We played a game of 5 players to try the new changes like described here: http://www.civproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=498

Just for a playtest.

The goals:

1- Try the changes like described.
2- Additional try the effect of Trade Routes as special ability.
3- Try and use wooden cubes instead of coardboard tokens.
4- Retry the previous changes (Wotw, written record, monument, Diaspora)
5. Retry the ASTtimemaker option.

I can be short about the results:


we used the original Advanced board using Ibera, Africa, Illyria, Thrace and Crete without using the parts for turkey, cyprus, Egypt. This resulted in a small board like described in the advciv rules.

This should encourage some more conflict.


- 5 players is just too less players to start a game with. We agreed on 6 players to be the minimum. At a regural round there got only max 5 cards of a number in play. This ment that most of a trade card set was in stock so it was hard to get a set together. It look at least 2 but sometimes 3 turns to get a full set together. Combined with little space we got stuck to max 7 cities for the bigger nations and 3-4 for the smaller.
At the end of the game there was no player with 3 cards over 200.

Combined with playtest 5 we can say that the timemarker option should start with 7 players at least. Like last month and like todaywe played for 10 hours and we could play some more rounds. So the timemarker option will not be used anymore for a 5-6 player game by us.

For me personally I don't want to play a game of Civ anymore with less than 6 players. Too time consuming for the fun it brings. I'd rather try and get 6 players together at another day.

Though it IS possible to play a game with 5 players I'd make a mention in the rulebook to recommend a game starting with 6 players.

Playtest option 4 ment some players bought written record soon again, but no-one got to monument or Wotw so there is no result in that. No proclaim, no deny.

Playtest option 3 failed. After a round 5 I decided to replace my wooden cubes by cardboard tokens again. We are used to stack tokens at stacks of 5. This way you can easily see how many tokens you have in stock or treasury. Another thing I miss at cubes is the flipside. we are used to flipping the tokens when expanding and moving. this is impossible.
Stacking tokens is stock as well as on the board give a quicker counting than cubes. So this option we all agreed on is not recomended.

Playtest option 2: we did not get to buy it.

Playtest option 1:

We only got to buying urbanism, monarchy, theocracy, military and naval warfare.

- Urbanism is a great card to me. I used it 3 times and it's cheap for it's use. The fact that we removed the drawback made it actually being bought by players who previously didn;t even want it when it was free. So I think we keep it. NOTE: it should be mentioned that exactly one city may be build per turn using urbanism. Like architecture. Those two combined can be very powerful.

- Monarchy can be a powerful card. Though it has a drawback. It's the only cheap red card that has a drwaback and therefore block the ability to reasonably build up red credits. Still we did not agree to try and remvoe the tyranny drawback yet.

- Theocracy was not used but only made the secondary effect of iconoclasm defelct to another player once.

- Military is a great card. Though the removal of drawbacks had no effec tin this game. 1 player bought it and made great use of it.

- Naval warfare: It was the first time I ever saw it bought though it was especially used for it's extra token option. No civil disorder of civil wasr was applied to the twoplayers holding this card so no result in this playtest.


Additional finding: We did not use the excel-sheet Civ.Administrator we created because we changed the costs of some cards.

Now we used the credit tokens again and a list made by Paul. Some like the list, some didn't but we all liked the credit tokens again.

We think we'll be using the credit tokens in addition to the Civ.adm. and maybe a blocknote to keep track of credits on certain cards in the future.











Conclusion:

- No wooden cubes
- No more game with less than 6 players
- No time marker for less than 7 players
- Let's playtest again.



These are our playtest option for next game until changed by new input


Playtest proposal for next game:

Urbanism
Remove earthquake drawback
add the line 'No more than one city per turn may be build using Urbanism' (or a similar line)

Naval Warfare
Remove civil disorder drawback
Change civil war drawback to an additional 1 from both sides

Military
Change civil war drawback to an additional 2 from both sides

Advanced Military
Lower price from 260 to 220
Change civil war drawback to an additional 2 from both sides

Public Works
Lower from from 230 to 210

Anatomy
Change the first attribute to: 'Upon Purchase, you may immediately acquire up to two (dual-)science cards with a face value of less than 100 points each or one (dual-)science card with a face value of less than 200 points).'

Trade Routes
change 'During the return excess trade cards phase' to 'During the special abilities phase' (maybe it needs a limit of two cards per turn)

And additional the previous playtests we keep continuing untill proven wrong or added to the official rules:

Wonder of the World
# You may acquire one additional trade card for free, from a trade card stack of your choice that is higher than your amount of cities in play.
# CORRUPTION: Five additional commodity card points must be discarded.
# Nullifies Trade Empire.
# Decreases your epoch entry requirements on the AST by one city.

Written Record
Change the extra five credits to ten credits

Monument
Change the extra ten credits to twenty credits

and

Diaspora
add the line: A city build this way may only be build in an area containing a city site

Politics
add the line: In case a city is annexed, exactly five treasury tokens must be trandsferred from treasury to stock

I don't quite agree with you on the number of players - I think the game is quite playable with five, although six is better. But maybe we should just have used a slightly bigger map, to have a few more city sites. I finally did manage to build nine cities in the last few rounds, but I had lots of trouble to achieve that, and I think five of them were wilderness cities.

I do agree that with five players, we can do without the time marker, but I'm in favor of using it with six players, because this five player game actually lasted about two hours shorter than the previous six player game. If you want to play a full six player game we'll have to start really early or finish very late.

The credit tokens were great. The list I made was a bit cumbersome, but maybe I'll produce a simpler version later.

We played on the map provided with Avalon Hills Advanced Civillization, and what was suggested there for 5 players.

I've played 5-player games on the exact board before and it didn't give problems all the time. Sometimes it did.

Previous game we played with six on Mirjams map was too easy. At a regular round 3 players had 9 cities and the rest had 7 or eight and that is too much for 6 players. No doubt there weren't problems there, but it gave no competition.

Well Mirjams map just isn't well balanced. When playing 18 players on that full map I now know, I'd rather play East cause it gives you much more space compared to the West part which actually is the original Adv.Civ. map.

Next time we play, I hope to play on the map provided with this package of Civproject.

I hope that's more balanced on a five player game.
What's still a problem, is that there's quite little of a certain trade good coming in the game every round.


I guess for all times, some players prefer making notes and others don't. A good list can always be handy for some players.



When you know time is a problem when starting the game you can add the marker. say, you're starting a game at 10.00 and you must finish at 22.00.
Still i'd rather set my alarm an hour earlier and have a much more fun game. But that's not always possible for everyone all the time