Announcing my retirement as restart reminder-er starting Jan 1. It's been a wild ride but it's time to pass the proverbial torch along until the day it is decided to add a restart reminder as a server message

Cheers,

HaKr_

seen above is a picture taken during the "Butsecs War" this is taken from the BN - GS pov on the successful skybridge codenamed "Trader Joes" to combat the "Wholefoods" vault / farming complex during the early stages of the war. i have a ton of these older pictures and videos if anyone is interested. Picture was taken the early morning of June 11th, 2023 at 5:13am

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TL;DR: Why fix something that isn’t broke?

I was recently informed that admin team, in their infinite wisdom, decided to raise the cost of holding pearls to 28 essence a day, in the year of our lord 2024, and in a time where—by my count—only 33 people are pearled, with most of those players being pearled sometime this year.

The argument for raising the cost to hold a pearl has been an ongoing discussion for many years now, with pearl holders—obviously—detesting the idea that they might have to pay more. It's no secret that many pearl-holding nations are very specialized and often have to buy essence, even now, due to having a low population. On the other side, parties that want costs to be raised have argued that nations with a low population shouldn't be able to hold pearls and that holding pearls for an extended time is unjust and 'ruins the server experience for people unjustly pearled' . This argument reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of the Infinity War on CivClassic, where one could look at /ep showall and see pages of pearled players dating back to 2018.

Both sides do have their merits. Were players unjustly pearled in CivClassic? Sure. But on this server, there hasn't been an issue with that. Players who have been pearled for an extended period of time have, generally, deserved it. I know that this is a very subjective statement but—to be very blunt—it's true. If you look at /ep showall today, you should recognize names like Ez2Clutch and Carson being pearled for extended periods of time there. That is for good reason. Both of these players, and a few others on the list, have associated with nothing but raider crews for the past four years. These people will not change. They do not play CivMC in the way most normal people do—and should they get out, they'd undoubtedly cause more players to quit much like they did during the Generic War and the countless other conflicts they were involved in after the fact. Players who have joined since their pearlings should be incredibly happy they do not have to share a server with these very unpleasant people.

All that bitching aside, I'm not here to complain about pearl costs rising simply because I do not enjoy Ez2Clutch and Carson. Icenia would be fine if these were the only two people left pearled on the server for eternity due to a price increase. I'm here to argue that it makes actual player-based moderation of the server in-mass next to impossible.

Icenia, Exyria, MtA, the IF—all of these nations have spent years developing their infrastructure. They have active players who contribute to this server being active. Even if they are not on the same page diplomatically, they are a part of the same ecosystem of people who play by the general unwritten principles of interaction between nation-states on the server. Wars are declared, trade is conducted, laws are passed. They've built up their communities over time and have developed their own culture and systems.

Players like Ez2Clutch/raiders and PvPers do not play the server to pass laws or build a city. They play to sow chaos and rack up pearls. They don't care about your laws, they don't care about your culture, they don't care that you spent 2 years building some megabuild. They simply want to fuck with you and your shit.

The unspoken truth about it though is that both of these playstyles are accepted on Civ. There has always been a side to cause chaos and there has always been a side to try to reign it in and, if Wet Bandits is any indication, reigning that chaos in is a very time-consuming and resource-draining task. If you are new to this server and wish to see how wars on this server are conducted, imagine bashing your head into a wall for a few weeks to a few months straight. It isn't a "if I walk here and plant a flag I will win" deal. It's a "I will set alarms on my phone for 3 in the morning to see if the Euro squad is bridging my shit and I will dig yet another hole at 4 in the morning or else two years of my grinding is going in the toilet” kind of deal. War is costly already—both in real life and in the game. We simply don’t have the mechanics on this server to make war more of a normal part of life where a nation doesn’t lose literal years of work on mainstay infrastructure. Needless to say, holding the pearls that you do manage to get is also costly and set to become more so.

