Hey Everyone!

I'm a great fan of the original Boardgame. I've just recently stumbled across the expansion project website and am amazed how much hard work went into this. The new Gameboards look just fantastic and I've already plotted the western half to A0. I'd love to introduce Civ to my pals with the new gameboard.

Now here's the problem: I think the vast number of new Advances can be totally overwhelming to players who have never played civ before and are not yet familiar with the basic game concept. In my opinion the number of advancements is a major impedement for the succes of the expansion project in a new group of players. Thus I believe it would be beneficial if one could simple omit all but the original Advances and introduce all the new ones step by step. The Problem which arises is that almost every advancement that appeared in ADCIV has been changed in either ist functionality or its pricing or both.

Does anyone have any experience in leaving out advancements? Or any hints?

Keep up the great work!

Hi Rainer

a bit more than 1 year ago i was introduced to this expansion and as experienced player I realized that all existing advances were replaced.

Though verysoon I made quite a study to the structure and the exact ruling of each card so I know how highly connected the system is as a whole

Please look at this forum for the 'strategy explorer' to get an overlook.
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=478&highlight=strategy+explorer
This is a guide I created but has not been officially added to this project.

There you see the advances are divided in three groups of 17 cards.

Here's an unofficial handy tool too:
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3207#3207


It's not so easy to take some cards out. there has been some discussion lately that some cards are seldom bought and I'm looking for ways to change that.

but if you want to play a first game with less than 51 cards I advice you to print all cards once (cheap paper) and keep a checklist for everyone seperately which cards are bought. this is the cheapest way to test and learn. In the end you'll be wanting the full set (you could ofcourse print only 12 sets if you have max 12 players)

cards to optional leave out (but only for a test) are:
advanced military,diaspora, library, wonder of the world, naval warfare, public works, roadbuilding, monument. After some playtest we do these months things might change (at least as houserules) and these cards might become more popular.

Still I recommend to NOT leave out cards.


Please read this forum for changes because the files provided on the offical pages are going through development.

This game is still in development anyway!
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=471






Not yet updated officially but gone through quite some changes:
- In spring 2008 we have changed the exact stating of each text on the cards.
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=452

- I changed the layout of the advances. all attributes on the front, flavor text on the back. clearer credit system. beter colors.
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=443
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=446

- I created new images for all 51 advances
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=433

- Some cards were renamed (e.g. Astronomy has become Astronavigation)
- I created new lay-outs for the commdoties
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=448

- I drew new images for the calamities
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=450


There has been some playtesting and adding some houserules at two of our groups here in the netherlands. Most of those changes are now used as unofficial but applied rules. Maybe things change officially too.

you can read some about that here:
[url]
http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=498[/url]

Hey Flo! Dank U Wel for this fast response. I followed the links you provided but i still think that there are just too many sciences to make this game appeal to a wider range of newbies. It's just too much information to swallow. I think I will stick to the original ADCIV Sciences for now.

Belgisch?

Or did you just learn some words?

Hey, there's nothing wrong with the original Advanced Civilization, but if you want to playt that nice game with more than 8 people, you have a problem

Most of the time we do play with around 6 people. Still I turned to the expansion now. Once you know thenew possabilities you don't want to go back.

It pays to take half an hour or so to read through all the cards.

You could email a list with all the attributes to your game-mates so that they can do some homework before playing the game

No, I'm German. my hometown is Aachen (Aken) so I pick up some words and phrases Right now I live in Berlin.

I may very well intodruce the new Advancements to my playmates one day since these true provide denser experience of the game. For now I will just stick to the original ones.

True, but you need to study this. Newbie players don't have the time for this and immediately starts playing the game, and therefore it is a good point stated that it can be too much.

So I propose to make a beginners variant of this game using like 24 or 30 advances, where rows of three advances giving credits to each other are removed from the game (and maybe some calamities must be removed too.) But it is hard thinking to keep the number of cards from each colour equal and right now I am too lazy to do it now.

Hi Rainer,

I guess I kinda agree with Johannes but it's not that I'm too lazy to do that.

Please read this note by the former chief of this project:

http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=272


The reason I'm not working on a system that provides you with less than all advanced is that I think the main reason to start this project in the first place is to provide experienced players with an expansion to give them something more than just Advanced Civilization.

There's nothing wrong with Adv.Civ. to start with for beginning players. This way players learn the game, which is huge for itself to know all the cards.

When players think knowing the original 24 cards by heart is too much, maybe this project it too much to step to.

I mean, an 18-player game like this is not an easy step-in game after all.


Nevetherless there could be created a simpler game, but this game has been set up as a large system. It takes a lot of time and playtesting to come up with a good 30-card system.

Until that moment, there's a lot of finetuning and playtesting to to for the full game, so i'd rather spend my time on that.
Don't know if there will ever be a moment to call the game 'complete', but I'm spending my time to go for that.

After that point, maybe there's time to create a simplified brother-game.


Another reason for not creating a simplified version is that the full game is still in progress. Thing might change and they have to be changed in the simplified version along.




So I guess I'm sticking to my opinion that one's gotta take some time to read the cards. Just like any other new BIG game, it takes a while to understand the big system.

So here is an interesting question/challange (and Flo will know where I'm going with this).

Do you guys think there is there a way to split the advances into two viable sets (which could then be combined into what we have now?). What sort of split division would work? What advances are required/recommended to always have available?

There is one problem to keep in mind.

Most advances are link to another. Once you take out one, it doesn't give credits to that higher one anymore. Also there may be a cheaper card giving credits to a card that doesn't exist anymore.


Better is to come up with a new scheme of, say 30-40 cards, and create a new credit system for that, create new (adjusted) attributes for that and limit the number of players to 8 players (and leave minor calamities out) and provide this as a standalone 'basic set'

But this seems very close to the original Advanced Civilzation. You could see this as an update or step-in for the expansion.


As mentioned above. This might be an option one day, but at the moment at least I am rather spending time on improving other parts of the game.