I think we are coming close to some reasonable option.

Still I see some problems:

Let me explain:
The card would say:



The rules would say:

FAMINE:
- The primary victim must remove surplus without regarding the benefit of Agriculture.
- (in addition) primary victim must remove x tokens
- secondary victims must remove x tokens
- cards that aggravate or reduce.

FLOOD:
- The Flood Plain is selected. If no units on a flood plain, the primary victim destroys one of his coastal cities, and there is no secondary victim.
- All players that have units on the affected flood plain must remove surplus for all areas on the affected flood plain without regarding the benefit of Agriculture.
- The primary victim removes x unit points.
- All secondary victims remove x unit points.
- cards that aggravate or reduce.

What it does:

FAMINE:
A non-tradable calamity affects the whole civilization for the primary victim. After that an additional number of units must be removed.

Pottery would reduce the addional loss, but the excess tokens for agriculture are destroyed anyway.

Probably lost for Agriculture: up to 20 unit point
Probably lost for Famine anyway: 10 units

A primary victim cannot fully defend against Famine, a secondary can.

FLOOD:
A Non-tradable calamity affects all players on a single flood plain, if the primary victim has units on it, otherwise all other players are out.

All of those players (most of the time one or two players) loose the excess tokens on the flood plain. this can be up to 7 tokens, but if all areas on the flood plain contain cities, this might be 0.

After that the players remove x unit points from the flood plain.

I think this is not what we want in the first place.
Famine becomes much more devastating (ever for the players having the need for it) and Flood might result in being unchanged.

I made a slight change.

This is my proposal:

FAMINE:
- primary victim must remove x tokens
- secondary victims must remove x tokens
- cards that aggravate or reduce.
- After all removal The primary victim must remove surplus without regarding the benefit of Agriculture.
(actually the way it currently is)

FLOOD:
- The Flood Plain is selected. If no units on a flood plain, the primary victim destroys one of his coastal cities, and there is no secondary victim.
- The primary victim removes x unit points from the flood plain
- All secondary victims remove x unit points from the flood plain.
- cards that aggravate or reduce.
- After all removal all victims holding agriculture must remove an additional five tokens (not unit points)

So for the card:


For the rulebook:







For the Calamity Quickchart:
Flood - Aggravated by Agriculture.



I consider this like the destruction of five from both factions in Military for Civil War. I mean, some definetive damage.
Even if Flood would sweep the flood plain clean (because you don;t have much there) you would still have to remove the excess tokens.

I'm clearly stating 'tokens' (not units) because removing 5 unit points would still give the agriculture benefit. (example: you reduce a few cities on high numbers, and actually might get a near city in return)
Order players to remove tokens rather than unit points nearly equals this additional surplus check without agriculture, but this time, players will loose 5 anyway (not more, not less)


For Velusion's option it would be unfair for a civilization that NEEDS Agriculture, and that circumstantial has a single token on a flood plain, would loose all excess tokens for agriculture (even the 1 and 0 areas)

For my proposal, these players do get hit, but only in a solid five damage.

Also it covers the problem of the higher poplimit benefit in reducing cities, though only for Famine and Flood but these come around often enough for both primary or secondary victim),

A Slave revolt drawback could be traded away (which is less strong, and therefore interesting) but it doesn't deal with the reduction benefit, so adding this Slave revolt drawback alone would still leave the need for an additional rule for this (that's why this discussion in still on)




I think this option is the fair, and simple solution for our problems:
- Weaken Agriculture for the players not in need for it most.
- Hit the '4' and '5' areas most.
- Don't touch the '0', '1', '2' areas.
- Deal with the city reduction benefit for Agriculture
- Important: Keep it simple, both in wordings and in practice.


Anyone?

It's been silent here for the past days compared to the previous ones. I suppose no real complaints have been made for the last option.

I anyone has better ideas, or complaints, please react. For now I really think this is the most reasonable option.

Next week we're going to play a game of 9 players and I'm going to playtest this last option.

I'd be interested in seeing the results of some playtesting.

Do the additional five tokens removed after flood have to come from a flood plain?

DG.

No, this is in order to ensure the removal of 5 tokens. Otherwise it could ocur that no 5 tokens remain n the flood plain.

If you think it should be mentioned, I propose the following:

change this to that in the rulebook:

29.5.1.6 After all losses are removed, all victims of Flood holding Agriculture, must destroy an additional five of their tokens.

29.5.1.6 After all losses are removed, all victims of Flood holding Agriculture, must destroy an additional five of their tokens from anywhere on the board.

I think this is potentially a good solution to reduce agriculture's power. Flood is often a bit toothless to most nations and so beefing it up to a coastal city plus five tokens could be good.

Mind you, I can't see Egypt, Babylon or Celts buying agriculture before engineering anymore! Shaking up the order in which countries buy cards is probably not a bad thing!

Indeed, though players taking risks will, which in the end might make the game a bit more fun at this point.

Playtest Result:


We have been playing with the 0,1,2 rule (Agriculture only gives a benefit to areas which have a marked population of 0, 1, or 2). New players have had no problem with this rule, and it decreased the desire for agriculture by the "power" civs (Babylon & Egypt).

Granted, we played with very few players and didn't finish the game, and we were using the original board (Civilization - not even advanced Civ) instead of the CEP board. Still, I think that option is a very good one.

I am not a fan of all the floodplain restrictions - the floodplains matter during the calamities (just like the volcanoes). Other times, it's good to ignore them.

I'm ok with changing the calamity effect, but if you are losing random units from other places - why? What is the "historical" or "in-game" reason for losing people? I mean, random armies don't just die because of a flood 1000 miles away. You could say they aren't being fed, but rarely did people transport that much food a long distance - if you can't grow it where you were (even with agriculture), then you didn't eat. That's what the population (and the increased pop w/ agriculture) represent.

