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Cradle of Civilization
For the sequel Call to Power II, the team at Activision wanted to focus even more on customization and asked a group of seasoned CtP1 modmakers from Apolyton to alpha-test the game. These people are listed in the credits of CtP2 under the header A-team (you'll never guess what the A stands for ): basically all the people listed in the previous paragraph, minus Lee Waters but plus Apolyton co-admin DanQ, scenario-maker Harlan, coder (and now ACS CtP1/2 Manager) Locutus and artists Morgoth and his wife Katy. Harlan was even tasked with creating the Alexander the Great scenario (originally more A-team scenarios were planned but this didn't work out). Due to circumstances (but that's a different article), this testing group unfortunately didn't have as much impact on the development of the game as was initially hoped for, but a number of their suggestions made it into the final game (e.g. Harlan's idea of MAD). Activision's team also organized the text files a lot better and made them more accessible, they greatly simplified the AI files, and made huge improvements to the SLIC scripting language and the scenario editor.
Space ScenarioThanks to their experience with alpha testing, the A-team was able to get a good head start with modmaking for CtP2 (which was one of the goals of creating the team in the first place), so the first version of the MedMod for CtP2 was ready within weeks after the release of the game. Unfortunately the Activision team was soon after release dissolved due to internal reorganization and after that Activision officially stopped all support for the game, after releasing just a single patch and a WWII scenario. Some of the Activisioners hung around the forums for a while -- Richard "Azmel" Myers was extremely helpful in explaining the AI to the community long after he quit Activision -- but eventually all disappeared.
City Expansion & Visible WondersIn spite of Activision's lack of support, the community kept creating mods and scenarios: next to the MedMod an number of new major mods and scenarios began to appear, such as BlueO's AI Frenzy Mod and CitySprawl Mod, Dale's Diplomod, (Super) Apolyton Pack, World at War! and Ages of Man! (yes, he was a very busy beaver), OmniGod's BMP World Map, Hannibal Ad Portas's SPQR scenarios (here and here), hexagonian's Cradle of Civilizations mod and War of the Rings scenario, Martin Gühmann's City Mod and Goodmod and most recently Peter Triggs' Call to Conquest. Aside from these there was an endless list of tools and smaller mods such as kaan's Fix Mod, player1's MyMod, Immortal Wombat's OCC, Visible Wonders and Natural Wonders mods (among other things), Pedrunn's City Expansion and Space Scenario, Pedrunn and mapfi's Religion Mod, Peter Triggs' Defense of France Reconsidered scenario, FRITZ's numerous scenarios and maps, the Apolyton Tile File, Paul's ModSwapper, J Bytheway's CtPEd and ModManager, and Martin the Dane's TileEdit, ReadZFSFile and recent Sprite Editor. And that's only a small selection... On top of that an equally endless list of increasingly complex and powerful SLIC features was created by the likes of Dale, Gedrin, Immortal Wombat, Locutus, Martin Gühmann, Pedrunn, player1 and Peter Triggs. Many of these features ended up in one or more of the game's most important modpacks (MedMod, Cradle, Apolyton Pack, GoodMod, World at War and Call to Conquest). Of course, most of the work that the Apolyton CtP2 community has done in the past three years can be found in the Apolyton Directory.
Release of the Source CodeAges of Man!Of course, for every game the fan community would love to see the source code released. However, ever since Activision stopped supporting the game there has been a larger-than-usual (initially) latent desire for this in the CtP2 community. In fact, shortly after Activision announced that they dropped their support of the game, Harlan posted the following remark: "If Activision is too cheap to properly follow through on this game, they should at least have the balls to release some or all of the coding to allow others to make the fixes they should have done." This feeling has stayed with the community ever since.
Or won't ever. 
