CivWiki Newsletter for December 24, 2024

Good morning and merry Christmas!

Well, this is it folks, this is the final weekly newsletter you’re going to see pinned on the CivMC subreddit. After two and a half years and 127 newsletters, this era is coming to a bittersweet close as I intend to move onto a few bigger and better things.

I won’t be going away in the community, but as my IRL responsibilities and activities have just gotten more busy — not to mention this newsletter writing process has become generally unsustainable — the end of the year seems a fitting time to say goodbye to everyone. While this will be a pretty normal newsletter, I have a couple of small additions along the way.

For one final time… let’s get to the news:

Featured

Featured Image

Shockton has the honor of being the final cover image for the weekly newsletter. Although it has the virtue of it being winter-themed and snowy — it is the Christmas season after all — the decorations are probably some of the most indepth and high-effort among the server. I always enjoyed visiting the town with its distinct landmarks and tropical feel; one location of what I would consider to be a great representative of Civ.

Featured Article

CivWiki is a website for the Civ genre of Minecraft servers, self-described as “document[ing Civ] servers, the mechanics that drive them, and the rise and fall of their players and civilizations.” Motivated by a lack of wiki and server documentation following the demise of CivCraft, the site originally emerged as solely documenting CivClassic during its launch in 2017. It eventually expanded its scope after merging with the CivRealms Wiki in 2020 and obtaining the Civcraft Wiki archives in 2021 (with archival efforts from the Maester Alliance).

CivWiki has also had the benefit of many memes, including “edit civwiki”, following the result of people calling others delusional in CivClassic; several memes were created for people which spread the meme. In 2023, with CivMC’s launch, the CivWiki also made an effort to reformat its pages for its server; today the site is the leading authority on Civ history, along with supporting other efforts around documenting Civ history, like the Newsletter. CivWiki is always looking for editors, and welcomes new players to edit on their own nations and improve existing ones, including those pages still from Civcraft, highly requested pages, or documenting events that have very little context.

This week’s featured article image is of the CivWiki’s main page. We’re coming full circle, aren’t we?

This Week In Civ

The News

SPQR’s Coliseum outfitted for the holiday season (cr: alberb96)

Around the Server

Is this the year we don’t have a war on the server before Christmas?

• Pavia uncovered that CivMC admin RedDevel was behind last year’s Christmas holiday attacks.
  • Cissonius and the Coast Guard were notified by Complexii that RedDevel had supplied the explosion materials.
  • The country then issued an ultimatum seeking the CivMC admin’s pearl for crimes against Christmas.
  • He surrendered after the effort of several other players fought against them.
• Pavia additionally announced they were signing a CUB Friendship agreement with Rivia, extending their influence into the southeast.
• Stoomer was pearled by Khalkedonia after a continued series of incidents.
  • Khalkedonia cited “inappropriate behavior” and harrassment of a player in Khalkedonia telling people unaliving speech (ed. note: Sorry, just trying to be politically correct while on Christmas Eve!)
  • While specifics haven’t been disclosed, it has generally something to do with harrassing, and a completely separate issue on ToonySR’s pearling. For now I don’t want to disclose anything that is not public as per policy.
  • Frequent players do know Stoomer as a recurring character in CivMC; he has had a flaky reputation after hopping around from nation to nation.
  • Nothing is happening though, as usual, however.
• ChrisChrispie celebrated the anniversary of the end of the Grasslands Gambit with a celebratory “private chat post”
  • However, this post got a lot of criticism — partially because this is all he ever talks about, partially because this was such a damaging war and people just don’t want to talk about it, and partially just because people just give Icenia a hard time
• A follow-up post was created by Alaska regarding the raids on Novosiborisk.
  • The first two incidents listed in the post I have already talked about in detail in a previous edition.
  • They mentioned Fempire players in the post getting killed on the skybridge after they aided helping them cleaning up.
  • Zalvv posted in a comment later on that they were uninvolved, in fact actively trying to clean up the water grief. Not90 further clarified they were not blaming anybody in Fempire.
• The Imperial Federation re-elected Asgeir as Chancellor, with Warendrop being elected as Vice Chancellor.
  • Asgeir sent a victory speech thanking his voters for the re-election, citing some accomplishments and a commitment to move further in his second term.
  • Urzork was also re-elected as judge.
  • The Diamond Chronicler held live Q&As and debates (ed. note: discord link) for Chancellor candidates Linemaster and Granola in one event and Asgeir for a second event in the leadup to the election!
• Accra has announced they would be taking over the Old Mount Augusta territory following negotiations, saying that Mount Augusta offered as they wanted to grow.
• Doggo_Engineer was pearled following an incident on Welfare Wednesday.
• Both Tusk Armory and Raven Raiments are issuing notices to their customers that orders will be slightly delayed due to the holiday season. Raven additionally mentioned that they would be refreshing their Pavia and IF stores.
• The AP Media Company is hiring players to help cover important events on the server, following their success in the Icenian Senate debates.
• The Bedford Commons Council opened a newfriend-friendly shop, selling low-cost building materials and a (slightly) favorable exchange rate.
• Icenian Senator Orinnari has announced they would be resigning from their position, reasoning that he does not enjoy how the state is “Yoahtlifying” at a rapid rate
• Realmichael and Carter_t23 have announced their intention to challenge Bronnakus for the Salernite Prime Minister-ship in the upcoming January elections.
• Fractured_Dreams won the King of Saturnalia vote!

