Lodish: What was your first Civ server?
Naglafer: CivClassic

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What other civ iterations have you played?
CivRev 1.16

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What got you into Civ?
I saw this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraftbuilds/comments/gac12j/render_of_a_town_on_a_server_i_play_on/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf on r/minecraft builds. I had recently learned about anarchy servers and saw some amazing builds and bases, but knew most of it was displayed in an incredibly hyped and unrealistic light of what playing servers like 2b is actually like, especially since there’s no counterplay to grief/attacks there, but civ seemed to be everything I liked about those kinds of servers with more, so I read about the server and logged on the very same day, where I spawned north of genso

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What was your first nation that you joined?
The first nation I joined was the free city of Pacem. I really liked the build style and the libertarian RP (a surprise to nobody) and began traveling south towards it as soon as I logged in. A player who helped me get there, cooliomoose also got me in contact with Shtim, the main leader of Pacem, and I started getting involved with the town the very next day when Shtim and Rambete logged in and showed me how things worked. Pacem quickly became a home to me, and helped me learn a lot about the server, and is a place that will always hold a special place in my heart as my home town for classics and future servers to come.

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What would you consider your greatest achievement on a Civ server? What do you think most people know you for?
These two questions share the same answer, and that is Titan Industries. Titan Industries was a small business that filled an important void when it was founded, as HJI, Sventhar, and Savion were all inactive at the time and not supplying prot to the server. I was able to capitalize on that as well as use superior advertising to become the dominant prot seller for the rest of the server, even when competition from Savion and HJI arose. With that money (and some other war profiteering and grinding) I was able to build a decently large amount of infrastructure, which amounted to ownership of two vaults and a massive amount of liquid wealth still in reserve. At this point Titan Industries is a name everyone knows, with a large amount of satisfied customers, people who remember and were helped by the philanthropy we’ve done, and even garnered respect from rival competitors who became friends along the way. Titan Industries has become such a success and iconic business that it’s already grown significantly since the end of classics, and has gained a lot of new talent that will help bring the company to even greater heights on CivMC

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Were you politically active on Civ? If so, what positions of power have you held?
I was pretty politically active on civ for most of my time on the server actually, as I believe less than a month into the server I joined Pacem’s government as the first newfriend ambassador, and handled recruiting and acclimating newfriends and new players to the town, with many if them sticking around, such as PacGaming, Jriles, non-newfriends but newcomers Charlieseese and Torrio, and a lot more who I’ve had less interactions with, but still made an impact on the town. After that I was elected to the Pacem state council, where for two terms I helped lead Pacem and organized the building of new farms and other projects, and made decisions alongside Shtim and Rambete. After that, when I left Pacem for Icenia, I served as the Minister of the interior for a season, before giving it over to someone else as I had grown bored of city craft and just wanted to grind, and was out of government for a while until I occasionally rejoined for a few positions, until the end where I served as the secretary of commerce until for two or three semesters until the end of the server.

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Were you ever involved in conflict with other players or nations?
I’ve been involved in quite a few actually. The first conflict I was ever involved in was the nro’meagh ice road incident, where a branch of the boomer ice road was built between Pacem and the leg running east of the yoahtl vault, after a VPN dropped a few pieces of IRO and a bucket of lava in the town the night before the Pacem war games. Neotide came and dug a pilot hole after consulting khard, the person who owned most of the land that the ice road went under in yoahtl, and put a one wide ice road connecting it. Later that night Avo discovered it, put an obby shell around the ice road on the Nro namelyer and put doors on it, which was found by Neo and assumed to be grief. After that stuff spiraled out of control with several misunderstandings, and it ended with a massive cope post from Avo as well as him quitting the game, and the demand that the ice road be left as is, but that we couldn’t use it. As that wasn’t happening, instead Charlie, Bi0, I, and few others dug an entirely new ice road going around Nro’s claims, and then one night removed all the ice from the old one and filled it in entirely with stone, and that was that. Later, Neo invited me to participate in the hallow vault break, where I met a lot of new players, learned to skybridge by watching shade, and had a lot of fun overall. Later I was one of the people who started the bridge for the Best western attack, going to bed right after we hit the snitch curtain, as I needed rest after the brain damage caused by looking at Infra’s corkscrew. After waking up I continued to help with the attack, lead the third floor of the skybridge as we hit the skybunker, almost actually killed charlie for BOWING OUT OF THE SKYBRIDGE WHILE I WAS TRYING TO MOVE IT FORWARD and then joined Infra Jon and someone else to disable vault 76, and then joined everyone to break geo vault the next evening, marking the end of the infinity war.

After that I was involved in the fall of EM, where I prevented the EM vault from being broken by inheriting it, and later remodeled it into the Prometheus vault. After that I had fun fighting in march madness, was killed in the EM tech war, and was involved in a few minor skirmishes/personal fights outside of that.

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You ran Titan Industries, what did this teach you about business and the economy on CivClassics?
Running Titan Industries taught me a lot actually. Having a strong brand and convenience can help you outcompete even lower prices, and reputation matters a lot. Building a good brand that people can recognize and makes itself well known will always draw in customers if your product is good, and building relations with customers insures loyalty as well. I also learned both from running TI and observing other businesses that being able to fill a niche or do something significantly better than someone already filling that roll is the best way to succeed. If you’re joining a market and competing against an already established business and you’re selling for about the same as them, you’re likely not going to be able to compete well, unless you can find a way to stand out and make people want to choose you instead of what they would have gone with before, and branding can be the biggest thing here. Am I buying a CS of stone or alt stone from miner_guy1234’s stone shop, or am I visiting Miner’s Rock&Earth emporium, for all my stone needs? These could be the exact same store with the exact same stock and prices, and I and many others would visit Miner’s Rock&Earth Emporium because they have a better brand and are more recognizable from a generically named shop, and it’s harder to advertise yourself in trade chats. Also if you can, don’t put your primary shop in a mall, you’re really not going to gain much traction from a mall stall, as this tells people your store isn’t big or important enough to have its own standing building, unless it’s a branch in another nation, like IMC’s shop in the MtS mall.

