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#139 YOUR CITIES AND YOU Our first "celebrity" column, Activision's St. Swithin, talks about -- what else? -- CTPII. #138 TURN-BASED STRATEGY: THE THINKING PERSON'S GAME Father Beast returns to voice his opinion on the calibre of the turn-based strategist. #137 IS TURN-BASED STRATEGY IN DANGER? Tim Bromige examines the playing field of the turn-based strategy genre today. #136 THE MEANING OF THE POST COUNT AT APOLYTON FORUMS Xuenay takes aim at the Apolyton administration for their handling of forum post count situations. #135 WHY I'M STILL PLAYING CIVILIZATION II DaveV can count to four reasons as to why he is still playing CivII more than four years after its original release. COLUMN ARCHIVE

"A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step". How true are these words that Chinese great Mao Tse-Tung once spoke. And, often, these first steps are the hardest. That is why the team of Guns, Germs and Steel, have done a commendable job just to get this far. The members of GGS, like to think of themselves, as visionaries, as David's, in a world of Goliath's, such as Firaxis and Activision. This column attempts to establish, to the uniformed reader, exactly what the GGS project that has been creating a buzz around Apolyton is.

GGS is one of a group of many Civ type games being created at the moment, by groups of enthusiastic volunteers. This project started only 7 months ago, in the busy world of the Civ 3 Forum. A forum member, a name now long forgotten, suggested that "Why should we wait for Civ3, when we can create our own game, using the members of Apolyton here?" This one sentence set off a light bulb in my head, and the project known at the moment as only Open Source Civilization was started. The next problem was where to go from their, how to take that first step. Enter Korn469. Many forum goers would now Korn469, whether it be from the AC-Fiction area, or the Civ3 Area. Korn enthusiastically joined the project, creating the first two documents, "General Ideas for Open Civ 3", and "Failure of the State".

I started work on an opening screen movie, more out of lack of things to contribute, than anything else. The first programmers joined, and JacobH started coding a small program to display the video. Then more programmers joined and the mailing list at egroups was getting up to 15 mails a day. The group had blown up in size. There were now up to 8 members, and 6 of them programmers. There were now three websites, mine, Korn's, and Amjayee's, who was another programmer. Then came a significant time in the game's history. Amjayee released the first version of his map, and which caught a few peoples eye. Soon he had released the second version, Map Prototype .01, which was a beautiful piece of work, and is still our most function piece of programming.

Soon, the frantic pace of the project slowed down. Many programmers starting leaving through lack of time, although one, Dan Ward, managed to make some code for the Client/Server system. The project's direction changed completely after this. Programming was slowed down, due to only two programmers, Amjayee and VetLegion, being available, and the focus was shifted to designing. Amjayee created many forum pages at the Alt. Civs section, which an eager group of designer's started to discuss. But not much was happening. An idea would get posted, discussed, then that was it. This all changed on July 23, this year, when Joker posted the first version of his economy demo. From then on did things change. The thread is now on its 4th page on has over 150 posts. Amjayee has posted his Population model, and we now have over 70 posts on that. Apart from that many design features are being hashed out, and the project is at an all time design high at the moment, as we have just(!) gotten our own forum.

"What's in a name?" was once stated by Romeo, in the famous Shakespeare play. A lot it may seem, as the project now feels more official now that it has the official now Guns, Germs and Steel: Tools of Conquest, and its own website. So what does the future hold for GGS? Well in the coming days Amjayee is hoping to release the prototype for the Economy Demo, and VetLegion is hoping to release a unit on map demo, not yet using Amjayee's map system, but a screenshot. After that it is hoped to combine VetLegion's unit-on-map demo, with an update of Amjayee's map demo. And after that? Well, only time will tell!

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About the author: "An avid Civ2 fan and GGS webmaster".

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