Please allow me to introduce myself...

I'm Gerart de Haan, and as my name suggest, I am related to Flo; both as a cousin, and as a close friend.

Eversince Flo bought Civilization some ten years ago, we have played it together frequently. During the last half year I have often been a guest on the Civ Project site, and though I know the game by heart, I never joined the forum so far.

But now I do, because of a specific reason. Last months I have been working on a new and advanced credit calculator. It has been play tested during our last game, a forthnight ago, and afterwards we discussed about it and made some more additions and improvements.

So, here it is: download it, check it, and play with it. And if you have some (constructive) comments, just shoot...

http://www.kjbwaarland.com/Civilization ... ulator.xls
http://www.kjbwaarland.com/Civilization ... Manual.doc

Gerart

Hey Gerart, nice to see you have joined

I haven;t seen the latest version so I started testing.

One thing I know is that you don't want it to be a highly developed software, but rather a tool.

Something I did notice, is that when you enter two names that are equal (for any case there are two players with the same name, without manually adjust this in say Peter 1 and Peter 2) the sheet gives an error. It could be worked out in giving an option to change a name afterwards, the same for typing errors.

Ok

I've been testing some more. I cannot find anything wrong at it.

We've been playing with a simpler version 2 weeks ago and that worked great!

What's improved from that one, is that you don't see the victroy points during the game, as long as you don't click the graph-sheet or the overview. That could be hidden somewhere maybe.

In the previous version, you could forget to enter the number of cities each turn. Now it's impossible.

Funny option: At ending, automatically print the graph for the number of players. (now i'm joking)

Welcome to CivProject Gerart!

Thanks for your nice tool. Unfortunately I have no laptop to use when playing CivProject, so I won't be able to use it, but with your leave I'd like to put it in the "Contributed" section of the Archive.

Anyway, playing around with it I think I've found two minor errors you might want to fix for later revisions:
1) I find no way of registering backwards movement on the A.S.T. for the player being the primary victim of regression.
2) When clicking on the "End of Turn" it asks for the amount of cities of all civilizations, including those not in play, and then it proceeds to do nothing. If I click on it again, it does something in other sheets as they flicker by on the screen, and then OpenOffice.org Calc crashes. I'll assume this doesn't happen with Excel...

P.S. Vanilla OpenOffice.org can't execute VBA macros at all, but I'm using the build from http://go-oo.org, which can. It is also available for Windows, if you want to try it out and see if you can get it to work for those of us not wanting to pay $$$ to Microsoft for an, in most respects (at least those that matters to me), inferior product.

Flo:

You're right about your point of the bug in case of two players with the 'same name'. I thought of that and have (so far) been a little lazy in avoiding that bug, since it is (from practical point of view), kind of bullshit to enter two identical names in a score list. However, this can be fixed, and I will put it on my list with comments.

Jonno:

Thanks for your comments.

I did not specify anything about Regression, but it can be handled manually. If a player is primary victim of regression, go the worksheet 'Overview' and table 'Player Status', and type in his new AST position in the column 'AST'. It works, but is not very satisfactory; I will think of automatizing this event in a later version.

In relation to your open office, I can tell you that since I went to university (eight years ago), I have always used MS Excel and I know how to hande it. Last year I learned a little VBA at my work, which I used in this workbook. Since I am really not a programmer, I'm quite sure my VBA code could be written much better, which would make it compatible with your software. Your troubles with the file don't occur in Excel - or at least not in my version. I'm sorry, but I'm a little a-politic concerning computer stuff and just opportunistically using MS Office because I know it...

Gerart

About double names:

Oh well, It could be possible in any case with 18 players and there are 2 players with the same name in which not all players do know eachother at the start of the game, and the person entering the names does not know either at the start. (guess this won't happen at 8 players). It's just that it results in an error rather than an option like "this name is allready used" or something like you've did with accidentally entering 10 cities, it gives a message that it's impossible.



About, Regression:
Ever since we used the Expansion project all fanatic players are too afraid of Regression (cause in most cases it loses the game) so that those players just avoid drawing the 9th stack by simply not building more than 8 cities.
The lesser fanatic players mostly don't get to choose between 8 or 9 cities.

I like the calamity very much though, cause it adds a sort of brake to the number ones. Only the most daring players go to the limit like this. It takes a lot of more courage rahter than just luck to get and keep 9 cities. And besides that, the players with the most victory points are those at the frontline of the AST and these are mostly the only ones to be hit dramatically by Regression.

Gerart:
I'm not using Linux and OOo for political or ideological reasons, but because for most stuff I do (though not CivProject, unfortunately), it's simply better.

