Civilization Junction

You didn’t really think Apolyton and CivFanatics were gonna merge and charge for content, did you?

As Apolyton staff members have hinted at in various places in the forums, changes are coming to Apolyton, but nothing like this. We can’t talk about the details yet but you’ll find out soon enough.

In the meantime, thanks to Sirotnikov for supplying the uber-cool logo for CivJunction, and all the ACS and CFC staff who contributed their time and effort to help put this together. We’ll keep the CivJunction website online for historical purposes (the domain expires around this time next year but we’ll probably move it to http://civjunction.apolyton.net/ after that).

We hope everyone had as much fun with this joke as we had. See you all next year

Both sites would like to see some form of monthly competition continuing. CFC had the “Game Of The Month” in various flavours, including succession games, Civ 1, 2, PTW, Conquests, Civ4 and Warlords, whilst Apolyton had various situational competitions as part of their “Apolyton University”.

Whilst the actual details are being worked-out, the likely compromise will be a number of competitions based around the CFC format of ‘everyone plays from the same save, with the same difficulty’, but with the Apolyton focus on situational play to develop certain aspects of the games.

At this stage, we will need to charge a small entry fee to download the games (similar to ‘Apolyton Plus’ subscriptions), but we hope to keep costs low. These funds will go towards the site maintenance and gratuities for the administration staff - sorry, no prize money!

Two of the Internet’s leading Civilization fan sites have forged a permanent alliance. Dan “DanQ” Quick, Chief Owner/Administrator of Apolyton Civilization Site (ACS), and “Thunderfall”, Site Administrator of Civilization Fanatics Center (CFC), are merging their respective operations to form Civilization Junction (civjunction.com). The two will take on the role and titles of Co-Owner/Administrator, much like DanQ and fellow ACS co-founder Markos “MarkG” Giannopoulos did in 1998 when merging their individual CivII fan sites.

By the end of the month, most of ACS’ and CFC’s services will be integrated and made available to the public under the CivJunction (CJ) banner. Among the highlights: the disbandment of Apolyton’s Directory service in favor of CivFanatics’ Downloads Database, the en-masse incorporation of Apolyton’s CivGroups service and moulding that site’s PLUS subscription service into a pay-for model for key operations including “Game of the Month”, “Hall of Fame”, and “Junction University”. Work is already underway to merge the sites’ two forums. After the merge, the combined forum will have nearly 10 millions posts, making it the 77th biggest forum on the web.

ACS and CFC staff have been working hard behind the scenes for much of the current year in preparation for this announcement. Other than Quick and Thunderfall themselves, many of the existing staff members are expected to join the staff of the combined site, although they may play a different role. Individuals who have served on neither parent site’s staff will also be a part of CJ’s team.

“This is a truly exciting time for the Civilization community. We believe it’s in the community’s best interest to merge the two biggest and oldest fan sites, to make it the ultimate destination for all things Civilization”, said Thunderfall.

“We are seizing on the opportunity to combine the extensive resources of both Apolyton and CivFanatics that have been cultivated for many years”, said Quick when asked to comment. “Some may ask why we are taking this significant step now. To them I say, why not now?”

The GOTM competition continues, with GOTM 17 having just been released. This game sees you playing as Alexander, leader of the Greek empire. Its an archipelago game, with one less player than normal and low sea level; so you should have room to expand!

Game settings:

Civilization: Greece (Leader: Alexander ; Traits: Aggressive, Philosophical)
Rivals: 5
Difficulty: Monarch
Map: Archipelago
Mapsize: Standard

Climate: Tropical
Water level: Low
Starting Era: Ancient
Speed: Epic
Options:

Victory Conditions: all enabled

>> Read the pre-game strategy discussion in the forums HERE
>> Go and download the starting saves HERE

Under the leadership of President Nugog, the first Single Player Civ4 Democracy Game ended in a Domination Victory in 1828 AD [see stories]. After a hiatus to rest and recharge the preparations for a new game have begun. A new forum has been opened and the sign-up thread is starting to fill up.

A Democracy Game (DG) is a game is played by the entire community, either as an SP game with the whole community controlling the a single civ, or as an MP game with the community splitting up in teams which each control one civilization. The way it works is that the community elects a President from their midst, who actually physically plays the game, and a cabinet of Ministers, who are each responsible for making the decisions in their area. These ministers consult the community to make their decisions: they organise debates and start polls, though typically any member can start a discussion or poll on their own as well if they want. Once enough instructions have been gathered the Ministers pass their orders to the President who then plays a few turns, usually while holding a chat session in the IRC room so people can provide live feedback on issues that come up during play.

Democracy games are fun because you`re playing as part of a community and educational as there is a lot of in-depth strategy discussion involved. If you`re interested in playing, join the CivGroup and start discussing settings, rules, etc.