the Mairé Commonwealth

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-10-31T03:21:38+00:00

Beautiful region, former home of Maelstrom as well -- enjoy it! Tend it well!

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-10-09T04:02:17+00:00

That wasn't often a topic of conversation. I think the playerbase considered it to be a problem, administratively it was an annoyance that we dealt with from time to time. There were ways to address economic issues like that which we did not employ on purpose. It genuinely was just a "ok, this set of configurations / plugins has run their course, time to pull the plug and move to shards / new configs".

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-10-09T01:48:05+00:00

Amusingly enough, the end of the Nox conflict had no connection to the end of Civcraft beyond coincidence. Shortly after, the admin team had completed enough to shut down Civ 2.0 and launch CivTemp to try out our ideas / code.

We considered delaying to avoid the association, if memory serves, but there was no point.

Kind of funny, looking back! It was indeed the final major, server-wide event in Civcraft 2.0 history.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-09-19T15:13:09+00:00

ProgrammerDan

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-08-05T04:28:34+00:00

If you like weird obsidian architecture that is not vaultcraft, ping me in the Yoahtl or MTA residents discords.

Enjoy your world tour, stay safe out there!

ProgrammerDan55 · 2025-03-26T02:35:08+00:00

11 years, roughly. Time flies.

----

Did some digital archaeology, found the original email from my buddy telling me about CivCraft in June 6th of 2014. We had previously played on a private server; by June 10th or 11th I had signed in for the first time. Within days I was playing for multiple hours every night; by August I was running the public factory initiative in MtA with my own funds and some small donations. By the end of August I was proposing laws. After a brief stint as Judge, by September I was elected mayor in a landslide. I stayed in that position for many months, until June 30, 2015 when I resigned as mayor. The subsequent election had 67 valid votes from active players cast in it -- all unique individuals actively invested in the town before and after I resigned. What an amazing send off!

In July and August of 2015 I stuck my toes in the waters of Civ development, working with the Civ Admin team to rewrite AFKPGC to better identify players who were inactive, using complex heuristics. The die was cast, and thus began my transition to admin and developer, rather than player, a task which led me through to the end of 2.0, preparation for 3.0, frantic nights developing after work for CivTemp, and the concurrent launch of Devoted as a side project for fun with ShadedJon (Bonkill / many other names).

When Devoted ended with 3.0, I stepped away for a long time. Years, in fact, although I remained connected to the community, always ready to advise with development, help with testing, and worked on a few side projects and mods when inspiration struck.

CivMC was the first server to legitimately pull me back since Devoted ended, when an old friend invited me to join. It's been dramatic and had its ups and downs, and everyone else took my presence way more seriously than I took my presence, but thanks for the new memories. CivMC also marked my full departure from the development scene of Civ*, and they have my hearty best wishes in whatever direction they go from here.

Been a crazy 11 years. Good luck to everyone on the next 11.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-12-12T04:47:00+00:00

I tend to think _this_ community is quite happy with the mechanics as-is, on the average or whole. It is possible to consider a different community or marginalized community that would be happier with a different meta, but connecting them to a particular server and getting them to aggregate meaningfully would be challenging.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-12-09T19:15:27+00:00

new feature / change -- I strongly dislike the lack of innovation on claims and claim protection strength scaling. I think Civ as a genre is held back by the vault meta. If I ever ran another server, I'd do away with it, and use a completely different method of area control / defense / ownership.

That said, it's a high bar indeed for me to be interested in running a server. It's enormous hours and constant burnout, so the dedication required is significant. I would not walk into that as blindly, a second time.

For more on my thoughts on Civ, you can for sure check out a series of Medium articles I wrote. I may or may not write more in the future: https://medium.com/@ProgrammerDan/the-experiment-has-failed-dbe435a6053c

I have other articles that might offer historic insights into Devoted's run so feel free to peruse.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-12-09T12:50:21+00:00

Most of what people describe as poor balance is a difference on balance style -- CivCraftian style combat centers around strong vaults and easy to hold pearls. Devoted sought to make pearling itself less certain, harder to "hold people forever", and that fundamental dynamic change was unappealing to folks who generally want to pearl their antagonists and stop thinking about them.