Which, brings me to the crux of my argument. Conflicts in civ drag on. Not just on the server but for years. The Generic War was basically this. A continuation of a nearly decades-long conflict between "WP" and "Anti-WP", this time disguised as "Zoomers" but was really just Capri doing the same fucking shit Capri has done since, god, fucking 2017, and Mir responding in the same way they have since the same time. It's not fun. It sucks. The mods banning USA actually allowed for new conflict to take place for the first time in literally ages (and that conflict sucked too, I would know). There needs to be some way for players to actually break the cycle of perpetual conflict. Not just in the way I've written about above, but imagine if a large raider crew were to join the server with the intent of fucking everything up. With increased pearl costs, none of these players could be held. They'd have to be released into the wild after a short amount of time to do the same exact shit over and over and over again. Rinse and repeat. This isn’t unique to me—go ask a sizable portion of this server who, at one point or another, had to deal with this and I’m sure a lot of their members will tell you the same thing.

This server does not have a written "scorched Earth" rule. I don't think it should. Mod intervention in a server designed to be ruled over by the players on the ground would be silly if it was a day-to-day reality and the stakes for statecraft should be high, but if we're going to make pearl costs so high that defending your nation against raiders who are going to do the same thing to you again once you release them is going to become the norm, then perhaps we should. As I've already stated, these players are not bound by the same principles most active nations are bound to and the possibility of not having a nuclear option to "flush" these problem causes will result in more burnout than you can possibly imagine.

It has come to my attention that VilyanZ's birthday is the 5th of January, which just so happens to be the real month. The lord was born; now there is also another thing in tradition: before the Romans changed Christmas to December, it was celebrated on the 5th of January and still is in places like Ukraine, so in conclusion, VilyanZ is Jesus. 

Hello citizens of CivMC! We are excited to announce the formation of the new nation of Alaska!

We are an active nation composed of both familiar faces, along with new players. Due to individual circumstances during the history of the server our members come from all corners of the map, but have joined as a united group with a common goal of starting anew in our snowy wonderland.

We have settled in the northwestern area of the map next to our friendly neighbor Nassau. Though our first week on the server was off to a rocky start with a raid from the south, we were able to take back what was stolen and continue building our town/nation.

We have great plans for a beautiful, snowy, viking-esque architectured city. While currently under construction, our members are working around the clock to raise it from the permafrost.

During our short time as a newly created nation, we have already made many friendly connections across the map, and cannot wait to add more Alaskan members. We hope to create many more going forward, and establish lasting relationships for trade and alliances in the future.

At a quick thought of the memorable events I know of/remember I came up with:

-I recall the Estalian annexation of Ku being big news at the start of the server, although looking back, I don't really know how much influence/legacy it really has

-Western Jungle War, just for being the first war on the server alone

-Generic War, which led to the disintegration of Blockchainistan and Rhode Island

-Buttsecs War, being the largest war to date I believe

-Grasslands Gambit, considering it led to the end of Butternut, Gang-Shi and Lambeau

Please correct me if my understanding of those conflicts are wrong. Does anyone have any ideas for other important events or conflicts that I missed? I'm trying to get up to date about the server and increase my understanding about it :)

Edit: Is there a name for when all of the Rhode Island players got banned? That blanket ban was a pretty big deal wasn't it?

The Icenian Citizens have elected seven Senators for December 2024. Over the past 24 hours, 52 ballots were cast.

Each Senator has received the approval of 52% or more voters, giving a solid mandate to this Senate to represent the Icenian people. Candidates without seats only received 44% approval or less.

Nearly half of the names Icenians wrote on their ballots were candidates from the C.R.A.P. party. As a result, all C.R.A.P., Icenian Industry, and No Step on Snek candidates got a seat, while none of the I.I.P. and Conservative candidates did. This is a significant change from last month's I.I.P.-supermajority senate.

The most popular Senator (73% of votes) is Shadno (C.R.A.P.), a long-time member of the Icenian government filling various positions over the past years. This term, his focus is on pushing for the federalization of Icenia as well as on further working on diplomatic international relations.

First-time senator Kayotic (C.R.A.P.) received 60% of votes with a domestically focused platform.

The debates leading up to this election were dominated by discussions about the representation of different Icenian States in the national decision processes.

The Icenian Senate is the legislative branch of Icenia's government, complementing the President and Secretaries on the executive and Magistrates on the judiciary branch.

