I was doing some math, which is a dangerous thing. When buying cards below 100 points, the average cost is pretty low after including potential credits, somewhere around 50 points. The cards between 100 and 200 average around 150 points. Above 200 average something close to 250. Dividing each of these by 50, you get 1-3-5. Should 1-3-5 be used for the victory points instead of 1-2-3?

This seems to me to make the larger purchases more equivilant in victory purchase and cost (when including credits). It was the reason for going from the 2-2-2 scoring to the 1-2-3. 1-3-5 might be a slightly better balance.

Any other thoughts or opinions?

Remember to include the +20 prerequsite credit for 200+ cards.

But yes, it will still be more efficiant to buy cheaper cards (though not by near as much now). Hopefully the fact that you need bigger cards for the AST track and the slightly better powers of the higher cards will mean people will invest in them. We'll see.

If not we will consider a change like you proposed!

+20 prerequisite? I just re-read section26 "Acquisition of Civilization cards" in the 2.07fix2 rules and didn't see anything on this. What is this "+20 prerequisite" you speak of?

IIRC (I haven't reworked my spreadsheets recently), each card that costs over 200 has a cheaper card below it that provides a +20 credit towards the purchase. This is mentioned as a prerequisite credit, as basically, that is what that is replacing.

Our group tried the expanded Civilization for the first time last weekend. I agree with CraigB. Cheap cards were a bit too advanageous compoared to more expensive ones when it comes to victory points.

One middle-of-the-road option would be to give one victory point for each full 50 points of card value. I.e. from 50 but less than 100 gives 1 point (like now), from 100 but less than 150 gives 2 points (like now), 150 but less than 200 gives three, 200 but less than 250 gives 4, and 250 or more gives 5. The finer granularity reduces the reasons to be "victory point tactical" in selecting civilization cards.

This does make more sense. Especially since the cheap cards near the end are extremely cheap, a civilization should be rewarded for large purchases rather than small.

The original idea with "overvaluating" cheaper cards was that "broad" nations get more civcard VP, but will fall behind on AST, as getting the 3 cards > 200 in time requires specialization. However, playtests showed that "broad" nations was overpowered, so we changed to 1,2,3 instead of plain 2. Before changing things again, I'd like to have some more testing (preferably in games I play). However, off hand I can see problems with a 1,2,3,4,5 system. Most notably, while we have carefully placed cards in an appropriate VP slot for 1,2,3, however, we haven't considered whether they should go in upper or lower half, except to balance cost vs power. Basically all 150 and 250 cards will suddenly become overpowered and all 140 and 240 will suddenly become underpowered. Nothing that can't be fixed, but something that, in the short run, definitely will introduce more problem than it solves. In adition it will upset the civcards vs AST vs cities balance. Again nothing that can't be solved, but will introduce imbalances until such a time we have playtested enough to solve.

About this balance between victory points from cities, AST, and civcards: The balance is quite different from regular Advance Civilization. (For cities, 50 old points gives one new. For Civilization cards it takes between 50 and 100 for each new point. But for AST it takse only 20 old points for a new.)

Is there a thread somewhwere in this forum about the reasoning behind this change? Or was that discussed elsewhere? I'm not saying it is wrong! I'm just curious about the reasoning.

The reasoning for doing a change at all was to avoid that hour after the game ends until you know who won, got second place etc.
The reasoning behind the original 1-2-5 (cities-civcards-ast) was that cheap cards would give lots of VP directly, while more expensive cards, as a requirement for ast advancement, would give even larger amounts of VP indirectly (so the current 1-2-3 plan for civcards is actually closer to 1-4-7, if you consider that you'll be standing still on the AST without expensive civcards).
I'm afraid that the original discussion on this issue, as well as the BH change and rework of the Persia/Parthia area, was mostly perform in email discussions between Velusion, McBeth, Martin and myself, so there is really no public record to point at.