CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Newsletter for December 18, 2023

• specificlanguage

Good morning and happy Monday from New England!

We’re zoning in on the Christmas season, and I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I’m seeing a surge of newfriends as we end up toward the holidays, with activity starting to ramp up again. I truly hope everyone has a restful and lovely holiday season. Not to mention that next week’s edition falls on Christmas… But I’ll talk about that in a few more sections.

We’ve got a JAM-PACKED newsletter this week; you thought last week was long but we’ve got several different sections happening this week that make this newsletter even longer.

Are we ready to dive in?

This week’s featured image is a much busier and more festive tree in Pavia’s Town Hall in Pavia. Unlike last year’s tree out in the town hall’s courtyard, they somehow managed to fit an entire 50-block tall Christmas tree inside in the main town hall, where they’ve said it’s more of a Norwegian-style Christmas tree and it’s a bit crooked at the top. Honestly, it was actually kind of tricky trying to frame the shot to get the whole Christmas tree, but it still looks really nice. They’ve been building this like crazy the past few weeks (not to mention my own building) and it’s of course resulted in an amazing tree. Looks amazing, can’t wait to see more!

Featured Article

The Somber War was a global military conflict between Lexington and several economically and militarily powerful nations, loosely defined as the Western Alliance. The war was sometimes regarded as a natural successor to the Titan War during Civcraft 2.0, as many of the belligerents and grudges during the war were passed down from Nox. The conflict started as skirmishes and small conflicts in The Commonwealth and their boroughs in late 2017, however following a large-scale obbybombing in their capital, Westminster, the conflict became global as allies rallied their support. Several notable Commonwealth players were pearled in the End, and fights broke out between The Commonwealth’s ally, Hjaltland, and Lexington.

After a long period of inactivity in early 2018 and an update to the newest version, the Western Alliance destroyed the Lexington Vault during the Fall of Lexington, where nearly all players who were pearled were freed. Although a period of peace lasted throughout the rest of 2018, continued grudges from some of Lexington’s supporters led to the Infinity War.

This week’s featured image is a view of the Lexington Vault siege from Dsclouse.

This Week Last Year

On the week of December 19, 2022:

  • Temporal Isles was given terms by Icenia to demilitarize after leader PhysicsGamer was pearled following the Temporal Isles Conflict.
  • CivMC admins discovered players were able to brew extremely competitive utility brews for conflicts, and rebalanced recipes to compensate. Superbgamer was one of the primary offenders.
  • Ocala was obbybombed by Arnen after the territory was dissolved and annexed by the latter country.
  • Monument Group’s first public stock sale resulted in 2,000 diamonds from investors.
  • CivRevolution launched a Skyblock server while developing its 1.18 iteration (this would later become CivRev 3.0).

The News

Server Updates

On December 16, CivMC released a Christmas Miracle update (1.25) with a considerable amount of content; their previous update was on October 27. If you don’t care about the technical changes, then continue on!

Additions to the server included the following:

See the full update for more information.


RedDevel additionally announced this year’s Christmas event which, was incredibly restful as CivMC is now the latest game in the 2020s which has added a fishing minigame.

The update however did not go smoothly.

SoundTech was eventually forced to do a full rollback of the previous fishing update to stop the constant crashes that happened, as a “hail mary attempt”. He’ll be working throughout this week to find the causes behind these crashes.

However while it was active, the fishing and Christmas update has been perceived very well among players so far with players enjoying the fishing craze. CivMC has been adding features slowly, but each feature added has been perceived well.

The End of a War…

A tropical Christmas tree in Altepetl, following the war, from x1025.

We left off the newsletter’s incredibly long war section with the successful Yoahtl skybridging and other associated pearlings. If you want some context about this next section, please read that first.

Following the sporadic fighting, an attack bunker was cut off from the rest of Gang Shi’s ice road network. This prompted Gang Shi fighters to relocate to Butternut County’s vault, the last remaining active vault they had access to. While doing so, Icenia was disabling some other attack vaults, when an interesting development occurred:

The vault was eventually broken quite soon after, with the Dawn Guard Pact claiming most Butternut and Gang Shi-aligned territories, including Florence, Lambeau, and the Holy See. They intended to declaim all unmilitarized land shortly after.

Chosentwicelol did continue to show up in Icenia, notably on December 11, although following Icenia’s pearling of his associate, Squilliam, he has retreated with no further attacks being made. As of now, the two remaining bounties are for Kibbles, for 64db, and Chosentwice, for 192db.

Final Results

The Nassau town hall among the tall forest trees.

With the vault broken, the Dawn Guard Pact has essentially declared the war to be ended. On December 16 (shortly after the update went “live”), sentencing and land claims were posted.

Nearly the entire reaction to that post was “holy crap he has to write an essay on the Stonewall riots lmao”, but I think that means the reaction is positive.

However, Gang Shi handed over their ownership groups to Estalia, so currently, the territory is under Estalian ownership, but no changes to the territory have been made besides the ones above.

