ShakaUVM wrote: We played an 11 player game on my birthday, loved it. Some notes:
Happy to hear that you liked it.
ShakaUVM wrote: 1) Printed a full size greyscale version of the board at kinko's for nine bucks. Color would have been $220, so I passed. =) Black and white was quite playable, though some of the players got confused by the flood plains, etc. It might be worth investing in the time to make a better greyscale version?
Might be worth to investigate, but I think maintaining two maps is more than we can manage. Perhaps tweaking some colors so they look better when printed in grayscale. (We've already done this for the counters, but that was with color blind people in mind, and we ignored map colors).
Martin: what do you think?
ShakaUVM wrote: 2) The board is actually two inches too big to be printed on full size printers, both black and white and color. They had a hard time shrinking it to exactly the right size that it wouldn't crop the bottom (I think they printed the board four times before they got it right). It might be worth resizing it to fit commercial printers. Since they had to shrink it, the AST was slightly too small for the counters, too.
There is no such thing as "full sized printers", there are hundreds of different form factors for printers, the most common (worldwide) is printers conforming to some ISO 216 standard (big professional printers usually manage up to A0 or A1. but B0, B1 and A2 isn't exactly rare either).
The map's width was recently slightly shrinked, and it now fits perfectly on 3 B1 sized sheets (with 7mm width and 26mm height to spare). Due to the nature of ISO 216 sized papers it is also very easy to scale it to any other ISO 216 paper size and get the counters to match. And considering 95% of the world population are using ISO 216 sized paper, I'm of the firm opinion that the current form factor is optimal. If anything the map's height should be enlarged by 19mm, to make the margins uniform.
(If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a European, and the 5% of the world that's not using ISO 216 is US and Canada).
ShakaUVM wrote: 3) We played with 11 players. The instructions don't include rules for which sections of the map should be cut off at what player sizes, so we just eyeballed it and cut it off on the east side of Babylon, and it worked out pretty well (there were 12 starting points west of it).
Please see the alpha scenario handbook, it contains more detailed instructions on that matter. The book requires some more work, but that section is quite good.
ShakaUVM wrote: 4) Rome ended up winning, but that was mainly due to the fact that Germany was the only unclaimed starting position, so she was able to boom into it while everyone else was involved in pretty intense warfare.
That is why the rulebook clearly states that you should remove the area around all nations not in play.
ShakaUVM wrote: 5) Germany and Saudi Arabia (or whatever their countries are called)
Celts and Saba
ShakaUVM wrote: seem to have pretty bad starting locations.
Most playtest so far shows that's not the case. The Celts have a slight shortage of city sites, but on the other hand has an abundance of living space, making them the opposite of Minoa (Crete in AdvCiv), and mostly easier to play (though not necessarily more powerfully).
Saba, on the other hand, has an excellent position to get Astronomy and become mobile, having almost all of the eastern half as their playground (similarly to how Minoa has all of the Mediterranean as their playground).
ShakaUVM wrote: Also, the map, the instructions, the AST, and the player maps all have different names for the countries. Everyone was confused by the naming. "Is Saudia Arabia Kush?" one person would ask, and we'd have to do a 3-way lookup to figure out the answer. The #1 request from people is either to put the nation name on the starting location on the map, or name the country after the starting location.
I understand that this might be confusing, but I don't see the need for a three way lookup. The map names the name of the area, but both AST and playermat contains identical area names, and they are all color coded (each nation has a unique color, which is the background color on AST, playermat, counters and starting areas). Might be more difficult if you play with some pieces in color and some in grayscale, but there is a table in the rulebook that should be useful in such circumstances. We are not about to change the names of areas or nations, but perhaps adding the name on the starting area on the playermats would at least help some. What do you think of that solution?
ShakaUVM wrote: 6) I got an early Monotheism (made a complete Salt set almost as soon as it was humanly possible) and proceeded to mop the floor with four players who all ganged up on me. That might have only been possible since I was playing Egypt, and had a huge standing army with Metalworking. Another player had Fundamentalism and slaughtered another player with it. It seems odd to me that the counter-technologies for Fundamentalism (Philosophy), Monotheism (Theology), Trade Empire (Wonder of the World) and Politics (Cultural Ascendency) all cost more than the aggressive technology. While it does have interesting side effects (people buy Fundamentalism to counter Fundamentalism, but then their neighbors are at risk, so they buy Fundamentalism and it spreads) it does seem odd from a game balance point of view, especially since Philosophy and Theology are both weak for their cost. Counters should cost less than the aggressive tech.
