One of the problems with Advanced Civilization is that there is a lot of 'momentum'. Once someone gets ahead, they generally stay ahead and win the game. To help even things out I was thinking of a variant where players with the non-tradable calamities would give them to another player of their choice after trading is over. The player that drew the calamity was already screwed by not getting a commodity. Plus, it would help people pick on the winner to create a more even game.

What do you think?

As bad as this problem is now, it was remarkably worse in the original civilization in which the only winning factor was the movement of the A.S.T. marker. With the "point" system in place in Advanced Civilizations this problem is somewhat lessoned as Civ Cards and Cities can make up a very short AST difference. However it is true that if you really do fall behind far (say 4 or 5 spaces) behind the leader - barring an unlucky civil war draw by the leader - there is little hope that they will win the game. This is a problem that will either have to addressed in some way or written off and being unavoidable.

I've been brewing over your suggestion for a few days, because I have entertained something very similar in my mind in the past. First I was skeptical if not dismissive of the idea thinking it would change things around too much or be unbalancing. After much thought though, I'm actually finding I like aspects of the idea a lot. There are problems however with some of the negative aspects to your proposal:

1) Trading would not be AS suspenseful.
2) It would be hard during trading not to mention the calamity that is being traded. I think it would make sense to allow people to freely name and trade tradable calamities. This is not *necessary* a negative I suppose.
3) Certain calamity cards would be more sought after - cards like Treachery would be more popular perhaps because the person would always directly benefit a city from getting it. All the tradable calamities would have to be retuned.
4) The calamity phase would either be very hostile or very tame. Either everyone would go for each other’s throats (or the leaders) or people would aim calamities at empires in where the cards wouldn't do much damage (if any) and the turn would be unusually peaceful.
5) Calamities can be targeted directly onto civilizations in which they would cause the most damage. For example Cyclone would be VERY deadly when in certain civilizations hands as they could wipe out many cities in one swoop, where as it would be less likely to cause as much specific damage with a random draw / trade / and resolve.
6) Non-tradable calamities would be much more dreaded now. Someone who picked up two would be even MORE unlucky than before.
7) There would be extra bookkeeping because not only would every civilization only be able to direct two calamities (this would stop someone from being a spoiler), each civilization would also only be able to be the primary target of two calamities (otherwise a player could quickly be eliminated from ever winning the game).
I would have to change a lot of things in the game

In essence... I really like the "gist" of the idea, but I'm not %100 convinced. #8 will always factor into my decision heavily as well.

What does everyone else think? This could be a VERY big change to things if I consider using it...

I think you misread the original post here. It said only the non-tradable calamities are handed out after trade is over. The tradable calamities are still tradable and are resolved normally.

It's an idea worth considering, actually. Maybe there should be some secondary effect targeted at the player handing the calamity away, just for fun.

Difficult to manage.

They would have to be handed over before disaster resolution - so that the leader can randomly shuffle and discard all but two disasters.

You would see less civil wars in the early game (who can I play it on so it has no effect), and the turn leader having it every time in the late game. (Except when he draws it himself - then the second place guy gets it)

It's an interesting way of getting round the "I got civil war this turn, I want to trade for disasters".

Another idea I got while replying is to replace non-tradeable disasters with place holders (non-tradeable). Then before disaster resolution everyone who has a non-tradeable disaster draws from the "non-tradeable disaster" stack. Thus you know that you have a disaster coming, but don't know if it is going to be an earthquake or civil war. (or something else).

Having played and enjoyed Civ/Advanced Civ and now Civ Project for the past 20 years, a couple of very minor criticisms I have against the game are:

1. The player who receives Civil War first generally never recovers to be a major force.

2. Players who get ahead with huge empires generally stay that way.
With the 2 major Calamity rule, if they receive a Major Non-tradeable Calamity (i.e. Civil War,) they have the advantage that with their strength, they can generally trade to acquire some of the less damaging Tradeable Calamity cards (e.g. Superstition, Treachery etc). By the end of trading they hope to have 4-5 Calamities cards, of which they need only play two. Having a large number of Calamity cards increases the odds that the nasty destructive Calamity card(s) can be discarded.

In our last game of Civ Project with 9 players we played a number of home rules.

- 2 trade cards per city (to advance the game quicker)

- 47 tokens per empire (to decrease the number of excess tokens available to attack other empires. {I am a pacifist at heart }

- The weaker empires to be the beneficiaries of Costal Migration, Tribal Conflict and Corruption.

- Added Drought as a 7th level Calamity. Because of the 2 Trade cards per city, as a 7th level Corruption Calamity was nuisance value and had minimal effect. Drought (all areas except flood plains has the population support number temporarily reduced by one - Agriculture also becomes ineffective) on the other hand is particularly nasty, and deserving of a high level Calamity.

- Beefed up the Tyranny Calamity to ensure that the victim always lost 2 x city number unit points.

- The size of the Empire at the end of trading determined the number of Calamities to be played. Every Empire played up to 2 Minor Calamities. Empires with up to 3 cities also played a maximum of 2 Major Calamities; Empires with 4-7 played up to 3 Major Calamites and Empires with 8-9 cities played up to 4 Major Calamities. It forced larger Empires to trade generously to off load their Tradable Calamities.