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Why did you pick the name Titan?
The name for Titan came from a mixture of things. I as a person and player believe that greatness is something to be strived for, and so when I chose a name for my company, I wanted a name that would be fitting of a business that could display and achieve greatness. The very definition of the word is something of great strength and importance, and so I felt it was very fitting. The name signifies power in our products, which if you’re buying weapons in armor, you want to be strong, and so all of that plays into the brand that I wanted to craft around my business. Additionally and to a lesser extent, my love for the game Titanfall also slightly influenced my attraction to the name, and while it is not a reference to Titanfall, it still played a roll in just keeping the name in my head when I was making that decision. There’s a few other minor things that influenced the decision that I can’t really pinpoint or elaborate on enough to actually talk about it here, but overall it was a pretty large mixture of things that came together to all influence the naming of Titan, and I can’t attribute it to any one thing entirely. I will say though, greek mythology was probably one of the lowest things on the list in terms of what did influence that, and while I like mythology in general, it really didn’t have as much of an impact as a lot of people think.

What other types of businesses do I see being successful in the future? Do you see stock trading, banking, and other parts of the irl economy on civ?
Honestly, as long as people need a type of block, it can be sold and a successful business. The issues more arise with is there a demand for this product, and at what size and consistency will you be selling a product? Do you need to include other products with it to make it marketable? These are the important questions to answer when you’re attempting to sell something. For instance, we all see seeds as having no value, but even seeds could be sold in the right instances. Fill a chest with a CS of seeds, a hoe, some light sources, and create a schematic of a farm and maybe even a bot script for it, and sell it all together as a farm starter kit for new nations. The seeds and other materials gain extra value as they are intended for a specific niche purpose of providing everything to someone who may not have it, and while you might not be able to bring in the big bucks with it, you’re selling stuff that’s otherwise worthless, and you can further expand your business to have base starter kits for any farm including more advanced ones, and now you might make a stack or two worth of diamonds when a new nation buys a bunch so they can get everything started. Bulk building mats stores could likely make a good amount of money in buildfriend heavy towns, and you can even spice it up above the competition by taking a page out of irl home goods stores by grouping together and combining blocks that have a complementary pallet, and offer a discount if they buy in bulk. Throw in some stone too so someone can walk into your store and shoot you a message on discord, and walk out with everything they need for their build and then some. If you’re not sure what to sell, sell yourself and skills and provide services, either offering people to build schematics for them, sell them schematics for builds they want commissioned, dig holes and clear areas for projects, dig and build a tunnel, almost everyone can find some way to interact with the economy, all they need is to know their skillsets, utilize them, and find a niche where they are needed or can be improved.

As far as stock markets go, I really doubt there will be a civ stock market, as gains are generally too low and come in at a slow rate that it takes months for you to make your money back, and in civ that’s a long time. If I remember correctly (which I probably don’t feel free to correct me in the comments), Gabon corp, the most prominent business to sell shares, sold shares at approximately 64 diamonds each, and estimated dividends where somewhere around 10d a month. That means that at this rate, if the company stays active and maintains that output, you would not make money until the seventh month, at which you will have profited six diamonds per share. In a game where you can spend an hour mining and come back with several stacks of diamonds, the passive investment really isn’t worth it, as for people who buy a few shares and stay active all that time it’s a tiny trickle for a massive price, and for people who can drop thousands of diamonds on shares, even if you get a stack of diamonds a month, you’re at the point where you misplace a few stacks of diamonds and you don’t even notice, so it’s generally not worth it either. Stocks irl are backed by the company’s incentive to keep making money for decades, and companies generally don’t just get bored and disappear with no profits for months, something that can, does and has happened on civ, meaning it could potentially be a year, a quarter of the server’s life minimum, before you start to see that trickle of profit. Banks follow a similar pattern, the passive price and inconvenience of lacking access to whatever you’re storing generally isn’t needed, and if you really have that much wealth, you can dropchest, chest vault, or use your own or a friend’s vault instead

Many parts of irl finance like stocks and banks I believe are based on long term stability, and unstable investments generally are only seen as valuable if the value of potential gains is incredibly high, and someone wants to take a massive gamble. Unfortunately the nature of civ being a secondary aspect of people’s lives and one where someone can at any time just never log in again or just be bored and quit a business, or even the admins getting bored and turning off the server, makes civ stocks and civ finance significantly more unstable than their irl counterpart, and therefore likely not going to truly take off as a market, with some people of course still buying into it or trying these endeavors.

What brought about Minemaster933’s Anti-Naglafer party?
Minemaster was unfortunately poor, and did not like that he was poor. As I was very much not poor, minemaster attempted to attack that which he was jealous of, and began an epic rivalry. Minemaster has since become widely successful, causing much coping and seething from people with sticks up their ass, many laughs, and unfortunately had a brief relapse into not being cool when he laid a light dusting of obby over the lovely boomer ice road. Minemaster is now a cherished friend, and is formally invited to join Titan Industries as the minister of trolling on CivMC, and will be immediately tasked with harassing e-lawyers everywhere, as they are one of the sworn enemies of fun and corporate malpractice.

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--This interview was conducted over discord on the 12th of February, 2022.--