Metagame Highlights

Danzilona at Christmastime (cr: peakman2).

• MotokoKusanagi proposes a rename to backpacks because of how… not how like backpacks are, but I do like the Okx box name in general
• Stoomer is still trying to get you to make a civball for the map of the world — I keep telling him to scale the balls so it fills the map more, but nope he won’t listen
• TheJmqn has a new nation claim visualization
• Additionally, he is also selling NameLayer groups with convenient or funny names
• Solitaire7 has returned with new ads on MCServers!
• Codey is actually asking for sources on the Pavia Christmas bombing, hopefully working on more Imperial Times!

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

The Fun Stuff

Pavia’s gardens, snowy and bright on a dark brisk night, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a… (cr: ArtificialDriver)

Builds

• A wonderful new banner shop located in Yoahtl! (cr: Yergo)
• Kaltsburg’s Statue of David is actually really well done (cr: Deyan)
• Danzilona has some great shots of their Christmas decorations, akin to their 2022 decorations. (cr: peakman2)
• Shiroyama’s Map Art museum has added a new basement! (cr: meenos)
• While it’s a great rock sculpture, why is this flipping people off? (cr: Banana_Blu)
• A big great wolf sculpture in Alaska (cr: Not90)
• I like this station design coming from Kaltsburg (cr: deyan)
• A really great Christmas trees from Delos (cr: Max_imil)
• The Library Room in Shockton Manor has some great interior design (cr: SeldomSh0ck)
• Heikki found some room for a Christmas tree in their crowded streets (cr: Plrog)
• Some pretty quiet streets within Salerno give way to some fun decorations (cr: Luminous15)
• Alright, this amazing underwater city in Khalkedonia, the NRS Steelmeld, is actually insane. I love underwater cities and they did a great job (cr: Innattee)

Cool Content

• CivTalk’s pilot episode has been released!
• Bedford Herald has published its second edition!
• This Kallos claims map is very cool
• Some great journalism (/s) from the Pavian Sun

Memes

• What a great story, will definitely read this comprehensibly to the end
• Typical OreStraya comment?

Non-Civ Content

• Estalia’s Donut Marathon is on! Sadly, I will not be participating due to high humidity and hot temps, so I legitimately would be dying of heatstroke
• Active players will know that I went halfway across the world for the holidays. Normally this would be extremely painful but this time I was in business class with lie-flat seats, so it was at least much better.
• The Red Sox signing Walker Buehler is kinda insane — glad that the Mariners didn’t trade away Luis Castillo there though too.