One of the first acts of this month's Senate will be to elect a Senate Speaker, one of Icenia's most important leadership positions. Join the Discord to stay updated: https://discord.gg/MzfM4c9z6H

https://preview.redd.it/57opgdz9xb4e1.png?width=1052&format=png&auto=webp&s=0a7631d41706e5699896214b8c865d9f38bb5f5a

https://preview.redd.it/vbwkg1qvxb4e1.png?width=668&format=png&auto=webp&s=91a94713bbfe02297e3c4329bce49850ad604fae

Bastions Go Live

On Civ servers, Bastions are sponge blocks made in a factory that emit a field with certain effects to bolster fortifications; mainly by preventing blocks from being placed and interfering with ender pearls. In the run up to the launch of Bastion in April 2014 (Civcraft 2.0) an obvious application of the new plugin was that moats around towns would actually be viable. Some players started toying with designs:

https://imgur.com/a/new-leningrad-wall-SbXDV

Titan were the first city to start producing and selling Bastions and were ahead of the curve in the early months as far as building and designing Bastion defences went. A trench to bedrock was dug around the entire city:

https://i.imgur.com/phfr2Va.png

Many players realised that lava could be combined with Bastions to create an impassable barrier. Lava moats impracticality for defenders was not widely understood at the time:

https://i.imgur.com/AABA2ye.png

https://i.imgur.com/KKu7JQd.png

PVP Trenches

In January 2015 the Titan War began. Famously the conflict revolved around her recently constructed ring vault, the first of its kind, but the city's trench also posed a deadly threat. Many "World Police" fighters were pearled in the trench. Although crude, Bastions at this time (unlike CivClassic) also prevented players from pearling out of their fields:

https://youtu.be/qeZgKKE38XU

At one point the World Police hijacked a portion of Titan's trench and Bastion'd it themselves, creating a giant trap in which several HCF fighters were pearled:

https://youtu.be/SfENZo0_y1w

(This trick was repeated in CivClassic at the Ransakistan vault)

There was a growing recognition of trenches role in an active defense. The old lava moats faded out and newer builds were designed with PVP in mind:

https://i.imgur.com/hhMtgu4.png

In the summer of 2015 the first trench purpose built to compliment a vault was dug around the Nox vault. Water allowed defenders to fall retreat safely during fights, or just enter the vault from any angle; the best other megavaults of late Civcraft 2.0 had were a handful of waterdrops (and many didn't even have that):

https://i.imgur.com/01WrMh5.png

After Civcraft 2.0 ended it became increasingly common for vaults to have a water trench in the style of Nox. The vault trench served a number of roles:

• A giant trap for enemy fighters to be knocked into and killed.
• A way of providing easy access between the surface and the vault proper at bedrock.
• A way of forcing attackers to initiate an assault on the vault further out from the rings proper, stretching their supply lines and buying defenders time.

CivClassic

In the summer of 2017 CivClassic launched and the major powers were soon constructing big vaults with trenches. Independently, they began building columns of snitches from bedrock to skylimit beside the vault trench. This was a new departure driven by experience (especially from Devoted) that anything but full snitch coverage at all Y levels left vaults very vulnerable to sneak attacks. This was amply demonstrated a few months later when Anguish lost their world border megavault to a stealth skybridge attacking from a direction that didn't have sky snitches.

In the autumn the first large-scale war broke out and the fortifications built up in the previous weeks put to the test. After breaking Anguish the Western Alliance (Mir, Hjaltland, Commonwealth) launched an attack on Lexington's vault. Starting with a skybridge but then switching to bedrock (skybridges were still crude and dangerous at this point) the attackers didn't get very far but both sides learned lessons.

Notably no casualties were suffered by the attackers but a few defenders were pearled. Defenders had been forced to wade into the water and loose arrows from close range. In the aftermath both sides scrambled to design and build archer positions covering bedrock level for their own vaults. This defensive feature, birthed out of a single battle, became standard on vaults going forward.

