I'd like to know the history of CivFanatics and Apolyton. People keep referring to it, but what happened?
Apolyton's roots go back to two distinct Civ2 websites. Dan's "The Ultimate Civ2 Site", and Markos' "The First Greek Civ2 Site". (Both can still be seen if you use
archive.org and you kow the old website URLs) Dan's site was full of maps, scenarios, and civ stories, as well as a forum, which seemed to change with each new domain name. These sites started back in the mid 90s. As the years went on (roughly 10 years ago), they merged into Apolyton. Apolyton's distinctive "engineer's drawing" on the main page was made back in the TUC2S days.
CFC got its' start around 2000. There is a history thread somewhere, probably in Site Feedback. It was around in time for the first wave of Civ3 players. By the time Civ4 came around, the RNG (random number generator), err, Google, kept showing CFC when people were searching for video card issues with Civ4, and found CFC.
CFC has always been a more structured, and clean (not cluttered with ads, and millions of ad-ons) than Apolyton. But, Apolyton has been known to have more strategy discussions than CFC. Conversely, CFC was the major Civ3 scenario/mod site.