GothCon this year must have been the best convention ever, at least if measured by hours spent playing Civ. Out of the 70 hours I was at the convention I spend 50 playing Civ, and that is not counting breaks. That gave me time to play 3 games of AdvCiv, two games of CivProject, sleep for 6 hours, eat some when I was starving, and not much else. Still, I'm going to conventions to be able to play Civ, so it must be considered a success. In total I drank 16 litres of Coke, and when I got home I slept 12 hours each the first two nights, but that's beside the point...
I arrived at 19:00 Thursday night, and after packing up my things in my sleeping hall, and setting up CivProject for next morning, I decided to hang around the "boardgame bar" to see if anyone was playing anything interesting. Less than a minute later I found two guys checking out AdvCiv, and asked if they had a spot for me... They did. 10 hours, 18 rounds, 14 steps on the A.S.T. and 4 litres of Coke later we broke up the game so I had time for a quick breakfast before the first scheduled game of Civ.
That was an 11 hours (minus 1 hour in breaks) game of CivProject starting at 10:00 Friday morning. We ended up being nine players, playing the eight Mediterranean civilizations plus the Celts. I played the Celts and won (barely).
This game was interesting in many aspects. Firstly, we played with the new Scenario Handbook, and thus gave less space to Egypt and Assyria than in previous games.
It worked out great for Egypt, who felt he had lots of space even though I had "stolen" three areas in the south, and came second place. On the other hand he only got hit by flood once in 13 turns, it might have been a different story otherwise.
Assyria, however, felt the loss of Nineveh and Carrhae hard, a loss felt even harder by Hatti, who became the target of Assyria's attempt to compensate. Hatti tried to compensate in turn by attacking me (the Celts) by ship over the Black Sea, which leads us to the next interesting aspect.
At seventh round, when I was the only player without civilization cards (but with a really good hand of trade cards saved) Hatti attempted to migrate over the Black Sea. We had a truce were we were to set up a "city wall" in Maetolia/Cuban and not bother each other. He, however, broke that truce and invaded Crimea and destroyed my city construction attempt in Odysseus. I immediately promised revenge, but I soon discovered that, due to his small size and my limited access to the black sea (now only Odysseus and Getae, I had a city in Tomi), I would have a snowballs chance in hell of actually doing anything but retaking Crimea. Unless, of course, I bought Military... I did. It cost me two turns standing still on the A.S.T. before I could enter the late bronze age, but in addition to extinguish Hatti from the Black Sea coast (which in combination with Assyria's offensive brought him down to 1 city by round nine), allowed me to keep eight or nine cities when my neighbours only had six or seven (thus I traded predominantly with Egypt and Assyria, also keeping a high city count). I was still behind in points all the way until the last turn, where a good saved trade card hand, luck with trade cards drawn, and a good trade enabled me to buy 11 cheap civilization cards at once, thus overtaking Egypt, and winning by three victory points. Military is a great card, at least if you don't get hit by Civil War, and standing still on the A.S.T. isn't critical. Nothing I didn't know earlier, but this game confirmed it.
The game was played with only one optional rule, "Bottom-Three Shuffling of Non-Tradable Calamities" (Paragraph 4.4 in the Optional Rulebook), and the only 200+ card purchased was me buying Library turn 11 (so I could dare buying Fundamentalism as a defensive measure by turn 12, even though I had nine cities and "bought gold". My neighbours dared buying Fundamentalism for offensive purposes anyway, as they only had eight cities.)
A complete table of results for this game follows:
| Civ | Player | A.S.T.
Points | CivCard
Points | Cities | Victory Points | Tie Breaker | Position |
|---|
| Minoa | Anders Qvist | 60 | 16 | 2 | 78 | ? | 4 |
| Celts | Jon Severinsson | 55 | 22 | 8 | 85 | 3 | 1 |
| Assyria | Jesper Berglund | 55 | 6 | 5 | 66 | 11 | 7 |
| Rome | Markus Rännare | 55 | 12 | 3 | 70 | 5 | 6 |
| Carthage | Roge Ivarsson | 60 | 16 | 4 | 80 | 0 | 3 |
| Hellas | Christian Günther-Hanssen | 60 | 11 | 5 | 76 | 18 | 5 |
| Hatti | Björn Sörling | 45 | 5 | 3 | 53 | 8 | 9 |
| Iberia | Adam Thorp | 50 | 5 | 3 | 58 | 20 | 8 |
| Egypt | Jens Schou | 60 | 18 | 4 | 82 | 10 | 2 |
Next I played a 5 hours trial board in the AdvCiv tournament (ending up sixth out of seven, Jesper, Assyria above, was seventh), went to bed, slept for six hours, visited some shops, ate, played in the 11 hours (minus one hour in breaks) finale of the AdvCiv tournament (I got a spot due to low interest, and ended up fourth out of five, the same Jesper got fifth place).