For the 0,1,2 rule, it's easy to say that early agriculture only made lands which were less fertile become more fertile (by moving existing water, soil and livestock to reap its benefits). The fertile lands don't benefit much, because there's already plenty of water, good soil, and wild animals to hunt in the fertile lands. Wild flora/fauna is just as abundant as domestic.

Anyway, that's my vote - other options may be added, but I suggest figuring out the in-game reason behind a change, then playtest individual options for both balance and complexity.

Hi Chris,

I notice by the way you wrote your last post, you're not too happy with my last proposal. That's fine.

It's not up to me to decide. You playtested your idea, so will I playtest my last proposal. Not because I don't listen, but to me this last proposal is better, that's why I proposed in the first place.

Besides I discussed this with a few people, and we came to this option. (ofcourse it's just who you're talking with). It's not my sole idea.

The result of these playtests might be that we're both happy with our options. Maybe because there is NO ONE right option where others would be false. Maybe in the end it's just a matter of taste.

In the end it's Velusion to decide which version will be included.

OK?





Answers to your last reply:

ARMIES
you are talking about troops. I don't see the population tokens as 'Armies' only. I see them as population in the first place. As well as farmers, citizens, slaves, soldiers. In the end we're talking about population expansion, and population limits. So our tokens represent the more general inhabitants of an area.

FLOOD
My justification for the Flood-option is that flood mostly doesn't come as problem alone. After a few cities and population have been killed and destroyed, a lot of support is needed for these area to build up again. Agricultural land is destroyed and people need food.

Indeed it would be more reasonable if those extra tokens would come from the flood plain or adjacent to them. I chose for 'anywhere' on the board' to not make it more complex than needed. Many of our calamities work this way. You could ask the same for (for example) "Famine", "Civil War", "Slave Revolt". Reasonable these calamities could occur in a smaller region only. Though for our game we chose to make them affect the full civilization. That's the way it works best.

REALITY
If we attach this strong to historical justification, then why couldn't we agricultural improve the areas of our current 3,4,and 5 poplimits. Ofcourse it's just how you write it down. Things like irrigation even improve flood plains. Let's not pick up that discussion here


CONCLUSION:
Let's agree to disagree. I'm not trying to bring your option down. Both options have both good components and historical misinterpretations. Let's see it that way. You prefer that option, I prefer this, other may agree in one or prefer other options.

Ok so yesterday was our game and playtest for Agriculture (among others).

We played with 9 players (I was the non-playing gamemaster)

Apart from many foudings which I will describe elsewhere on the forum this is the result for Agriculture the way we played it.:

- The flood drawback seems not so strong itself, though it turned out to be very hard for a player that got sacked twice by flood and agricutlure in Egypt.

- So the card itself was playtested well.

- All agreed the card needed a drawback something like this.

- This specific drawback seemed to be a reasonable option but certainly NOT the best.

- Criticism came from both the primary victim and other players that these five tokens should not come from anywhere on the board, because there's no reason for it.

- Though five additional losses were an option if these would have to come from the flood plain, this seemed not the best option.

So:
To me it's good to have had this playtested, though the result was negative for this option.

After the game we held a review and discussion on this card. This resulted in two reasonable options:


Option 1:


Option 2:



Since option 1 has already been playtested and turned out fine, I propose to have option 2 playtested as well, see how this turn out, and choose one of those two options.

I'm directly linkin to Merlok's game due january 3th.

Ok, we will do so..

Another optoin (though rather work intensive) would be to say that agriculture only helped 0 and 1 regions. We could then go over the map and slectively increase some of the 2 regions to 3s. This would still make agricuture a "good card" for many civs - but now is just becaums a normal card rather than a great card...

This is a nice option and playtested as a (0,1,2)-rule instead of a (0,1)-rule with positive result. But the downside for this option is that some civilizations (like Assyria) hardly have areas with a population limit what is low enough. Since Assyria is built in by Hatti, Egypt, Minoa (on Cyprus) and the edge of the west map, Agriculture should have to be a useful card for Assyria.

I think changing some of the population limits from 2 to 3 is a good option in the first place, though we have to be very carful in this (not randomly do this). I think Gerart is the right person to take a look at this, as he's been studying the card very carfully lately for the EW split. He also made a exact list of all areas. We have to regard the potential number of tokens, areas city sites, and the change between agriculture or not in this.


We realized during our last game that the current map is a little too tight. It's fair to have the map be right whenever every player holds agriculture, but it think it should be just a little easier without. not much, but just a little.
Changing some 2's to 3's might do this trick. Along with this I think maybe dividing one or two areas into two seperate areas would also help doing this.

(Thinking about Sarmatia and Siwa)
But I don't have this list in my head, so I don't know for sure, it this is the right option.

Yep. I'm inclined to agree. My impression is that it is difficult to cycle through the 8 deck because of how tight it can be.

One idea would be to split up the Assyria homeland some more (multiple 2 areas is better than a 4) maybe via "blow up" like Greece. I'm sure there are other locations were we can add in a few areas.

splittin gup might be the right thing, but a blow up is too difficulut.

We actually considered it after you mentioned this idea once, but unlike greece where you strecht your blowup over an unused open sea space, in Assyria you will have to move over other areas.

Small areas aren't that much for a problem, but as long as one token or city can be place in it, and the name doesn't need resize or inword line breaks


If you split up areas I see a little problem that could be fixed in this, and that's the four city sites above Jerusalem. Once those cities exist a 'wall' occurs that blocks any movement between egypt and assyria.

Let's move this map-discussion to another topic because it is becoming off-topic here.