THE YEAR BEHIND US
Well, for once, we didnt keep the same growth rate. 6 Million pageviews in the first year, 14 in the second. That should be 32 in the third year, but it was only 22... We only had one game released during this year so I guess we are kind of justified. The good thing is that we dont have stock owners to worry about and we're also not in the stock market to see our price dropping like a rock due to results below expectations ;)

So, this was the year of Call to Power 2. Something between the best game of the genre, the sequel that should actually be the original and the opportunity to find out (the hard way) what happens when a game doesnt sell, CTP2 achieved at least one thing. It gave us (some of us anyway) something to occupy ourselves with until Civ3. It also gave some people the opportunity to re-balance and enhance one more civ game. The funny thing is that in some areas the... Apolyton patched CTP2 might be better than Civ3. But that remains to be seen.

We also witnessed a great event in gaming history: the extinction of dinosaurs! Ok, so it was only a game, but you are still able to say to your grandchildren the story about the day that Sid killed the Dinosaurs so that he had time to play golf :D As surprised as we were hearing about a dinosaurs game by Firaxis, we never expected that we would ever see a game called "Sid Meier's SimGolf"(despite the fact that Sid has been into all kind of games in his career).

As for Apolyton itself, we made a few upgrades, with the most important being the switch to vBulletin for the forums but we left some big stuff for the future. We gave some focus on various games, with forums for "Alternative Civs" like Guns, Germs & Steel and Freeciv, as well as for Europa Universalis, Earth 2025 and Trade Wars 2002. Among our most interesting moments was the CTP2 Gold Party, our first "celebrity" article for the Column, the exclusive posting of the CTP2 WWII scenario, our (first for SMAC) fiction contest, lately the Face of Apolyton interview series and of course the world premiere of the Civ3 units images. As for the hosted sites, GameLeague moved on to it's own server and we had Art of War, WesW's site and the Craddle of Civilization joing us.

THE YEAR AHEAD OF US
Our fourth year will certainly have two games released: Civ3 and SimGolf. The first of course taking the bigest part of our attention, with the at least to see what happens when two great designers work together(dont ask me who I'm talking about). We might also see the first game of BHG, although their silence doesnt leave much room for such speculation. The other big question is whether Civ3 will mean the death of Civ2, or will Civ2 continue alive like a zombie reminding the gaming industry how games are supposed to be made....

As for us, we've got our hands full with Civ3, but also with the rest of our sections. The forums might not be just forum by the end of the year, bringing new abilities to existing features of the site. Meanwhile, we'll probably be spending a lot of our time trying to talk Yinout of seting himself on fire in protest of the delay in the release of the latest civ3 patch :)

THANKS
This year we owe thanks to these people: Sven Muencheberg on the Civ2 DB, Ming, MichaeltheGreat and MLeonard on the forums, Omnigod on the CTP2 DB, Snapcase and Imran Siddiqui on the news, Solver on the pbem charts and the interview, and various others, like self biased in the Civ2 DB, Stefu for the smilies and more...

Thanks also to GameStats for one more year of great cooperation

Thanks to everyone who visited our site, send us a file, used the forums, critised, whined or made suggestions about the site and generally everyone who used Apolyton.

Finally, thanks to the... manufacturers of our addictions, for continuing to produce big amounts of the drugs we love and helping us pushing to as many other addicts as possible :D

AND WE KEEP ON CIVIN' !!
So Civ3 is a given. And after Civ3, what? Civ4 of course! Until next year....