CivWiki Monday Newsletter

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


CivWiki Newsletter for December 28, 2023

• specificlanguage

Good morning and merry post-Christmas from (not snowy) New England!

Well to be honest, I actually don’t even know if this will be live on Christmas, because like, am I really going to be publishing a newsletter on Christmas? No…right? (Editor’s note: It wasn’t.)

I hope everyone is enjoying a lovely Christmas holiday, along with the new year coming up I really hope everyone is having a splendid time with family and friends. I say this because you really should not be playing Civ.

Anyway, it’s time to complain about everything and look at the news! Ready for it?

This week’s final lovely Christmas tree is from Griffin, who’ve set up a nice little Christmas village. Located on the other side of the grand canals, the square is all filled with shops, snow and is just a small walk away from the Adria Church you see in the background. It’s a lovely place and it’s a lovely place for a little celebration. This year was another great round of Christmas decorations, folks, and you’ll see some more later on today!

Featured Article

The Christmas Agreement was a document signed by Lusitania and Mount September in December 2020. The countries had been relatively close since the founding of Mount September along with various out-of-game activities throughout 2020; the treaty was a way to formalize their diplomatic relations and foster economic growth between the two nations. Among other agreements in the treaty was a railway line to be dug to improve the slow travel times, with both countries outside of the HITS international rail.

The treaty was fostered under Septembrian Foreign Minister Thraldrek, and was signed by Mayor Squareblob of Mount September and King Metriximor of Lusitania. The alliance was one of the first outreaches of diplomacy during Mount September, and would later lead into the creation of the Augustan Federation (with Lusitania) shortly after. This was also one of the rare moments of Lusitania engaging in diplomacy, as they preferred to stay out of any conflicts. The treaty solidified the relationship between the two countries as they continued strong well into 2021.

This week’s featured image is a screenshot of Lusitania on CivClassic 2.0 at sunset.

This Week Last Year

On the week of December 26, 2022:

The News

Hadestown

Mount Augusta’s voter tree that’s become a Christmas tree.

Last week, I did do a pretty good summary of the conflict as it was beginning. I would much rather, however, reiterate the entire conflict in detail this time now that I know a lot more than last week.

The conflict arguably starts with Mount Augusta and Doom City’s dispute on the Alenarith nether portal.

We move now to a few weeks ago, when


From there, the conflict then spills into the overworld as Doom City retaliated for what they perceived was a BUILD-created attack.

BUILD perceived this as Doom City’s aggression in the conflict, not to mention this was an affront on two BUILD nations so far. This culminated in a pivotal battle on the bridges between Mount Augusta and Doom City.

The Bridges of Madison County

Structures currently in conflict with Doom City & Mount Augusta, taken by Blatlas.

On the morning of December 19, Doom City fighters clashed with Mount Augusta along a bridge near the southwest portion of the city.

Ok, yes, I mentioned Estalia, but I’m talking about that in a second. Following the war, BUILD nations released post-war reflections.

Many of the BUILD-associated posts had generally positive reflections from the community, with Doom City and Estalia-associated comments being downvoted. The general reaction to this conflict was overwhelmingly negative on the Doom City side.

The end of war saw Doom City retake ownership of their temple after it was previously taken over by the Mount Augustan government, as well as continuing negotiations of Nightmarr and Defender’s release (who have since been released). I should mention though, that both sides have been really amicable in negotiations.

I believe that’s it, but there’s a related issue in Mount Augusta that we’ll talk about later.

South Pacific

Transylvania’s Christmas card in Cluj-Napoca.

I just like doing a musical theme, and this one barely fits the news at hand.

Company (Around the Server)

The Elysian Pact’s Christmas photo for the year, which definitely isn’t on the nose at all.

Rest in peace, Steven Sondheim. So, here’s the rest of the server news on CivMC:

Metagame

Some light snow in Shockton, as they gear up for Christmas.

The Fun Stuff

Mercutio’s Christmas tree & card and a snowy decorative, area around it!.

Christmas Cards

I mean, why not? It is post-Christmas time now…

Builds

Memes

Time for some war propaganda, as always…

Poll of the Week

Last week, we had 39 responses. However, please don’t take any of these statistics seriously as these results are quite bad.

The first question was How many Civ discords are you in?

I do find it interesting that it’s pretty much an all-or-none affair, where you either have an entire account for Civ discords (the 60+ crew), but also some that are in their local community discords (10-40 crew), and others just in their own nation and some other sparing discords. It’s a pretty equal balance, but just wanted to see how their discord habits for Civ look like.

Speaking of which, our second question was Which Civ communication method has made you feel the most connected?

Since nearly all of our Civ communications is run on Discord and Reddit, this one is no surprise, since everything is done there. Some oldfriends are holding out hope for Mumble and in-game chat though! I don’t know who picked “Skype”, but shame on you!

For the last question about advertisements, I’m glad that there are a number of people who are happy at doing advertisements once again, because I’ve been hoping to bring it back for a little. I do think the prices are going to have to be pared down, but I’ll think about it for the new year.

Time to poll it up!

Please note that all information submitted is anonymous. A red star (
*
) means that this question is required to submit.
Did you think Civ got better or worse this year, gameplay wise?
Did you think Civ got better or worse this year, in regards to player relations?
Did you think you, personally, got better this year?

Just a quick reflection on the year. We’ll see how this goes!

Christmas Cry for Help

This is Elysian Pact’s oh…this is when they all died when trying to take a Christmas photo. Whoops…

Thanks for reading this week’s extremely rushed Christmas newsletter! There was a lot more that happened that has piled up over the past couple of weeks that made this time-consuming to write.

No non-Civ content this week, I’ve watched Barbie, Chicken Run, Percy Jackson, and even the Eras Tour in a dizzying amount of time, so that’s all going to be in the best of speclang 2023 when I have the time to start writing it (probably not soon as I kind of want to relax). Don’t worry, I’m trying to keep it pretty short this year and not 37 minutes long of me blabbering.

A huge thanks to ShadySauce, Nightmarr, and SQOpenSpellbook for providing information about the war, along with Toaxbis and others for general support. I will see you all in the new year with some cool interviews!

As for the newsletter schedule going forward — I think I might take next week off, and return on January 8. You might see a sporadic, self-indulging best of speclang post, but I do want to take a couple days off from thinking about what to write for the most part.

Until next time…


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