Civilization Fanatics Center

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Civilization Fanatics Center (abbreviated CFC and CivFanatics) is a fan web site for the Civilization series of computer and video games published by a variety of companies (depending on the game), including Atari, Firaxis, and Microprose. It is owned and operated by user Thunderfall, who founded it in 2000.

Civilization Fanatics' Forums is the 190th largest bulletin board on the World Wide Web as tracked by Big Boards, with over 4,000,000 posts and 90,000 members. It was voted second best fan web site of 2005 at Voodoo Extreme.

Contents

1 History
2 Games
3 Forums

3.1 Forum rules
3.2 Forum structure

4 Other activities

4.1 Game of the Month
4.2 Democracy games
4.3 Hall of Fame
4.4 NES

5 Subculture
6 References
7 External links

History

In the beginning, CivFanatics was a small personal homepage hosted by GeoCities (1998) and later on by XOOM (1999). The old site title was Civilization Fanatics' Page, part of the Thunderfall Impressions site. After the site was moved to Strategy Gaming Online in March 2000, the site was renamed to Civilization Fanatics' Center. The current form of the CFC web site took shape after the move to Strategy Game Online, as server resources were no longer an issue, thus being able to offer bulletin boards and file downloads. The forum initially catered to players of Civilization and Civilization II, while later on experiencing the first big influx of new members just prior to and during the release of Civilization III. Subsequent influx has arrived due to the release of Civilization IV.

Games

CFC currently mainly supports the fan communities of the following computer games:

Also the following fan communities are present to a certain degree:

Forums

Forum rules

The forums have a comprehensive list of rules, along with a number of moderators. CFC is "family friendly" and threads which do not conform to the rules have been known to be deleted before even accumulating any replies.

Forum structure

The forum is split into seven main groups, each containing individual forums. Each of these subforums may contain further subforums, and, in some cases, sub-sub forums.

The Civilization subforums were created to facilitate conversations about MicroProse's and Firaxis' games Civilization I, II, III, and IV. Each game has its own subforum group which includes subforums for strategy, ideas and suggestions, creation and customization, multiplayer, and demo games. Along with the forums for the Civilization games are subforums for other games like Galactic Civilizations II, Sid Meier's Pirates!, Rise of Nations and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Other Games is also home to a subforum for forum games. This sub-forum does not contribute to post count and allows the members to play many small games.

The Colosseum section contains subforums for topics not covered in other sections of the forum. It includes Off Topic, home to almost a third of all posts at the forum. It is a place where people go to discuss non-Civilization related topics. These topics range from 'light' such as "favourite music style" to 'very heavy' like "If abortion should be a crime, how should we punish the woman?" The majority of the topics are either news-items, religious discussions, political discussions, or general interest topics. Several other popular and long-running threads or thread series include the [Babe Thread], the [Evolution vs. Creationism Thread], and [Member's Photos Thread]. In addition, a number of "Ask the . . ." threads have been made in which a poster invites and answers questions about a group to which he or she belongs (usually a religion).

The Colosseum section also includes subforums for World History, Computer Talk, Sports Talk, and Humor and Jokes.

There are two other subforum sections; The CivFanatics group is home to only one public subforum, the subforum for site feedback. Site feedback allows active member feedback regarding CFC. Forums in the Project & Mod Development are hidden. The forums here consist of mods in the Private Beta Version stage, where only the specific mod-development teams can go to work on their mods away from public criticism and outside ideas. Private forums allow teams the ability to formulate his or her mods without being constantly bombarded with questions and unsolicited help. Exceptions in this category are the public forums for the "Fall from Heaven and Rhye's" and "Fall of Civilization" Civilization IV mods.

Other activities

Game of the Month

The "Game Of The Month" (or GOTM) was a concept first started in February 2001, for Civilization II - the [Civilization II GOTM]. The idea behind this concept is for a number of players to play a game, all using a common starting save file. Players then compare their results and discuss strategies. The competition has now been extended to [Civilization III GOTM] and [Civilization IV GOTM], and most recently to a [Civilization (original) GOTM]

Democracy games

The idea of the "Game of Democracy" is often attributed to the user "Duck of Flanders", although there is some belief that it was in fact conceived from a conversation between users "CornMaster" and "Alcibiates Of Athenae." The first democary game (played in Civ II) started in December of 2001, just after the release of Sid Meier's Civilization III. CFC has hosted six Civ III [democracy games] ("demogames" or "DG") and is currently hosting both a Civ III demogame, as well as a Civ IV democracy game.