Flo:
I'm regularly playing with anything between 6 and 18 players without knowing everyone's name in advance, but then I'm playing at conventions, and don't use a computer, so I probably don't count...

And regarding Regression, 5VP ain't that dangerous, two or three more advances will compensate for that. Also, in most CivProject games, most players won't be able to proceed on the AST every single turn of the game, so quite often Regression just saves you from having to stand still at the next epoch entry, and thus not do any damage at all in the long run. However, Regression together with Fundamentalism (2 steps on the AST, eg. 10VP) does hurt, that is why I never buy Fundamentalism without buying Library first.

I made an updated version of the Advanced Credit Calculator. A button for 'Regression' has been added as main difference. Furthermore I removed a crucial bug that I found. However, I skipped the idea of building in protection against the bug of entering the same name twice. Too much effort for just a small improvement...

Get your version at:

http://www.kjbwaarland.com/Civilization/Advanced_Credit_Calculator_2.xls

Gerart

Yesterday we played a game of CIV with 7 players.
One reasen was, that we playtested the Creditcalculator (without Gerart).

We came to a list of things that could be changed to this.
I emailed it to Gerart, but I will put a shortlist here of things that might be noticed by others too.

- There is no option to add another player during the game (civil war).

- The same for when a player should be destroyed and return in civil war.
(you think that's impossible, but in our last game, we were close to that, without any collective plan in destroying a specifiec nation).

- It could be made possible to hide sheets of nations that don't play. This was intended, but is not working right at the moment.

- The credits for 'Library' cannot be discounted automatically.

- The credits for 'Anatomy' cannot be discounted automatically.

- I could be more efficient to put the AST-sheet as last sheet in the row, this way you input all purchases in AST-order, then altering the AST.

- I was a bit confusing that the AST works with nations, where the sheets work with player names, (this has been changed before), but I think it will be clearer to use only nations for sheets. We could still put the names in the specific sheet, but not in the name of the sheet.

- The graph was not working right. I cannot tell what the problem was.

- Maybe something like a seperarte 'correction' sheet could be added. This way you can make changes to the stats, without looking at all the stats for all players (like victory points)

- I don't know, but I could be made possible to change purchases when you discover an orror made in checking purchases one or more previous turns.

Due to balance issues we found during playtest, this is not allowed in CivProject. (This is mostly because the playable area on the map varies with the number of players, and the playable area must remain fixed during the entire game, and thus the number of players must remain fixed.)


Actually, no special support s needed. A player can not be completely destroyed in CivProject. A player may loose all his units on the map, and thus not have very much to do during most phases, but he will not be completely destroyed. For example: He will regress in the move succession markers phase (as he has no cities), and he might be able to trade (if he has 3 or more commodities saved from earlier turns).


Other than that, your comment seams good.

OK I never saw that (or looked over that).

In advanced Civilization, a player starting later comes in at Civil War, and a player destroyed, comes in at a civil war too. it that case taking over all advances and AST position of the civil war victim.

I didn't know this part was lost in Expanded.


In this case, I'd like to know what happens, if a player has no units on board and AST position is Stone age. Does that player regress every turn or stay at the place before bronze age entry.

If you are in the stone age, you never regress (except as the primary victim of Regression of course, but I've yet to see a player in the stone age with 9 cities...). Having units on the board or not isn't a factor.

As we discovered before, playtesting is the most important part of the road to something good...

I will be working on Flo's input and post another improved version (including comments), when I'm done.

Gerart


PS. Flo forgot to say that notwithstanding the comments, the CC worked quite well last Sunday... :-)

Maybe I'm not a person to mention the good parts and focus on the things to improve first. I guess so be it.

All I do is to try and get the best result, but we discussed and agreed about this allready together.

Just wanted to react on this.

I have thought of the comments on my CC, and come (so far) to the following conclusions:

- The worksheet 'Tables' will be hidden, since there's no use showing it during a game.

- I will try to add a macro that can hide the worksheets 'Overview' and 'VPs' on command. This because I noticed that some players prefer to not know the exact score of each player during the game, but only at the end. The sheet was never made for this option, but I will introduce it.

- Player names will be added to the AST list, and will be used in the Vp-chart.

- Library and Anatomy are pains in the ass to me. It will be quite difficult to make a proper solution for their effects when purchased. I will think of a solution, but if the amount of work (and chance of errors) exceeds the advantages, I will leave it. It ain't that hard to solve manually during a game.

- A possibility to correct the amounts of cities or AST position of a player will be introduced. Don't know yet how I will do it, but it is definately possible.

- I am thinking of using coloured tabs for tribes that are being played, while making non active sheets one other single colour, so they're easily distinguishable from each other.

Gerart