In November the Anguish vault was reclaimed and Lexington started daily probing attacks on Mir. The attacks never broke through Mir's extensive trench system. In one fight, Johnfairfax was baited into Mir's trench and pearled.

https://youtu.be/imH9V-imrYo

Hjaltland saw the value in the trench traps Mir was using (trapdoors+slit for safely disposing of trapped bad guy) and retrofitted the design to their own vault. From there this style of pit trap and certain other features of Hjaltland's trench (ground level archer wall, tunnels) proliferated.

By the beginning of 2018 all the features that defined modern vault trenches were in place; water, pit traps with trapdoors and hitting slit, archer positions at bedrock/ground/sky, tunnels, snitch columns. Nearly all vaults on CivClassic to this day employ some variant of this layout.

Exclusion Zones

Hand in hand with the evolved trench meta of CivClassic were exclusion zones. Whereas in the past a vault was a hole in the ground you could often nearly stumble into without minimap, now they had a very defined trench and snitch coverage backed up by 24/7 snitch bots linked to Discord. Exclusion zones have become Very Serious Business and rarely a week goes by without some drama arising from them.

u/Thin-Ordinary-4931/VilyanZ made a Risk game board of the CivMC map at the time a couple months back. Would people be interested to actually play a game like this on Tabletop Simulator?

State craft goes hard, which flavor of states do you like?

View Poll

Looking for the best deals on essential items? The Kyojin Corp Exchange is now open and ready to serve all players! Whether you're a seasoned trader or a fresh settler, we’re here to help you get the resources you need, without breaking the bank.

What We Trade:

• Emerald
• Diamond
• Iron
• Essence
• Gold
• Copper
• Dirt
• Sand
• Stone
• Gravel
• All Woods

Why Choose Kyojin Corp?

Smallest margins on the server—get the best deals, every time.
Always stocked and ready to trade, no matter the demand.
Located conveniently at 3180, 4819 to ensure smooth transactions for all.

How To Get To Us:

• NordStream Nara
• /dest ! +,+ arctic nara
• switch lines in Qbarra off the gor
• ryan ice from IF, Salerno, Icenia

Swing by, make a trade, arbitrage, and see why we’re the #1 choice for traders on the server.

See you soon at The Kyojin Corp Exchange!

PrisonBed and PrisonPearl

Civcraft 1.0 launched in the Spring of 2012 with a plugin named PrisonBed to facilitate player-driven justice. A player could kill another player and confine them to a bed in the overworld. Players quickly learned to secure PrisonBeds by constructing diamond-reinforced obsidian (DRO) boxes around them. Unfortunately the plugin was extremely buggy (prisoners had a habit of escaping) and within a couple of months it was replaced with a new plugin named PrisonPearl and this is where vault pyramids begin.

Vault pyramids are placed at bedrock level and constructed out of DRO that attempts to maximize the breaks to access a chest, which is contained in the center.

Vault pyramids were nearly always some variation of a 1:1 slope i.e. a chest is simply placed in the centre, and surrounded by a square of obsidian, diagonally aligned to the axis. This is then repeated again, on top of the last layer, until there is one block at the top:

https://i.imgur.com/C1QL8XP.png

There was no common standard for how to build a vault and pyramids were often full squares reminiscent of a beacon base. The largest (and most infamous) prison vault on the server on the eve of the HCF invasion of late 2012 belonged to Foofed:

https://i.imgur.com/6ZKS3Gd.png

Vault Engineering

During the first HCF war vault pyramids got bigger and it was recognised that they needed to be taller than they were wide. Vault builders tried new forms:

https://i.imgur.com/gnNgDP4.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/5fIGq9j.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/15mxRBB.jpeg

At the end of the war the 5:6 slope emerged as the definitive design. The 5:6 follows the same pattern as a 1:1 vault, except, every fifth layer (starting with the first) is duplicated (ie. the first and second layer size will be the same size along with the seventh and eighth).

The reasoning behind the 5:6 is that as a player requires two breaks (opposed to one vertical break) when tunneling in through the sides, but takes into account that players can also use glitches with minecarts to increase efficiency when tunneling horizontally.

https://i.imgur.com/NyHwgI6.jpeg

Further optimisations post-1.0 included adding more DRO to the most likely break paths i.e. top and cardinal sides.

https://i.imgur.com/T2CC5i1.png

https://i.imgur.com/jERye17.jpeg

The 5:6 slope was ubiquitous in Civcraft 2.0 and remained standard to the server's end.