CFC has participated with its own team in the Civilization III Play the World Multisite Democracy game (MSDG) and the Civilization III Conquests Intersite Democracy Game (ISDG). The opponents were teams from other Civilization fan web sites, as well as a team formed by Firaxis, the creators of the game. CFC also participates in a 14 fansites Civilization IV Intersite Democracy Game that starts in July 2006. Due to the number of participating teams there are 2 semi-finals of 7 fansites. The game itself is hosted by a different Civilization fansite; [Evolution games.]

In addition to competing against other teams, CFC also hosts the Multi-Team Demogame (MTDG) which hosts democracy games with all the teams consisting of CFC members. There is one for [Civ III] and one for [Civ IV].

Hall of Fame

Through all the releases of Civilization, players have been able to track their conquests, exploits and wins in a personal hall of fame screen. CFC Halls of Fame (HOF) extend on this principle, where single player games are ranked in tables against one another. This started with the [II High Score HOF]. [III HOF] originally started as a high score table, but was later enlarged to include tables for each victory condition and mapsize. It's also the home of the QuarterMaster's Challenge, where players must complete every victory condition, win at every difficulty level and play every mapsize. IV-HOF is currently in Beta, as the permanent site is under construction.

NES

The "Never Ending Story" (or "NES") concept was first made by member 'uknemesis' in early 2002 in the Civ III subforum, as a story written collectively by members of the forum. It later turned into more of a "strategy game" format with member 'das' being most often credited for it. Ultimately however the modern NES was created by EQandCivfanatic in Return to Our Roots NES 2, which created the Fresh Start NES, as well as numerous modern rules. The idea behind the concept is for a player to rule a nation and submit orders for it to the game host, either via private forum messages, posting the orders in the game thread or through e-mail. The game host will then carry out the orders of the PCs, an acronym for "Player Countries" (and NPCs, an acronym for "Non-Player Countries") and post the results in the game update. Soon after the Never Ending Stories got its own subforum in the Civ III Stories & Tales subforum. It has evolved into a strategy game, with many different types. Such as:

Fresh Start: Players start out as a tribe or a small nation from an early time period (originally normally 4000 BC, but now more commonly 2000BC), and develop it throughout history.
Random Map: Similar in rules to a Fresh Start, but on a non-Earth based map.
Historical: A NES that starts at a certain date in human history. Players play real nations.
Alt-History: A NES with an alternative history timeline.
Fantasy NESes: Can have magical elements, or other fantasy elements incorporated. Players can play anywhere from a nation to a character, depending on the ruleset.

There are other types of NESes as well.

[The First Never Ending Story]
[NES Forum]
[NESing Guide]
[ITNES] Ancient thematic NES
[StkNES5] Longest running NES

The people that partake in never ending stories are known as "NESers" forming a type of autonomous subculture within the subforum. The "NESers" often have references to NES in their titles and signatures, and wear it as a badge of honor.

Subculture

As with any large community, CFC has a number of longstanding subcultural jokes. Among the more prevalent are:

Spearman Beating Tank - this is a reference to the combat engine in the Civilization series, especially Civilization III. In that version, due to the (often maligned) probability calculation it was possible for a weak, obsolete military unit such as a spearman to defeat a stronger, more advanced military unit such as a tank, much to the frustration of human players using the tank. Thus on the forums, "Spearman beating tank" became an analogy for any situation in which an unlikely and frustrating outcome befell anyone, or conversely, when one member "pwned" another. Because of its popularity, a "smilie" icon was designed to show this.
Giant Radioactive Monkey - Threads with polls often incorporate a reference to Giant Radioactive Monkeys as the "other" and/or "joke" option.
Giant Death Robots - Sometimes interchangable with Giant Radioactive Monkey as the other/joke option. Began as joke suggestion for Civilization IV.
April Fools Avatar Swaps - Shortly before April 1st, various forumites will exchanges each other avatars and signatures. They are suppose to then post in the "style" of the user they exchanged with. They rarely do, however.
"Warning: Poster is..." - A tradition that started when several Catholic posters, led by CivGeneral, began to mention their faith on their signatures, with the sig line "Warning: Poster is Roman Catholic! Reply at your own risk!". It has since been used by posters of many different religious and political backgrounds, and spawned a number of satirical versions.

References

External links

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