Actually, it is purely for game balance. If the countering advances was cheaper no one would ever invest in the offensive advances. The benefit of the countering advances is that they have less negative side effects (such as reduce, rather than aggravate, the effects of calamities), and, in most cases, are of a different field of study (thus giving you other credits)
ShakaUVM wrote: 7) Printing the technology cards was easy. Card stock from Kinko's and a color inkjet made very professional technology cards. I only printed one copy of each (two sided!), so people were constantly passing around the techs looking at them, which slowed the game down (I also printed one cheat sheet), but I already burned a lot of toner on the project. Counters and player mats were likewise easy to print, and turned out well on card stock (which was about 5$ for 50 sheets or so). Commodities was a pain, though. While I understand that different numbers of people will have different commodity needs, there was no easy way for me to print combinations of commodities on the same page without just opening up photoshop and copy/pasting them together. Microsoft Photo and Fax viewer can print them 9-up to a page, but they come out about twice as big as the default commodities, and it crops off the set values off the cards as well. This was the #2 request from our group (and really the only other request besides the country names issue), which was to make sheets of commodities like the technology sheets. Sure, maybe you'll put more on one page than a group will need, but I'm more than willing to burn a little bit of ink to save hours worth of effort. Also, printing backs on them would be a lot lot easier this way.
Personally I print counters on heavy paper (160gr), while I print counters and tradecards on cardstock (600gr). Quickcharts and playermats I do on ordinary paper (80gr). It works quite well, except the tradecards, that get slightly to thick (I'm looking into playing cards sleeves or thinner cardstock).
Printing a single set of civilization advances is probably a good compromise (I always print one copy per player, due to the "professional" feeling, while Velusion never prints them, due to cost). However, every player does absolutely need their own copy of the quickcharts if you expect the acquire civilization cards phase to ever end...
Regarding the tradecards, please take a look at jon.severinsson.net/civproject/tradecards. I've uploaded a ready-to-print A4 set for up to 18 players. I'm currently (slowly) working on a way to automate generation of both A4 and Letter sets for different player counts (unmarked cards for up to 11 players and E/W marked cards for up to 18 players)
ShakaUVM wrote: 8) We had to call the game after 10 hours since people got sleepy, but the final scores were all pretty close (indicating a good balance in nations), with Rome eking out a win due to her advantage from having two starting zones to play with. I felt somewhat bad for Saudi Arabia and southern Egypt, since they have long, narrow expanses of 1 territories making logistics somewhat difficult, and I ended up bottlenecking them whenever they tried to break out through me (Egypt just can bring a lot more men to bear than they could), so they ended up just fighting each other over scraps. I think that corner of the map could be tweaked, as well as possibly the England and Germany areas as well, which just seem rather poor.
Saba isn't intended to be played without access to the eastern parts of the map (should perhaps be stated somewhere more prominent than in some random forum thread), and the Celts really have enough living space to manage a few extra wilderness cities, so I don't think that will be necessary. Next time try playing the Celts instead of Saba, and use the borders defined in the scenario handbook. If you still think we need to do some tweaking, we will listen.
ShakaUVM wrote: Don't let this post sound like criticism. We all had an incredible time, and are thinking about all chipping in to get the $220 color board from Kinko's, and maybe even print it on metal, get magnetic tokens, and hang it on the wall, so that we don't all need to hunch around the table and crowd each other. I'll also print more sets of technology cards, and more cheat sheets for next time.
Actually, that is criticism, and criticism of the best sort. And we love it. How would we ever be able to improve if no one told us what was wrong. I similarly hope you will take my criticism in a similar positive spirit, as I'm only trying to help you to improve your next game.
(Criticism is defined as "The practice of analyzing, classifying, interpreting, or evaluating literary or other artistic works.", and "good criticism" is a synonym for praise)
And you just made me envious, I can only dream of affording a $220 professional print, and even less printing on metals and magnets.
Currently I'm printing the map on 48 sheets of paper, gluing them on cardstock, for a total cost of about $10 (in colour), but they do look ugly when I've played on them, and the edges of each sheet get jagged.
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We had to call the game after 10 hours since people got sleepy, but the final scores were all pretty close (indicating a good balance in nations), with Rome eking out a win due to her advantage from having two starting zones to play with. I felt somewhat bad for Saudi Arabia and southern Egypt, since they have long, narrow expanses of 1 territories making logistics somewhat difficult, and I ended up bottlenecking them whenever they tried to break out through me (Egypt just can bring a lot more men to bear than they could), so they ended up just fighting each other over scraps. I think that corner of the map could be tweaked, as well as possibly the England and Germany areas as well, which just seem rather poor.