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🎅 Special Holiday Offer! Gift a Netherite Prot Set this Christmas (to someone, not yourself) and enjoy a 4 diamond discount, free dropchest delivery, and an optional Christmas Card.

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

Poll of the Week

Players gathering in Groveheart for their Christmas celebration (cr: Gidein)

Last week, we had 35 responses.

Best Ad Strategies, 2024 Edition

I revisted some of the older newsletters and this seemed to be a relatively interesting question, so I decided to bring it back for this week. Nothing has really changed here though, I would imagine people think that clicking on more engaging nation ads and essays would bring more people regardless. Having these on in the background is a typical thing that I do.

I added one category this time around compared to the previous time, which was “Informational shorts” — what I envisioned it were those kinds of shorts that are informational, but are basically geared towards virality because they show “weird” stuff or whatever. I like these too, which is also sort of why I asked about this. Shorts/TikToks are definitely something that Civ can exploit, of which I’ve only seen one Civ player attempt to use. It’s a tough format to get right though.

Hot Takes

I did a whole writeup on nearly every hot take while I was stuck in the airport, but in the interest of your sanity, I have broken this out into a whole separate article so you don’t have to endure a mess of a writeup.

Hot Takes in 2024

specificlanguage

From the poll results, they're flaming hot and coming at you!

However, here’s a few highlights:

Admins SHOULD be pushing meta changing features as often as they want to play around with mechanics. Playerbase hate it? Revert. Else we will be stuck in the same dull server until Wing finishes a new and revamped sneaker collection of his own and closes the server.

This was a sentiment that really counters the idea of the admin’s strategy on the Meteoric Iron update. I mentioned in a previous poll writeup that while it’s not a satisfying thing where admins just throw a significant update onto prod without any feedback, but sometimes this is what you need to get new features out the door these days.

In typical Civ mainstream cycles, “meta changing features” would usually be developed by an experimental server, typically Realms or Devoted, but CivMC seems to be the sole server this cycle, so it tends to be difficult to play both the mainstay of the iteration and the driver of new ideas.

Winning a civ war through a ban wave or insiding is pathetic. People that have insided like ComradeNick, FastestGrass, Antea, now have zero trust within the community.

I don’t agree on the pathetic, but extremely tragic. I’ve already talked about ban waves (in the longer writeup), but insiding especially in the Grasslands Gambit was especially damaging to the community. It just really feels bad when you’re just entirely sidelined in the community and not even have a chance to redeem yourself.

not everything needs to be botted and sometimes the admins lean too hard into the bunkies crowd

Being a vault friend is a wasteful and unnecessary part of Civ

Vault warfare, as is, permanently relegated Civcraft into a very small niche that will always be small

It doesn’t really help the tech tree is so heavily imbalanced towards just climbing up, rather than out. It would be nice in future Civ servers to completely overhaul the tech tree in order so that something like this just simply doesn’t exist and allow nations to have better specializations, but because defense is the gameplay on Civ, one can dream.

You haven’t truly experienced civ if you’ve stuck to one player ‘archetype’. If you were always the grinder, always the pvper or always the builder you have only experienced a small part of civ.

The one thing I will say about being a newsletter writer is that it’s definitely opened me up to so many different parts of the world. I can at least say that I’m at least a little more versed in how PvP and strategy works instead of it being a black box. I think this iteration more so has allowed people to really discover what they can really bring to the table; it’s really the culmination of every “fun” feature that Civ has brought to the table thus far.

Vote Now!

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What Do I Read Now?

Exyria’s palace in their citadel (cr: me).

So, if you’ve been a longtime reader you’re probably reading this section, but this will become a more feature-heavy newsmagazine, although all items you know and love will remain. However, what happens when you want to get your weekly dose of news?

Luckily, I have a writeup from Pandastical about what might be pretty good to read!

Civflection: Journalism on Civ

Pandastical

The newsletter is going away, even though it's staying. What other journalism is on Civ?