When that game was over, Jesper and Jens from the scheduled CivProject game bugged me about an additional game of CivProject. I told them that if they found at least two more players, it was a go. They found three, and by 04:30 Sunday morning we started a six player game, playing the easternmost six nations. This game contained one interesting peculiarity. As one player (Pitt, Maurya) was from Luxenbourg, we had to switch to English, which was the second language of everyone present. This resulted in slower, and thus less chaotic, trading phases, which in turn resulted in better trades and a quicker game (who would have thought that a slower trading phase would result in a quicker game? But it did!). The fact that four out of 6 players had played CivProject earlier during the convention didn't hurt matters either, in eleven hours (minus 45 minutes of breakfast break) we managed to play 14 turns (that is the longest, in turns, CivProject game I've played IRL).
During this game I, playing Dravidia, and Jens, playing Kush, was very close to each other in victory points throughout the entire game. Neither of us had to stand still on the A.S.T. until the fourteenth turn, where neither was able to proceed. There was however one important thing to note regarding civilization cards. After buying our three 100+ civcards and looking at our cards and credits, we found that I had gone for a wide base (buying both Empiricism and Literacy, as well as cards of all colours), while Jens had specialized in Arts and Craft. During the entire reminder of the game Jens had more credits in Arts and Craft than I, but less amount of credits in total. Additionally I never had more 100+ cards than he did, while the reverse was true most of the time, and he was able to buy Politics at turn 13, while I couldn't afford any 200+ cards even at turn 14. On the other hand I was the only player able to, at turn 13, afford to purchase
all civcards with a face value of less than 100.
If he had remembered to manage his treasury, that would have resulted in me losing a wilderness city to him (due to Politics), lowering the gap in victory points to 6. Additionally, if the game had continued, I would have halted on the A.S.T. for at least one more turn, while Jens most likely would have been able to proceed into late iron age at turn 15, thus lowering the gap to 1. Given the additional fact that we agreed that I had traded slightly better than him, and thus should have more victory points than him, I'm drawing the conclusion that the current 1-2-3 VP distribution for civcards is balanced, and that 1-3-5 would be worse than going back to plain 2.
The game was played with only one optional rule, "Bottom-Three Shuffling of Non-Tradable Calamities" (Paragraph 4.4 in the Optional Rulebook), and the only 200+ card purchased was Politics bought by Kush.
Looking at this game, as well as the previous PBEM game with the same civilization I participated in (and won) last year, I'm drawing the conclusion that Maurya is slightly to weak, and that Indus easily gets in the crossfire (last game between Parthia and Dravidia, this time between Dravidia and Kush), but nothing so major that changes is needed on the map. The poor results for these civilizations in both games is also partly due to less experienced/good players (this game neither player had played any form of Civ prior to GothCon).
A complete table of results for this game follows. The oddities in the player column is because Indus had a temporary replacement player to fill in for him while he was down three stairs and got his ass kicked in the Diplomacy finale. When Björn, playing Parthia, later had to leave to catch his train, the same player also filled in for him.
| Civ | Player | A.S.T.
Points | CivCard
Points | Cities | Victory Points | Tie Breaker | Position |
|---|
| Maurya | Pitt Pauly | 55 | 9 | 7 | 71 | 15 | 5 |
| Dravidia | Jon Severinsson | 65 | 31 | 7 | 103 | 0 | 1 |
| Kush | Jens Schou | 65 | 24 | 6 | 95 | 18 | 2 |
| Persia | Jesper Berglund | 60 | 18 | 7 | 85 | 0 | 3 |
| Indus | Alexander Merinen
(Christian Hanssen) | 55 | 10 | 4 | 69 | 2 | 6 |
| Parthia | Björn Sörling
Christian Hanssen | 55 | 16 | 3 | 74 | 11 | 4 |
