CivWiki Newsletter for December 5, 2023
Good morning and happy December from New England!
I know that there’s been a good lot of stuff that happened this past couple of weeks, but I think I needed at least a few weeks to manage anxieties and enjoy myself while currently being a little on the “what the heck am I doing in life” side.
I highly imagine that newsletters are going to be slightly more sporadic going forward, especially during this busy holiday season, not to mention that news is getting a little more sporadic as we enter a period of relative peace.
Although the goal for publishing will always be Monday morning, I hope you can forgive me for writing these newsletters a couple days late, like today. Don’t worry, usually I’ll have a really good reason for missing a couple of weeks.
Funnily enough, because of my delay, the URL now collides with last year’s edition, which was the longest at the time, so you might notice that there’s a year after the URL this time.
Ok, let’s look at the news…
Featured
Featured Image
This week’s featured image, for obvious lack of actual subtlety here, is Margaritaville decorated for Christmastime. I was saving it up for the Christmas season, and especially so considering this is pretty much one of the only Christmas decoration that I’ve currently seen so far on any server. However, this is really well done, and does a really good job doing Christmas decorations in a tropical setting, which is a rare feat, where the only one actually able to do this correctly is Hawaii. Looking forward to more redecorations from MaybeGravy soon!
Featured Article
Devoted was a Civ server running as a experimental Civ server that intended to continue Civcraft’s political framework while also emphasizing PvP interactions and new gameplay designs. Founded by ProgrammerDan and Bonkill during Civcraft 2.0 in 2015, the server initially ran two iterations. Its third iteration is the franchise’s most well-known, as it became generally recognized as the mainline server following the failure of Civcraft 3.0 earlier in 2016. Wars were generally frequent on the server with frequent targets being Persia, Volterra, Ruin, and others.
Devoted 3.0 also included nations on Civ that had little or did not pursue involvement in wars. Mount Augusta hosted the Maester Library on Devoted 3.0 and became the main city that the Maesters played in for future iterations. Aquila, one of the largest cities on the server, had a capital city shaped like an eagle’s head. The server waned in activity following the launches of CivEx 3.0 and CivClassic 2.0, and shut down around October 2017. In 2021, the franchise launched Devoted Hell, an iteration of Civ that was only playable in the Nether. Today, Devoted has been a major influence of Civ to this day, with HiddenOre, CastleGates, and more evergreen features originating from the franchise.
This week’s featured image is Aquila, in Devoted 3.0.
The News
CivCubed Launch
The CivCubed lobby, made by Topaz and friends.
As some of you know, CivCubed launched on December 1, 2023.
I haven’t been talking about it that much because a lot of information was thrown at me during the last couple of weeks, which I didn’t even publish a newsletter for, oh well.
After playing for a little bit and rummaging through their features list, CivCubed is very much like the Civ you know and love, but with a good number of features tweaked and modified to be, in my opinion, more accessible and updated for newer players.
- HiddenOre and RealisticBiome-like features return, although with added restrictions in the ocean, region-locking, adaptability and proximity to 0,0. (This is really simplified, but it works, ok?)
- Bastions and Citadel-like features are hidden behind Civilization Hearts; banding more together will power up your civilization further and claim more land.
- FactoryMod-like features are now Workstations, which work faster when more people are in proximity.
- Snitch-like mechanics are present in Fingerprints, which appear when a player busts through a protective area.
While there are also other minor tweaks like an expanded ore and alloy system, you can read more on their discord.
As I’m writing this there’s only been a few days on the server with a peak of about 25. Launch went relatively smoothly and so far, there are people playing on a Monday night, so it feels pretty good. There isn’t any news that’s really important, with the exception of:
- The Mutual Trust Alliance (and I swear it isn’t actually Mount Augusta) fought against the Shittery Gang, against SlothInASuit and JoelThaTroll. There was grief that night.
I hope this didn’t sound too much like an advertisement. It’s too early to tell whether this server is grindcraft or not, but it at least feels like a breath of fresh air the genre needed. I hope it lasts longer than CivReign!
CivMC News
Volterra’s massive buildings in their town square.
- On Thanksgiving Day, CivMC admin SoundTech reported numerous crashes that rolled back reinforcements, and Wingzero later reported that it was due to memory errors. By the following weekend, SoundTech had fixed the issue.
- Transylvania declared independence from Kaowta after joining the country back in October, calling the country’s previous annexation a disgraceful act by a former president.
- Kaowtan leader Plrog did not contest this, and hoped for better relations between the two countries in the future, along with relaxation of Minecraft politics.
- Mount Augustan Mayor ComradeNick also offered an apology to Transylvania, saying that they went through similar issues in their past and reached out to the country for diplomatic support.
