To begin....

Hello everyone, I'm Cortwade, the community manager of CivReign.

For a long time, we've been fairly dissatisfied with Civ as a genre. It seemed there were always two modes for development; either you keep the status quo of the civ genre, or you push it so far that it becomes unrecognizable. There have been successes and failures on both sides of this spectrum, but we decided that in order to move into the future, Civ must change and adapt while also keeping to its core roots. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to keep the typical civ mod suite; Citadel, Namelayer, JukeAlert, and even Brewery were no brainers. However, what did we want to do different? What did we want to do to set ourselves apart?

Another issue with civ that we saw was the rampant toxicity that plagues almost every civ server in one way or another. While many groups do engage in the nation-building aspect of Civ, it always seemed that servers were dominated by groups of power-players, dictating the economies and militaries of all other nations and establishing world hegemonies that made servers stale. We wanted to counter this by making PvP and infrastructure more fair to everyone, not just those who can dedicate large amounts of time to the server.

With these two points in mind, we arrived on a set of ideas. These ideas became genuine suggestions, and, after agreeing upon these suggestions, we began to develop these thoughts into our core gameplay.

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Tech Tree

A major issue we found with civ is that tech trees are either too shallow or too grindy. Either players are capable of pushing through the entire tech tree within a couple of days, or players are stuck in an extremely long, grinding process to upgrade factories to the point of industrialization. We wanted to find a middle ground, where the tech tree is long, but also deep. The tech tree will have many routes depending on the geography and what you're looking to make, with many different specializations you could take your civilization. In general, we wanted to make things such as high-end armor, XP, and endgame military infrastructure a long process to reach, but also rewarding.

With this, we came to a couple of ideas, one being the implementation of a long-term crop. We intend to make one of the crops required for XP production have an extremely long growth time, possibly in the field of 1-2 months. Of course, this crop would also be impacted quite severely by what zone it's grown in, shortening or lengthening the growth time of the crop by up to two weeks. The reason for this is simple; time investment. Farms would become infinitely more valuable if your XP production is solely dependent on that one long term crop, and players would have to maintain careful relations with their neighbors and other powers to maintain their vital crop land or keep a delicate export/import balance. The times of course are subject to change, but in general this could reflect "eras" as well. With nobody able to access the highest tiers of armor at game start, how would players interact with one another before that first great harvest? What sort of strife would result from a world where XP production is so finite?

Furthermore, we wanted to implement something we call "Seasons." Seasons are not literal seasons like winter or fall, but rather periods of time similar to other popular multiplayer games where specific items and loot are only temporary. Each season, a slew of new content would be added, but its up to the players to discover what new things they can create. Perhaps a new combination of ingredients could produce a potion that could revolutionize warfare, or new armor could be added that changes the meta during the season. After the season is over, these items would become incredibly valuable as well, encouraging trade and distribution while it's available. This constant drip feed of new content would provide for ever-shifting gameplay. This also ties into our long-term crop idea. Is it more worthwhile to spend this months' crop harvest on discovering what could be an incredibly powerful tool, or spend it on what is already known, or perhaps just store it until next season where there might be even better content.

This also ties into "Smeltery" (name subject to change), which is very similar to Brewery. Already, we intend for high-end gear such as Prot and Vault Bastions to be tied to materials you can gain from using this plugin. When a new season drops, suddenly there is a huge incentive and rush to begin more experimentation to try to find out what these new materials area, and, in the process, perhaps discover secret compounds that were previously unknown.

To conclude this section, by creating a deep tech tree with time investment, constant new content, and several layers we hope to make an engaging experience for players to interact with. Instead of the old way of grinding things out until you reach the top, players must now explore and experiment, fight and defend, & trade and steal.

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The Vault Meta

Vaults are arguably one of the most controversial aspects of civ. Many argue that vaults should not exist in general, and this was something we contemplated. However, vaults are integral to the civ genre due to their usage as ultra-secure methods to not only store valuables, but also a nations criminals. If we were to get rid of vaults, either they'd be replaced somehow, or we'd be ripping a hole in the civ genre. However, that does not mean that the vault meta as it stands is the ideal, and we've come up with a couple of ideas to change up the system.