Hopefully, this series of wars between Gang Shi and Icenian allies is finally over. Everyone and their mother probably wants to see this Stonewall essay though, it’s going to be fire or another Coolchacha dud.

The Start of Another?

The voter tree and town hall around Mount Augusta.

Starting another war is a bit of an exaggeration, but on December 16, Arsenian leader SQOpenSpellbook posted an explanation on Reddit following the pearling of SymSquid:

The comments were either met with confusion along with general disdain for their attempts at “de-escalation” while at the same time demanding reparations.

This conflict is still pretty new at the time of writing and it seems pretty localized to Alenarith, so I hope this isn’t a war that goes over Christmas.

The Rest of the News

A snowy day along the plains of New Callisto, Imperial Federation, from Torynado.

As if I didn’t have enough to talk about.

Metagame Highlights

The Monument Group’s renovated and expanded shop in Pavia.

The Fun Stuff

A random house in Pavia… wait a second, that’s my new house that I just built this weekend!

Builds

So obviously we have Pavia’s Christmas tree but Gobblin’s been hard at work with organizing newfriend buildings:

It doesn’t help that I’m a citizen of Pavia now, so I can have access to all these incredible views. Anyway…

Cool Content

Memes

So uh, the above picture is when BritishWanderer “accidentally” lost his entire inventory while Vinland was performing their Christmas carol. It’s so over for him.

You wanted this. You’re getting put on a tier list, for example:

Alright now that I have my obligatory self-deprecating meme out of the way, and that you have an example of how terrible my actual humor is, let’s sort the tier list…

If you don’t see yourself here, then you weren’t worthy enough to even be tier’d.

Non-Civ Content

Poll of the Week

Last week, we had 57 responses to the primary question: “What playstyle (or kind of player) do you consider yourself to be?

This is the part where I’m like, “There aren’t that many builders on Civ,” where people “say” they’re builders but fall into many of the other categories, which can sometimes be typical for the “innocent buildfriend”.

As far as the rest of these categories go, it’s pretty expected to see that some of the highest categories are Grinders, Leaders, and PvPers, which are also very high makeups of the Civ genre anyway. But what I find more interesting is the Explorer, Organizer, and Newfriend/Oldfriend categories.

First, it’s interesting that a lot of people self-identified as “Explorer” and “Organizer” since there are very few reaches of the map left unexplored, or few people who are just taking pictures of sights. Similarly, I thought Organizer fell into more administrative positions, like welcoming newfriends, delivery people, factory workers, or random non-military people that continue to keep a nation running. I know I made this poll a week ago, but I’m interested to see what people thought this was…

I expected a lot more people to self-identify as an Oldfriend since this iteration is filled with a lot of players returning or continuing after playing since Civcraft 2.0 or earlier, there’s gotta be more than 11 of you.

Enough Yapping, Give Me A Question!

Alright, fine, I’ll give you one, sheesh. These next set of questions have to do with communication on Civ. And is totally not because of a related outage.

For this question, consider all discords, including nation, alliance, and server discords, meta-Civ discords (like CivWiki, Civballs, or the Maester Alliance), and anything that has to do with Civ and is not directly tied to anything related to outside of Civ.

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
How many Civ-related discords are you currently in? (Include all nation, server and metagame discords.)
Which method(s) of communication in Civ made you feel the most connected?
Select all that are applicable.
Company owners or nation leaders, would you *pay* for in-newsletter advertisements? Why or why not, and if so, how much? (This question is optional.)

About the last question, as I’ve started playing the server a little more, I’ve seen a few requests to run ads, either as jokes or as completely serious ventures. I want to see if companies would pay for these, and I’m trying to figure out what would be the best way to set these up again, after the very underwhelming response last time.

Home for the Holidays Cry for Help

The Civball Map of the World for 2023, from IceBoy and way too many others to count.

Thanks to rt, DSbulldogs, and Metropolitan for a riveting Christmas carol while I finished my newsletter this evening. But more seriously, thanks to BritishWanderer, Toaxbis, and Shadno for some administrative help and editing aid this week, along with the Pavia VC for some general support.

Here’s yet another reminder that the CivWiki & Monument Group announced an editing palooza, WHICH IS ENDING SOON at the turn of the new year! There are big 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!

Currently in the lead with edits (in terms of quality) is reffelruz’s giant edit of Peter5930’s page, with several honorable mentions being Icenia’s CivMC page, Rijeka, the Monument Group and Monument Bank pages, Arsenia, and Civ101. You’ve still got a few days to edit and rank in the leaderboard!


So, if you might have noticed, the newsletter’s next publication, if it was to go to plan, is Christmas Day. I’m not setting any expectations at the moment, but you’ll probably see the newsletter either later in the day, or on December 26 instead. This week, I’ll try to write as much as possible beforehand, but I cannot publish a newsletter on Christmas Day at the normal time, for very obvious reasons. Take this time to enjoy your Christmas day with family and friends.

If I don’t publish on Christmas Day (although I will try to write as much as possible before hand), merry Christmas and I’ll see you all sometime soon!


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