- The Imperial Federation struck a deal with CoolChaCha after the latter broke an ore smelter in Ohio, where chancellor Mat_Potato_King formally apologized for slander against CoolChaCha in the country; he hoped it would bring better relations.
- Additionally, he announced that he would be temporarily giving powers to his Vice-Chancellor, CaptainColton.
- Citizens of Baile worked with King 23 to establish a parliament in Kuyea, a city in Baile in late November, and adopted a new constitution.
- Unfortunately, Baile was raided on December 3, with major damage to their 7/11 compound. The assailants were pearled, and are awaiting trial.
- The International Hockey League had two matches scheduled this weekend:
- The Pumpkin & Sidekicks faced the Vinland Vikings with the Vikings winning a close match, 6 - 4.
- The DUCKS forfeited their match against Baile due to time constraints, after a highly anticipated match in Roma.
- Pavia announced several things:
- Archduke Gobblin IV announced the ART decree, which he proclaimed as “CivMC’s first major copyright act.”
- They also made an agreement with Fempire to join the CUB as a Declaration of Friendship.
- The Monument Bank also announced their financial statement for November.
- Due to Kar-Kazdun’s announcement to retire from the server, Vinland annexed the country, and citizens of Kar-Kazdun would be naturalized into Vinland citizens.
- Icenia placed a 16 diamond block bounty on Dark_FFC after stealing 45 diamond ore from one of their citizens. Dark and CoolChaCha also placed a counter bounty on Shadno and Dr_Bacon_Hair after Icenia placed a pearl-on-sight order for Dark.
- Icenia also elected their Senate for December, with Quanton_Biscuit remaining as speaker and Drekamor winning a contested runoff against Zolo for the final seat.
- DonFuer (or more accurately, Oceanstar) announced the dissolution of DonFuer on CivMC, due to inactivity from their parent organization and committment to 2b2t, with most active players continuing to play in Flora.
- Mount Augusta finished their rail line connecting their country directly to Pavia, as part of their CUB agreement.
- Butter_villager posted a letter of appreciation for SQOpenSpellbook and SirFrenchie, which was received poorly. Both have been known for raiding or backstabbing in previous events and are generally known as controversial characters among Civ, but people have their own communities, so who knows.
- Lambat banned all Skibidi Toilet and other related memes, which shows me how out of touch I am with modern humor.
- SeldomShock was elected as mayor of Shockton in Volterra.
- Mercutio celebrated its one year anniversary on CivMC on November 28.
- Kallumbia is half meme nation, half revival of Kallos and Columbia, so uh, take it how you will, I guess?
Metagame Highlights
The Maester’s library underneath Mount Augusta.
- A call for inactivity pings from the nations was relatively ineffective, not to mention many people don’t actually read reddit often. Although, is Lambeau really active with the exception of Dark messaging on Discord or Reddit? That’s like me commenting every two weeks, but doing less effort
- Well it’s way too late to post Civballs, but at least the map is finalized
- I find the thread about places for new players very interesting, as it offers pretty good and reasonable perspectives on what nations to join, even though there’s probably only about seven or eight reasonable nations as placed on this thread
- Kind of on the same vein as the last post, a new player asks if CivMC is alive. There were days on CivClassic where a morning wouldn’t get above 10, it’s feeling pretty good compared to past iterations when you see about 20 on an average weekday.
- Once again, another philosophic post about the dangers of Civ burnout comes through with a bunch of helpful and supportive comments
- ComradeNick shows off some more Cobblestone!, Sand!, Terracotta!, and Gravel!, which coincidentally are my four favorite sequels of musicals on Broadway right now.
- Solitaire is hoping to bring the server rank up, again!
- ItzHoover is looking for helpers who can help him run the Civ Book Club.
- ElementKZ figured out that Civ started nearly twelve years ago today. That’s crazy that I’ve been on Civ for more than half its lifetime now…
- Civ development for 1.20 is sort of slow, but things are starting to move, for now…
- CivRev is quietly restarting development for their 4th iteration, showing off rocket travel between dimensions, along with some debate about centralized nation feeds for different nations.
The Fun Stuff
The Commonwealth’s currently under construction Parliament building.