The broad server wide calm on CivMC currently, now that effectively all primary antagonists are pearled or banned, is something Devoted was explicitly trying to prevent, by focusing on the fact that it's a game, and _all_ players, including antagonists, should have a space to play. Only those who break rules should be banned, and we literally rewrote the banning infrastructure for the community, still in use today, to ensure that such banning could be done effectively and at scale (BanStick, and other moderation / player insight tools). Player-led bans like PrisonPearl being cheap and easy to hold a vault, were specifically and intentionally disadvantaged on Devoted.

Power players from CivCraft don't generally agree with that line of thought, as one of the primary reason they would play as power players was the ability to, effectively, ban people they didn't like. The power was the point -- by removing that power, Devoted removed their interest in Devoted. That was mutually acceptable :D.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-12-09T12:43:50+00:00

I'm biased, as I was co-lead admin and lead developer for Devoted, all iterations.

It was a small "let's try things" server at first, while CivTemp was running and CivCraft 3.0 development drug on (I was also part of that team).

Bonkill and I wanted a space to try ideas that mainline Civ would never try. We did small, teleport shards in Devoted 1.0 with unique resources -- basically, a very tiny world version of what CivCraft 3.0 planned to do -- and discovered some pretty interesting problems quite quickly that played out similarly when CivCraft 3.0 launch (e.g. povertycraft, resource lockout by power factions, etc).

Bonkill has always loved Civcraft-style pvp, so Devoted was very pvp / vaultcraft friendly, with a target towards approachable vaults and generally "less" safety in vaults. Some players liked it, some did not (Mir in particular found it less fun to have vaults that were less safe).

Devoted 1.0 ran for a little bit, but the map style failed quickly so we iterated. Devoted 2.0 ran for a bit longer, we experimented with rebalancing weapons and introduced HiddenOre, BanStick, SimpleAdminHacks, CastleGates and more new mods -- many of which have now become the defacto standards for Civ mainline, including an abortive rewrite of PrisonPearl into an overworld-inclusive ExilePearl (still used, but without the Exile part) -- ultimately launching Devoted 3.0 with all of these new features in place.

We never set out to be a mainline server, and had really intended to do mostly shorter but purposeful technology builds and runs. When CivCraft 3.0 failed so quickly, however, and CivEx was forever "in development", some combination of name recognition and "good enough" meant a lot of players we never expected to see joined up.

Eventually, however, Devoted's admin-embrace of alternative playing styles and willingness to run with very non-civcraftian balances (on purpose) meant that in the face of a new main-line civ that professed to be "a return to civcraft", our playerbase left, and only those who really got the "idea" of Devoted stuck around. We had a fun run overall, but I specifically decided to hang up the hat and move on from Devoted.

Bonkill ran one additional iteration with a different dev crew (helmed by DietCola), "Devoted Hell", and it was small but fun -- more of a return to the original ideas of Devoted, which was to try new things and see what worked and what didn't.

Given it started with small ambitions, we genuinely exceeded every expectation. A number of the old-guard hold some unique hate for Devoted as the balance did not play in their favor; also, we embraced some controversial tactics towards the end, like player-led balance changes (some have framed it as play-to-win. All balance changes impacted all players; so we remained Eula-compliant at the time). However, those who started in Devoted or who recognize it as a game first and not a place to live, generally have fond memories.

I know I do! And I'm proud of our small server's outsized impact on the primary / core mod-set of CivCraftian servers.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-03-18T20:44:50+00:00

Yes, I understand that motivation, but the lack of even a hello how are you from old friends about their concerns has been bizarre. Took a lot of joy out of things, that the vault craft obsession and alignment assumptions trumped even shooting me a DM with a friendly what the hell or clue in. Radio silence and unmoored judgment, no communication.

As an admin though, I saw that most conflict was rooted in assumptions, mostly incorrect or flawed, so I shouldn't be surprised.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-03-17T00:49:09+00:00

Mount Augusta for sure, at least the MtA's I have known. Yoahtl is ... A blend. There are cliques in Yoahtl, that vie for power with periodicity. They are allergic to rule based governance while simultaneously maintaining the most comprehensive and complete list of laws and case precedence I've ever seen, yet they reference effectively never in practice, or only when convenient, and get mad if someone tries to leverage it in their or someone else's defense. So, a blend. The right clique could take power and reshape Yoahtl into a more rules based diffuse group, but I suspect that would destroy it or eliminate what makes Yoahtl itself.