This above, is sort of the kind of content you’re going to be seeing on the new monthly newsletter anyway. But, as a short summary of what you might want to look at:

• The Bedford Herald has a production value that’s much similar to mine from a design perspective, however it mostly covers Pavia internal affairs. It even has a lottery every week for those who complete the week’s puzzle!
• The Diamond Chronicler is typically where I get my news from Karydia & the IF. While it’s entirely Discord-based, the journalism is very good and does a great job involving its readership and holding events.
• I will be anticipating more content coming out of the AP News Company, which will mainly be covering more Alenarith- and Icenia-based affairs but somewhat covering the whole server.
• The Imperial Times is something that was much more active over the summer — however it seems that Codey has returned and hopefully will be pumping out more high-quality video-based broadcasts once again, covering news across the entire server but focused on the IF.
• If you prefer a more long-form podcast-type, CivTalk might be the media of choice for you, as Arx is spinning up this podcast and has a couple of episodes out at the time of writing.

Of course, I will be continuing this newsletter as previously mentioned before, as a monthly newsmagazine if you decide to stick around anyway — mostly will be doing the same as before, however, you might not see the amount of frequency and pull this used to have.

One Final Cry for Help

It’s me, in my newsletter office, as I finish writing this last weekly newsletter.

Thank you, so very much, for reading to the very end of this newsletter.

We’ve come to the end of the line, everyone. I want to get something clear that I loved doing this newsletter weekly, even despite the pain and troubles and all that kind of stuff.

There’s quite a lot of people I’d like to thank for helping me with this newsletter throughout the years:

• BritishWanderer has been one of my most consistent supporters, whether through funding the newsletter through the Monument Bank’s ads, or helping me write articles last minute, I cannot be more thankful for your help, both for your efforts and as a friend.
• Gjum and Lodish, thank you for really supporting me during the early days of the newsletter and proofreading through really late nights with their comprehensive Civ knowledge.
• Xcios for having the amazing idea for running regular polls on the newsletter, it has been an immense help towards the newsletter’s engagement
• The members of the dubbed “newsletter mafia” who helped review the newsletters during most of the newsletter’s run: Creepi0n, GetSkinny, RedDevel, reffelruz, animeme_master, Metrix, ShadySauce and Xcios
• Hitobashuru/Nat for designing some simple branding for this newsletter on the pictures that I’ve still been using to this day
• SpeedyJustice for taking a chance and write a column for the first time, and doing a great job even though it was only a couple of editions
• Des23 who was a big help with the newsletter and helped write Featured Articles many times throughout the first months
• Cissonius & Shadno who have been very good about pinning the newsletter to the top of the subreddit every week
• Anyone who’s written a featured article, which includes TheJmqn, prawny331, yodabird19, tvman999, AmandaCC, Kaprediem, ArtificialDriver, reffelruz, Metriximor, RedDevel, Slusshi, iinkuu, QuantonBiscuit, dcruzy, Realmichael, Zhirall, IntentGames, Ishir_, Wandrum, and Jaydon. Yes, all of these people wrote a Featured article throughout this newsletter’s run.
• Anyone who’s sent in a correction to me with good intentions or poor intentions, you did make the newsletter better in terms of accuracy.
• You, yes you, the reader for sticking through and reading the news and supporting it through the last two and half years of weeklies.

Finally, if you’ve reached the end of the newsletter, spend some time with your friends and family this Christmas. You’ve read so much about silly little things on your computer, you should say thank you to people in your life that allows you to play this game as well. I am personally writing this with the company of my family around, and I couldn’t be happier.

I will be taking a good, restful break, and soon I’ll be back in mid-January with the first monthly newsmagazine. If you’re interested in getting your foot in the door, message me @specificlanguage on Discord (although you might not get an answer right away.)

For one final, weekly, time, thank you, and as always…

EDIT CIVWIKI, and thank you.

• < < < Last week’s newsletter (Dec 16)
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