3D Breaking and Non-Linear Slopes

In late 2013 a new method for penetrating vault pyramids was developed which took advantage of an inherent weakness in pyramids; the distance to the chest from the lateral face was a lot shorter than from the apex or edges. This technique drilled down diagonally in the vertical and horizontal axes and was dubbed "3D breaking".

https://i.imgur.com/yp6NT2P.png

https://i.imgur.com/jmMHVkV.png

3D breaking undermined many of the assumptions of vault design up to that point. The crudest counter was to pile up material in the path of a 3D break on a regular 5:6 slope:

https://i.imgur.com/ne1VBLY.png

More sophisticated were non-linear slopes i.e. vault pyramids whose slope changed from base to peak. The effect was usually to create vaults that were less pointy, more squat:

https://i.imgur.com/KC44ega.png

https://i.imgur.com/OZfeeo7.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/EcfUyj7.png

The egg slope was developed by Diet_Cola and Bonkill in late Civcraft 2.0. Each egg slope pyramid was hand crafted by manually mapping typical break paths, and tended to resemble a 1:1 slope on an elevated base:

https://i.imgur.com/YdjJz9h.png

A later approach was to forgo a pyramid entirely and instead build something closer resembling a cone or even a sphere:

https://i.imgur.com/Db0fSLr.png

In Minecraft 1.8 player hitboxes shrunk allowing more players to break vertically, meaning in theory that vaults had to be much taller than previously. 3D breaking also received a significant boost as a result.

Vanilla Chunks

In Civcraft 1.0 bedrock was generated as vanilla meaning it was full of holes and pockets; widely exploited by players for vaults. For Civcraft 2.0 it was decided that custom generation would also have entirely flat bedrock to avoid any OP spots. However, some (dozens) of chunks on the map glitched and generated vanilla style. These vanilla chunks were highly prized for vaults. One (World's End) became notorious for having a long one-block tall tunnel in the bedrock with the chest at the end. An alt account sat logged off in a side pocket ready to replace any broken blocks. It later emerged that the bedrock had been modified through an acid block exploit.

Spikes

The vault spike is a column of obsidian from the chest to the peak on a different Citadel group from the bulk of the pyramid. The purpose is to allow access to the chest without giving a player the ability to swipe the entire vault pyramid, which could be worth several thousand diamonds.

Worldborder Vaults

Vaults backed up against worldborder are (nearly) half the cost. The largest pyramids in Civ history have been worldborder vaults.

Beacons

Beacons takes slightly longer to break than obsidian. In Civcraft 2.0 players began using them for the innermost layers of vault pyramids. They paired especially well with vanilla chunks. Recently, beacon production has grown so much that entire vault pyramids are now being built out of beacons.

Vault Pyramids Today

As CivClassic has progressed pyramids have grown less and less relevant in the vault meta now mainly being a measure against insiding. This, combined with new break methods introduced with 1.14 crawling mechanics have effectively left efforts to optimise pyramids pointless. With virtually all vaults on the server having returned to the 1:1 slope the meta has come full circle.

I recently made a post that said it’s now about 2.5 years old, which is pretty mind boggling. How are people feeling about it? Satisfied? Bored? Wishing for something new or content with what they have now?

Feels like it’s been a bit

So I think I was pearled a few months ago when I just joined the server because I stole some iron tools from what looked like a small underground bunker near where I spawned and so I left and didn't come back until now.

I see I still am trapped in the nether and my pearl seems to be maintained. Is there a place to ask to be freed, or at least know how long I have left until I can be freed?

After Calw leader forrealz77 approached Kallos looking to potentially become a protectorate, we had a discussion and mutually decided that Calw will become a fully integrated province of Kallos.

Any concerns or problems about the claim here can be discussed with me on my discord kickyxd.

https://preview.redd.it/j49zhqir9l3e1.png?width=1095&format=png&auto=webp&s=25f238c8cde126cb0bd6ce8f24da010f70a29e37

Thank you for reading and have a good day!
(sorry jmqn)