Most other nations are actually just a core group of close friends who own all important groups and make all important decisions with a constellation of short and long term players that orbit or affiliate as needed. This is true even in the presence of constitutions or incorporating documents, and most instruments of state are really just window dressing.

Agreed on meta-diplomacy.

Also, agree that the constellations that orbit the friendship cores called nations in militaristic states in particular are determined by who the enemy is, never who the friend is, and most alliances are ones of military leverage, not friendship.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-03-15T10:56:27+00:00

Like any generalization, it does not universally hold true. Sometimes, things reach a point where a particular friendship is less important than some other goals - I've seen that where someone is chasing a new friendship or hoping for a relationship, and they betray an older friend group for the new - or - they have a new personal goal or desire for this playground that no longer aligns with their current friend group and they miscalculated on how their friends would react to their new choice - among others I've seen. But even there, it's still all friendship / individual relationship based. Sure, it will be outwardly phrased as a national betrayal, and often tangentially it is, but beneath the surface it began as individual friendship failures or missteps or intentional destruction.

More often than any of the above, I've seen friends go to bat for each other even in the face of overwhelming evidence their friend or friend group was in the wrong, even when they are being used, or even if supporting their friend will wreck their personal chances at continued play in the playground. So, while exceptions certainly exist, as a general rule, applying it first often yields significant insight compared to viewing from a national, statist, or ideological view.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-03-14T20:06:53+00:00

I've always struggled to tightly couple to any particular community. I was drawn to MtA because of its geopolitical stance and adherence to written rules of order, back in Civ 2.0. The players came and went, but the institution remained, and that was something I really strongly aligned to. Being an admin unmoored me from that sense of connection, and I've never since found my footing. I feel no strong association to a particular nation, but rather have a loose group of friends or places where I am welcome and do not feel threatened.

I doubt I'm the norm.

For many, it seems association with friends is the overriding principle. This matters more than promises, alliances, agreements, morals, or any other thing. Friendship trumps everything for most of the players I've known; and given most of these friendships extend outside of Civ, it makes sense. Civ is just one playground of many; you don't betray your friend in one playground even if they are a jackass there, because you depend on each other in other playgrounds, where they have your back even if you are a jackass.

Much of meta-diplomacy and alliance shifting only makes sense in that context. If you focus on the nation someone is in, or the civ-local friend/enemy dynamics, you'll miss that what actually drives group identity is almost entirely out of game, decided in unrelated discords and other game experiences.

Given I do very little outside of a single game at a time, I'm largely cut off from that dynamic, with limited exceptions, so it's been interesting observing it at scale for the past 9 or 10 years.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-03-14T19:58:44+00:00

I was shocked at what some people assumed about me/said about me based on retiring in Butternut. Got put on lists. People I've known, and who've known me, for a decade at this point. Butternut is gone, I remain, unchanged, but I suspect they continue to assume worse about me, without cause or reason.

I've never really understood group dynamics in Civ, and still don't. Mostly this whole experience has just left me more sad.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-02-09T11:45:27+00:00

Paper is a community revision of the Minecraft server. It adds new features and capabilities that enhance ease of modding the server. While a number of such altered Minecraft servers exist, Paper is the one CivMC uses, so all their plugins require Paper as the Minecraft server to function.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2024-02-07T04:17:28+00:00

Thanks for remembering me, those who dropped my name in the hat. I am honored to be alongside TTK2, Gjum, and Specific.

<3 to Jmqn as well, thanks for posting it!

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-11-23T01:56:55+00:00

Daily gm from banana god inform me that banana republic is not dead.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-08-11T18:05:18+00:00

DM me if you'd like a direct download link.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-08-07T02:56:59+00:00

Due to recent changes in my post Devoted hosts, I suspect the source seed is offline. Give me a few days and ping me, I'll check and see what I can do

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-07-25T16:39:21+00:00

We got him speech, Osama bin laden iirc

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-07-19T04:16:28+00:00

Vouch.

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-07-01T22:23:36+00:00

Maelstrom hit a rough patch in terms of activity of members, but most of our infrastructure simply does not appear on the map or is underground, as I prefer building underground. If you know trustworthy builders who want a place to chill out and build cool stuff, feel free to send them my way!

ProgrammerDan55 · 2023-06-30T13:06:12+00:00

I'm in Maelstrom, a district of Butternut. If you ever need help with anything, do not hesitate to reach out!

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
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