[CTP] Kull's Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the CTP2 Apolyton Edition project (Cradle 5)

[Blake00]

Other than the occasional tinkering with the Apolyton Edition of CTP2 there's not many Call to Power fan projects still going these days. However long time Civ community member @Kull has been working over the last year on making the popular Cradle 3+ mods compatible with the Apolyton Edition of CTP2 making a HUGE amount of bug fixes, new gameplay improvements and even new custom terrain/city/unit graphics and animations (so much content he's now calling it Cradle 5!). He's got a project thread happening over at Apolyton and regularly posts updates with pictures detailing his ongoing work on the project. I do worry a bit though as Kull is pouring his heart and soul into that thread with so much content but Apolyton is just not looking all that great these days with down periods and less & less humans and more & more spambots posting there. I've invited him to come to CivFanatics but he's a loyal Poly guy through and through so I'll do my best to cover his work here at CFC and also over in the Call to Power Facebook and Call to Power Discord fan groups. If people want me to copy a full transcript of his Apolyton thread here (which Kull has given me permission to do so) let me know, otherwise for now any lurking CTP fans here can check out his original thread here:

Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition - Apolyton Civilization Site

This is going to be a rambling thread, which meanders here and there but hopefully winds up achieving the goal as stated in the the thread title. I started playing around with this several months ago and have made quite a bit of progress, but it always feels like "one step forward and two steps...

apolyton.net

Examples of some of Kull's custom graphics work...

 

[Blake00]

I see @Kull is still killin it on his CTP2 AE Cradle5 mod project.. so many posts over in his Apolyton thread with cool changes and images since I last looked.. he's a machine lol! Of particular interest is all the new custom wonders he's adding that appear on the surrounding city map titles (Civ6 style). There's a whole bunch of posts about it with screens that start from this linked post in July to now days where he's working on fighter craft improvements...

https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/call-to-power-2/ctp2-creation/9437883-making-cradle-3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition?p=9460515#post9460515

 

[Hans Lemurson]

Holy moley! I remember checking out Cradle 2 many years ago. I wonder what it's morphed into these days.

 

[CustodianV131]

Nice work, enjoyed playing them back in the day, this would be a great option to replay them now.

 

[Blake00]

@Kull continued to work on his CTP2 AE Cradle5 mod project over 2024 and now in 2025 is working to update it to be compatible with the new 2025 release of the Apolyton Edition.

Here's a few highlights from his huge thread..
https://apolyton.net/forum/other-ga...3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition/

He's been busy playtesting to get the mod into a final state..


Added an eco religion organizer unit (using graphics from CTP1 Forever future)..


New city styles..


Polar terraforming..


2025 status report..

Cradle 5 Status Report: As most of you know, the Source Code Team released a new version of the Apolyton Edition in late January 2025, with a host of fixes and changes. While that's great news for the CtP2 franchise as a whole, it proved to be something of a conundrum for the Cradle 5 mod, since unfortunately it isn't "plug and play" compatible with the new AE-2025. On the plus side, it means that several of the Cradle 5 workarounds or GL warnings (such as the one for the "Liberate City" bug) are no longer necessary since the problems have been fixed - but that's only the ones I know about. Accordingly, I'll have to perform a detailed review of ALL the Cradle 5 changes to ensure the mod hasn't removed functionality that works in AE-2025. On the down side, the AI now has a major happiness problem that causes a lot of early game revolts. I'm sure that's fixable, but it's a warning indicator that quite a few other things may also fail, at least with the current mod settings.

In some ways, the biggest issue of all is that I was right in the middle of a major update to the Tile Improvement system. Reversing those changes is not something I was looking forward to, so after a great deal of thought I decided to finish the mod so as to be fully compatible with the 2011 version of the Apolyton Edition, which was the original plan anyway. Once that is done, it can be released and folks can take it for a spin to see all the new features, and hopefully will be able to report on the inevitable bugs. Following the release, I can focus on developing a revised version of the mod (probably called Cradle 6) which is fully compatible with the new Source Code release (and presumably the subsequent versions thereof)

With that said.......

External commerce villages.. that later become modern suburbs..