It worked well.

Sure at the end of 10 hours each Empire had tokens spread over distant territories all over the board, but the Empires were fairly even and everyone had a lot of fun.

Hi !
I have also enjoyed advanced civilization for lots of years and after reading trad2bay's post I have to totally agree with him according to the explained in point two of his post.

Currently we are playing a civproject cyberboard game ( 9 people , all of them experienced players ) and this turn we had to face up a similar situation.

I explain myself: one of the players had CIVIL WAR calamity, and during the trading round he has been trading to obtain the maximum number of calamities to try to avoid the CIVIL WAR effect. Once the trading round has finished he had in his own 5 different mayor calamities in adition to the civil war. Like rules said I have stacked and suffled all of them and randomly I have chosen two calamities and discarded the remaining ones. The chosen ones have been superstition and civil disorder. This guy was ruling a really big empire, having a lot of trade cards and avoiding in this way the civil war effects.
This is only an example of something I have seen in a lot of diferent games.

Currently we are in turn 13 and from here to the end of the game will remain 5 or 6 more turns so no more much civil wars will appear.

I know this is a valid strategy and doesn't go against the rules but in my opinion disrupts the balance of the game. Some other civilizations were eagerly waiting for a civil war to have the posibility to raise their empires. And now they can see how most of this turn calamities ( most of them belonging to the greatest empires) are discarded with no effect and the civil war vanishing in their face.
To reduce the effect of civil war we have several civilization cards and using this strategy We are also reducing the importance of this cards.

I have a proposal to avoid this kind of situations, maybe the rules could be changed in the following way:
"24.3 No player may be the primary victim of more than two major and one minor calamities in the same turn. If a player receives more than two major calamities in the same turn he will first discard any duplicates. If he still has more than two, his TRADABLE major calamities are shuffled together, and one is drawn at random. If he still has more than two the same will done with the NON-TRADABLE ones. The remaining major calamities received by that player are
disregarded and are returned to the appropriate stack of trade cards. The same process is then followed with minor calamities with only one minor calamity being selected. There is no restriction on the infliction of secondary effects of calamities."

Doing this the effect described in the example will be avoid.
For our next game I'm thinking in use parragraph 24.3 in this new way.
It would be glad listening to your opinions about this issue.

In the other hand for an upcoming variant of civproject game I have added also a Drought calamity working in a very similar way than yours. It's a 5 non-tradable (in substitution of FLOOD ), the main difference it's that agriculture works. We have had the same idea several thousands of kilometers away!! .
For more info about this variant see my web page :
http://www.civiboard.com/hellas/

Best regards.

Jon G.

I've been thinking about running the stoic's variant for AdvCiv next at Redscape. Let me know when you get closer on your Hellas variant, I'll want to see if I can't get Cyberboard running.

Personaly I don't think this is a problem, nor do I think you should remove the option of this perfectly sound strategy. The calamities in excess of 2 still hurts, if nothing else as not being a commodity...

Well, that said I find one huge problem with your proposed paragraph, if a player only holds tradable calamity cards he will end up with only one one calamity! A paragraph describing what I think you want is:
24.3 No player may be the primary victim of more than two major and one minor calamities in the same turn. If a player receives more than two major calamities in the same turn he will first discard any duplicates. If he still has more than two, his tradable major calamities are shuffled together, and one (or two if he has no non-tradable major calamities) is drawn at random, and his non-tradable major calamities are shuffled together, and one (or two if he has no tradable major calamities) is drawn at random.
The same process is then followed with minor calamities with only one minor calamity being selected. There is no restriction on the infliction of secondary effects of calamities.

We tried this variant as well where non tradeable calamities were given priority, but the bigger advanced agressive empires still seemed to get ahead. Mind you playing with the option of picking up 2 Trade Cards per city, probably skewed things a little. I will be interested to how your play test goes where you only pick up one Trade Card per city.

I am glad to see that there is someone else who likes and plays Drought as well.

Your webpage looks great. You have obviously put a lot of time and effort into it.

Hi there!

I forgot that possibility [:0] ,anyway I was thinking in the same way you rewrite the parragraph. I will test this little change in rules for our incoming Hellenization game. Regarding "The calamities in excess of 2 still hurts, if nothing else as not being a commodity.." I'm not so agree. When you go through this strategy (holding a destructive CIVIL WAR ) and you are trading for mayor calamities you can also interchange minor for mayor and do tradings involving more than 3 cards. People with a Civil Disorder,Epidemic or Barbarians are wishing to do a last time trade so they are always ready to offer good comodities to the other hand.

About playing picking two trade cards per city:I have played a lot using this way ( with some friends using the PC GAME ) and I don't like it very much. The pace of turns it's really quicker but in my opinion the game loss a bit, use civproject rules playing in this way would diminish the AST importance, most of the civilizations wouldn't have any problems to obtain civilization cards requirements to go through AST.
I'm glad you have enjoyed my webpage, thank you very much for your comments.

Jon G.