Hello,
I am proud to present you with the second interview of Apolyton members. This time you’ll enjoy an interview with WesW, the legendary modmaker for Call to Power series, where he’ll tell you about the benefits of Medieval Mod, prove it, and unfold the mistery of what he does in spare time.I hope you enjoy this article.
Solver, ACS Interview Chief.

Solver: How did you find Apolyton?
WesW: I found the Ultimate CivII Site, run by DanQ, in the spring of '98, when I first got online. It was a good place to learn new things about the game, get pointers, and download mods and scenarios. It was also when I first learned that you "could" modify the game. I think it was Conflicts in Civ which contained instructions for putting in events and so-forth, but the instructions were beyond my meager programming understanding, so I continued playing the standard game for another year and a half. When I dl'd the mods, and saw where they had changed simpler things like unit values and abilities, it sparked my imagination and let me into mod-making.
I ultimately made what I called, if I remember correctly, the Fascist Patch for CivII(note by markg: it was the enhanced mod wes :)). I didn't really understand the difference between a patch and a mod back then. I believe that this patch, and the Real Europe map I made, are still available in the archives section of CivII. Some of you familiar with my Ctp work can see some of the concepts in this mod which are still present in the Medpack II.

Solver: Everyone knows you as a modmaker for Call to Power series. Have you also played other Civ titles?
WesW: I have played about all of the civ and strategy game titles that came that came out between '92 and '99, when I started into Ctp work. I played Civ 1 and Civ 2 each for a year or two solid, as well as Master of Orion 1 and 2, Imperialism 1, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3, Alpha Centari and probably a couple of others that I can't recall off-hand. I played a lot of strategy games too such as the old Koei games for Nintendo back a decade ago, plus more recent games such as Panzer General, Age of Rifles, Red Alert, Warcraft and Starcraft.
I have also played many roll playing games, going back to the first Dungeons and Dragons games from the '80s. The first game I ever played on the computer was King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne. I think this was back in '82. Baldur's Gate got me back into the genre two years ago after a long time away, and I just finished Planescape: Torment. (I got behind after working on the Ctp titles for two solid years.)

Solver: What made you start working on the first version of MedMod?
WesW: It was basically what gets everyone into mod-making: You see some things in the game that do not seem right, and you set about correcting them in order to make the game more balanced and/or fun to play. I bought Ctp1 along with Alpha Centauri and Balder's Gate in the early spring of '99. I played Alpha Centauri for about 3 months before the new wore off and I realized that it was just Civ 2 with a few new concepts tacked onto it. Next, I played Baldur's Gate through a couple of times.
Then I tried Ctp. I played a couple of quick games and was pretty disappointed in it. I actually came close to putting it on the shelf and forgetting about it, like so many other people did. It was obvious to me right off the bat that there were serious flaws in the settings and values, but the new concepts and ways of doing things as opposed to the Sid games intrigued me, plus I knew that there was nothing else coming out in the civ genre for a long time.
So, I got on Apolyton to try and find out what had been done for the game mod-wise, and found Luke Loh's (Celestial Dawn) mod. He was the first person to really analyze the game (the spreadsheets included in the Medpack originated from the ones he put together), and set about correcting the most glaring imbalances and inadequacies in the game. He is generally recognized as the person who made Ctp worth playing. He was just finishing up his mod and moving on to other things when I became interested in mod-making for Ctp back about July of '99, I believe.
It was after reading Luke's mod notes that I began to realize that here was a game that could be customized to a far greater extent than any other strategy game that had ever come out to that time. I was familiar with about all that could be done with Civ 2 by then, and Ctp opened up entirely new areas such as AI behavior to extensive modification, provided that you were willing to spend the large amounts of time necessary to familiarize yourself with all the files and what they did, or oftentimes did not, do to the game.
After playing the game for a few months, and becoming familiar with Luke's mod, the most glaring remaining game imbalance in the early part of the game, in my opinion, was that the City Walls improvement was so strong that it made capturing cities almost impossible until you had gunpowder units. This made the early game pretty dull war-wise. Thus, I added a new, early version of city walls called the Stockade, and moved the City Walls back to what would be the Medieval period. I also added a couple of new units from the work of Tom Davies, changed the numbers of specific units per city that the AI built, and developed the unit progression and categories concepts that I have kept to this day. When I was setting the units into their progression ages, I saw that there were now enough that an age was needed between the Ancient and Renaissance ages. Looking at the timeline, this new age fell into Europe's Medieval period. Most of my changes to the game occurred in that era, and Medieval Mod had a nice ring to it, so that is what I called it.

PAGE 1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3