So I've been playing CivCraft for a while now. First as a hermit by 0,0, then as a worker and eventually a property owner in Nine, and now as an observer of the game since it's too scary to play lately.

I like the idea of a civilization simulation where people have to work together to build up an economy, band together against criminals and generally re-invent civilizations.

Minecraft has proven to be a poor environment for this. The mods in place like PhysicalShop, Citadel, Humbug and PrisonPearl have been awesome in moving this Minecraft server towards the CivCraft ideal, but rapid PvP (and other) changes in each release of Minecraft cause these "fixes" to swing wildly from improvement to detriment.

Maybe this will be better in the 1.5 release.

My question is really for defining the fundamental essence of what this experiment is supposed to be. I have my own ideas, but I want more feedback from everyone playing. And perhaps a heavily-modded Minecraft is not the best game to try out this experiment.

tl;dr: What did CivCraft try to do, and what went wrong? Is there an existing game that might do this better?