this was a good thing to drastically change the PvP meta, the fact it’s a late game addition is such a bad thing for the Civ economy. Not to mention it’s pretty much giving power to the rich.

I have already seen some very cool emergent gameplay come from this. With mining of the ore being taxed and treaties being made to keep trading of the ingots inside an alliance… Not first getting feedback from players wasn’t the best, but honestly understandable if you see what happened when it was first announced. Keeping it secret just created its own fun event like a gold rush. As long as we get new things I don’t really mind, but for next major update like expanding the world maybe do involve the community in that.

Wholly agree with this one too, although, not very surprising. I think it’s still early though, we haven’t seen these implications play out in a wartime setting though, which would massively change the stakes.

[A very long response that involves them complaining about admins have been changing positions, saying that they are not becoming very receptive to feedback, despite being so much earlier this iteration: “Again, the admin team didn’t care because everyone who disagrees with them is ‘biased’ and therefor[sic] wrong.” You probably know who you are if you wrote this.]

On the flip side of the coin, stuff like this is starting to become more reflective of the admin team as of late. While I really like them (and I’m not being paid in any way to say that), I think the fact that this update got dropped without any prior notice kind of betrayed the trust of a lot of players on the server. While I can tolerate some rudeness, since Civ players can be pretty abrasive in nature, at least some sort of hint and a little more though into balancing really overpowered tools should have at least been in order.

I was personally under the impression that this update was simply adding PvP; the fact this added a great deal to the server was, while good, incredibly contentious.

This update hurts every kind of player. This late-game expansion hurts power players who have their work invalidated by overpowered instruments, and it hurts new players by furthering the gap between newfriends and OGs. The admins want to spark conflict; but fail to update PvP to allow newer nations to meaningfully participate in that conflict.

I mean it’s ok but I think basing it around nether portals is a tad bit elitist. It would be cool if the ore was placed randomly underground.

I like the new ores, as well as the nerf to antiplace, but I also think this will cause further stratification between the power players and everyone else

This is kind of why I’m personally a little skeptical about this update. A GTNH-size expansion has never really been had on Civ and I’m afraid that while this adds a small spark to the economy, it’s going to put the PvP game into an overdrive ending with villagers playing with sticks having nothing else to do to stand out. I think if it wasn’t tied to nether portals, people would definitely be less mad.

In a nutshell, while this is a good enough change to gameplay, my personal position is that Civ’s tech tree, economy, and country involvement needs to be more horizontal rather than vertical. Civ’s gameplay has already matured so much, why do we need to add another stage above what we already have?

Vote Nice!

I’d highly recommend you share this with your Civ friends — I’d like to give nice, wholesome comments to everyone next week!

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
Are there any genuine compliments you'd like to give to anyone on Civ? Give as many as you want!

Thanks! Cry for Help

A collection of Pavians and Salernites gathering together for the construction of both an Embassy in Pavia and a Bank Branch in Salerno (cr: Bronnakus).

Thanks for once again reading this week’s newsletter! Somewhat of a special thank you this time because it’s the newsletter edition. I really appreciate all of you who read to come around and read this hastily written stuff every week.

There is nobody to really thank this week Bro, I really didn’t write this on Sunday night did I?? A big thanks out for Empop, Cissonius, Gamertime, SteelHand7, Not90, VilyanZ, Okx, Gobblin, Hakr_, Ishir_, Bronnakus and whoever else I missed throughout the bolt of energy that was Sunday night.

Anyway, I just want to thank everyone who’s helped out on the newsletter in some capacity in this extremely long journey so far — every small contribution has made the newsletter what it is today and you should be very proud of what any of you’ve done. I can’t specifically pinpoint every person since there’s so many, but a few I’d like to point out are:

There are countless others that have reached their grubby (but very helpful) little arms into the newsletter but I just want to highlight these superstars for continually helping me along the way.

If somehow you want to join this list, please feel free to message me to create newsletter content! I’ll be looking for more as we continue to head into the new year when this becomes a monthly newsletter! Message me @specificlanguage on Discord.

Thanks for reading, have a restful Thanksgiving (for those who celebrate it) and until next time…

EDIT CIVWIKI