Has anyone thought to try the Imperial Civ variant on the new map with less than maximum players. Imperial Civ is a variant where each player uses double tokens, cities, etc. It makes for a better game when you only have a few players by causing crowding and providing for more commodities to trade.

For the Expansion Project, I would recommend dividing the cities on the board between east and west. If a player has cities spilt between east and west, they would draw the appropriate number from EACH side. This means a player could concievable draw 9 trade cards from each side.

If a player builds more than 9 cities on the east or west, they would begin drawing a SECOND card, in order, for each city beyond nine on that side.

This brain never stops working

-matt

I haven't heard from anyone who has tried to play Imperial CivProject, but your ideas imho a very interesting. I'd like to try it!
Say playing 12 people on the full map, and all tradecards. Should be space enough to expand on, but still tight, considering the double citycount.

However, I'd like to adress my main concern with Imperial Civ, that it is possible to get more commodities, and thus civcards, perhaps by making civcards costing 100-200 +20 and 200-300 +50. What do you think?

Re: increaseing the cost of Civ cards in Imperial CivProject:

I would have to say no. Of course I haven't played yet so I can't speak intelligently on how easy it is to purchase all of the Civ cards, but it looks as though having so many should provide plenty to choose from.

When I did play regular Imperial Civ, I think I remember buying ALL the advances and then focusing of getting the most points in Commodities by the game end, but I doubt that will be a problem with 51 advances.

-Matt

I'm not realy afraid of anyone buing ALL the civcards, just more than intrended. In the CivProject noone should be able to buy all civcards, part of the diversity offered by the CivProject is that everyone gets different abilities end-game, and I'd like to preserve that. Many players think the usual 30-40 cards is hard enough to keep track of, I don't want to increase that to 40-50 cards.

The fact that in Imperial Adv.Civ. you had to get high-value-commodities to win, as (I assume) multiple players had all civcards, just proves my point. In Adv.Civ. having all civcards is usually enough to guarantee a victory. Basicly purchasing power is increased to much imho.

All of this with the cavetas that I never have played the Imperial variant, neither Adv.Civ. nor CivProject.

We recently playtested the new expansion cards (non-hellenization) in a live empire variant version of advanced civ with 5 players. I actually believe this is the best way to play the game if you play it live. The full game is just too slow and I never liked the 9 city limitation, once you get there it's kind of boring. With less that maximum players you have to cut off parts of the board which is unstatisfying as well.

The new cards work well in this variant because we adjusted the rules for cities over 9, instead of starting over at 1 level, you start over at the 3rd level. We through in extra trade cards to balance this out, although you can still only collect the maximum set listed on the card. So trade cards would be ordered like this:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
3 4 5
6 7 8

This also allows you to include all the new calamities. With this variant there were lots of purchases, but not all the cards were purchased. I think putting back the the prerequs (as I stated in previous posts) would greatly help reduce what cards you can purchase. I also think you should eliminate all card specific credits, they are unnecessary imho, there are already too many credits.

Oh yeah, one more thing, we also only played with 80 tokens, not 110, all the other pieces were doubled (cities, ships). This works much better too.

We also modified music and d&p so that they are +/- 5 for civil war whichever is better, because with so many pieces, increasing your first faction might be a penalty.