To begin, we plan to make obsidian unreinforceable at game start. Instead, obsidian may be reinforced a couple of different ways. For vaults, individuals will want to produce what we call "defensive vault reinforcements." These will be reinforcements that, while comparable to diamond, take a very long time to mature. This would force vault defenders to think about where they build their vault, and, more importantly, how they engage with others while their vault is maturing.

In a vault siege however, defense reinforcements would be useless due to the maturation rate. Instead, we intend to use something we call "attack obsidian reinforcements," which will matures immediately, but will decay after only a week. So while it's useful in things aspects such as skybridging or making attack bunkers, due to its limited lifespan it wouldn't be used for much else. It would have stone-level strength, and be relatively easy to produce.

In the middle ground, we'd have "Structural obsidian reinforcements," for high-security structures such as storage bunkers or logout boxes. This form of obsidian would be similar to iron, and have a relatively normal maturation time, but still be quite pricey to produce.

Attack and structural reinforcements would be produced at the same factory, where the two would have costs such as stamina and various resources that go into making them. Defensive obsidian would be made at a "Vault Factory," where you could also produce vault bastions. This factory would be very expensive to reflect the cost going into such a large piece of military infrastructure, and defensive obsidian reinforcements would have a high cost associated with them, including stamina and various valuable minerals.

To touch on stamina, we intend to use stamina not only to fuel pearls and maintain factories, but to also fuel your obsidian reinforcements. Every week, in order to maintain your obsidian reinforcements you would have to deposit a certain amount of stamina into a namelayer "bank," which would correlate with the amount of obsidian reinforcements on that namelayer. The idea behind this is that it forces players not only to hop on every once in a while to refresh snitches and prevent reinforcement decay, but to also be active successively in order to keep your reinforcements maintained.

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Community

CivReigns is unique among civ servers for opting to include a whitelist. However, this whitelist will be very loose and easy to access. We plan to automate the process using a bot in our Discord as soon as possible. The idea is that once a user links a Discord and Minecraft account, they will be asked to have an individual who can vouch for them. Once that individual responds in a positive manner, the player is free to join the server, free of any admin intervention. The only reason that an individual would be taken off the whitelist is if they prove to be a nuisance to the community.

But what is a nuisance to CivReigns? Well frankly, it's a small definition. We will not ban griefing or raiding, but we will ban individuals who seek to simply destroy what others have created. This is what we mean by "king of the ashes." It's one thing to go on a conquest of another group, but it's another thing entirely to go to war to push them off of the server and wipe out everything they worked for. This is toxic, and will not be tolerated. Furthermore, we will not tolerate bigoted, racist or otherwise ignorant behavior. We live in the 21st century, and if you cannot handle a diversity of thought in a community whos goal is to simulate that exact same diversity, then frankly this server is not for you. And finally, individuals who excessively harass people will not be allowed to play. Be it constantly begging or belittling people to join their nation, or spamming the Discord or Ingame chat, people who simply make it their goal to be annoying will not be allowed to be a detriment.

Overall, we intend to create a mature community for people of all ages to play, so long as they're 13 or older. This game should be fun, and though it could be frustrating at times due to war, strife, and disagreement, it should be dealt with constructively and in a way that enriches the server. After all, what is a civilization server without conflict?

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Final Thoughts

CivReign is still very much in its infancy, and a lot of this is highly subject to change. We welcome any feedback and suggestions you would like to contribute. Our goal isn't to make a civ server to push the boundaries, or to revolutionize the civ genre, rather we wish to make a new, fun experience for newfriends and oldfriends alike. While what we are planning to do will change the meta substantially, it shouldn't be too hard for anybody to adapt, and we hope that our changes will make a more fun experience for all.

Next week we'll be going into specifics about certain plugins, and more in depth changes we're making to existing ones.