Builds
I quite literally only had a few builds this week, and the only one I could find that was easily accessible was the Margaritaville at the top. Technically, I did have two with Amicitia’s tree, but I’m attempting to stockpile it for next week’s feature. So some of the things I visited on my jaunt through CivMC this week were:
- Pavia’s garden of CUB members,
- Volterra’s town square with incredible architecture,
- Commonwealth’s Panda Sanctuary (but where’s the pandas?) and under construction Parliament building
- Mount Augusta’s city hall and Maester library
Otherwise, there was
- Pacem’s market looking like the Macy’s flagship store in New York
- Mercutio’s harbor is clean as heck, looking like Tortuga
And that’s it for this week, I guess. Bro why is the CivMC builds channel just #feedback now
Cool Content
- Butter_villager takes a selfie in a perfectly fine place on build night
- Wow, what a cool trailer, I hope Paddington doesn’t do anything controvers… oh no…
- Meanwhile, TheJmqn posts the 22nd map of CivMC, with not much changing since last time.
- Shoutout to the Kallumbia Civball, looks clean
Memes
- I’m gonna paint your ores
- I do consider the entire server an enemy of real life
- If I had a nickel for every time someone made a meme claiming the whole server
- I really wanted this joke of changing the Civ map with the top comments continued, I wanted to see how a balkanized MTA and icenia-less map would look like
- But seriously, “I am going to kill the president of Icenia”
- This is a sentence.
- Introducing the ChrisChrispie Corona Crisis — shoutout to all 0 Siivagunner fans that get this reference
- RedDevel posted a winking fish on the announcements channel, what does this mean?
- Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of it anymore but Nick has literally been spamming the wordbank recipe and he gifted me “Idfk rollingstone”
Non-Civ Content
- Alright, what the hell did I actually do this weekend? I went to New York, mostly to watch the Spamalot revival, but had a lot of fun regardless. Though, I did spend like $500+ dollars on random crap, so I guess that’s kind of cool.
- Meracydia’s Pick’ems on Week 13 shows the top of the pack being extremely close together…can’t wait to see who wins at the end of this season.
- Hmmm, maybe there’s an idea for a quick app idea in there…
- Shohei Ohtani continues to be the most coveted item for every baseball team while also being the most stone-faced about what team he’s going to; meanwhile the Mariners are having an extremely confounding fire sale of their up-and-coming and somewhat veteran players… which has everyone in Seattle really, and I do mean really fucking mad
- Insert freakout about GTA VI here, can’t wait to explore the Florida Keys for no reason
- Insert freakout about Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary specials here, Russell T Davies, David Tennant, and Catherine Tate all still have the magic
- Praxis has too much enthusiasm over the Advent of Code, but here I am struggling to parse through a file in Python on Day 5
- Yeah, otherwise I’ve had some anxiety about next steps in life, because I’m probably the last person who wants to become a NEET. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing this newsletter and the wiki but I don’t have anything to lose right now, so I’m hoping…
Poll of the Week
Last Week’s Results:
Last week, we had a total of 53 responses.
Our first question was about thanksgiving, whether people were travelling that week to visit family, friends, etc. This shouldn’t really be interesting, but I do find it interesting people didn’t travel a lot.
Our second question was about the controversy of art being present on Reddit, Do you enjoy seeing art on the subreddit?
I think people do like seeing art on the subreddit; but I think the thing that ticks people off is twofold:
- First: It’s Gang Shi. No getting around that one, I think there are people here that don’t really like the Gang Shi-focused art when the current political climate isn’t very fond of them.
- Second: In a good number of responses, people said “the art doesn’t feel related to Civ.” Sure, they’re really good, and I appreciate them, but the issue is it feels pretty disconnected from Civ and has its own dark turn. The portraits themselves, while really good, aren’t necessarily related to Civ to many.
These are just generally the responses that I’ve seen from the extra responses I got, and I think there just needs to be more variety of good content on the subreddit to detract from art posts and constant drama.
Brandon Commands You To Vote
I don’t know why I made the header like that, but sure. One simple question today, and I’m expecting to be a quick popularity contest:
Please note the order is the order of nations, roughly going clockwise around the server, do not use this as the order for best nations that I consider. Also assume the player joining is a normal Minecraft player with no prevailing preferences and just wants to get into Civ as a nation and has no experience aside from playing Vanilla.
This vote is also not legally binding and will in no way affect anything.
December Cry for Help
Pavia’s assemblance of flags who are in their CUB agreements.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! I honestly don’t have much to say this week, but this is my first step at improving myself and getting back into a routine and doing something fun. Also, like, I really need to practice my writing skills again. Please.
As we now head into December, another reminder that the CivWiki & Monument Group announced an editing palooza, with diamond prizes for those with the most substantive edits! See more details here! It’s easy to get started and you could win huge diamond prizes!
Alright, that’s enough advertisement from me. Thanks to Lodish and Gjum for quickly reviewing this before I push this out the door. Thanks everyone for reading and being patient, and I hope to see you next week!
And, as always…