On this day we had a playtest of the game.
15 players showed up and it was decided to leave out the INdian subcontinent, drawing the line just east of the river Indus.

All players had played Adv. Civ before more or less which made the game reasonably fast, 11 hours for 13 rounds.

Chorasmia won a devastating victory with about 3000 points, followed by Iberia (yours truly), Thrace, Assyria and Persia all within 100 points of each other at roughly 2300-2400 points.

One problem was that we had too few commodity cards, only the 3 sets that are printable one the page. This led to the fact that most rounds the leading 4-5 civilisations didn't get any cards from stacks 1-4. A bit dissappointing to be a 7-city power and get 3 cards.

I think this can be a problem even with 13 players (which I believe is the limit for having 3 sets)

Other spontaneous comments:
The game gets violent very quickly, but that is expected, the calamities are brutal (consider for example that Civil War occured every round). Trade was hard with 15 people and a strict time limit (10 or 15 minutes).

More specifically,

Crete's position stinks even more than in standard. Illyria, Thrace and Hatti are very close up. and move after Crete on the critical turn when the ship lands. Crete needs some help I think.

Pottery is to cheap I think. 45 points for halving a calamity that's gonna show up 3 turns of 4 is extremely good.

As for east/west discussion, I think one card that benefits east is actually Cyclone. A Cyclone in the Mediterranean can bring down so many cities that you wouldn't believe it. And it came back very often too.

And finally I thought before the game that the new AST hurdles would be too easy, but with the lack of trade cards most of us actually got stuck on the 3 cards for 100 place.

/Vidar - Sweden

Which civilisations played on you playtest?
How did you get the counter for Kushan, chorasmia, Dravidian, because i have only 13 set of counters which includes the nine first with the game and the 4 others on this web site?
Did you use all the panels?
Did you have a commodity cards track?
did you do with the East world and commodity with the East world and from the other side with ths world?
i am asking these questions because i am tryin to organise a playtest with more than 12 players (may be 13)
Thanks

Heya Vidar... thanks for the report.

Can I ask what version of the rules and maps did you use?

I also participated in this game and played Indus (far east) !
I believe that we used the latest updated maps and rules, but as Vidar said we only used three sets of commodities.

We played with 15 persons and excluded, Kushan, Dravidian and Mayruan ! We cut the map east of the Indus river as mentioned above...
We did not have a card track and also decided to mix the non-tradeable calamities with the rest (I disagree on this one). There should be counters for 18 players + Barbarians !?

Indus as well as Iberia had pretty good starting positions (especially Iberia) and thus I had 7-9 cities most of the time (until the last turn with only 5). As Vidar pointed out, having many cities was not an advantage and also beeing far down on the AST made my life a hard...I only came on 7:th place. However, I had a great time. Thanks to Vidar. I hope to join an 18-player game at Lincon in Sweden this year 19-23 of may.

I got very few trade cards and most of them were high valued cards, which were hard to trade in the beginning. The trades were short due to lack of good trade cards and most of the time we finished in 10 minutes ! However, I thought that trading with 15 persons was a little chaotic, I prefer two groups of 9.

Besides, Crete, Illyria and Thrace, Arabia has got a very bad starting position, he cannot compete with Nubia and is too far from Egypt and the city sites in that area. Either Arabia should be divided into more territories or he should start closer to Nubia (in Nubia?) or closer to Egypt (north).

I noticed that Rhetoric was a very good civ card, especially with three sets of commodities. Pottery also seems to be too good.

Three cards over 100 points for AST advancement seems to be a bit tough, maybe 80 points would be fair !?

Cyclone also needs some revision, there should be a maximum of secondary effects I think.

Regarding Barbarian hordes: I dislike the idea that the victim himself (if smallest) can choose where the barbarians go after the initial attack. I think that it is better if the barbarians always try to do the most damage on the primary victim.

Regarding Cyclone: This calamity should not have any effect, if the primary vicitm does NOT have any coastal cities. Otherwise, it is only an advantage for the victim.

Velusion, if you are interested I have some digital images from this event. You will probably have my mail adress from the Apollo18 project.

/Kruppman

We skipped panels 10 & 11 (Indian subcontinent). As for counters, we used some counters from an original gameboard - for instance, Chorasmia was using Italian tokens.

The one map correction I have been thinking of is to give Arabia another 2-area in the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula. In the game, he was able to expand optimally up to 32 tokens but was in a hard spot from then on. Maybe there would have been more space for him if he built a ship when he had only sixteen tokens.

I agree with Vidar (even though he's my brother) that Crete had a lot of trouble in this game, since he moved before his northern neighbours in the crucial landing phase. Velusion, what are your thoughts behind re-arranging the A.S.T. order?

Pictures from the event will show up later, and I'll let you know where to find them. Maybe you want some to put on this site?

As for counters, I am thinking of making vector-based versions of the counters available on the site. My counters now were a bit smaller than the original game's counters, which was hard to tell when I was guessing at resolutions. Also, the map panels had to be shrunk a few percent to fit A4 papers in width, rather than the US letter format which I suppose they were meant for. So the map is a wee bit smaller (in scale, not in size of course) than the original, as well.

Anyway, it was very nice to actually try the variant. Movement on the board worked very well and our major problem was the lack of a fourth trading set. Until next time (in the middle of May), I will have to make one. As well as civilization cards. Maybe they will be updated with the current rules until then? Depends maybe on whether we will try the new credit rules... they are interesting but will need several games to get the new costs right, I think.

Just my two cents...

btw, all rules and maps were printed out on March 18th. So they were the latest versions.

"Also, the map panels had to be shrunk a few percent to fit A4 papers in width, rather than the US letter format which I suppose they were meant for. So the map is a wee bit smaller (in scale, not in size of course) than the original, as well."
did you manage with photoshop to shrink a few percent to fit one panel in two A4 paper, because i try to do that but the panel is tto big for exactly 2 A4 papers?

Yes, I printed each panel on two A4's. With about five centimeters overlap. Panel 12 needed three sheets, though.

Btw, the next session will be played on May 22nd, in Linköping. I am sure we will have 18 players that time, since it is played in conjunction with the Swedish championships which attract something like 50 or 60 Adv Civ players.

Oooh! Anybody have two spare plane tickets to go there from Rome, Italy?
I WANT TO BE THERE!![:p]

Raffaele

Aron..

Before you play 18 there are some tweaks you will want to make. Trust me!

Contact me directly at velusion(at)sbcglobal.net and I'll send you a list of the map and commodity changes.

Anyway. Could you please make a report "Series Replay"-like possibly with photos?
I'd gladly read it. And I promised to translate it in Italian for some new entusiasts.

Thank you in advance

Raffaele

I'm also going to be at LinCon, and I'm printing the map etc. now.

I however have problems with the tokens and trade cards. Paper just doesn't work, and my printer makes a full stop if I try to feed it cardboard paper. Any Ideas? I'm living in Linköping (the place of LinCon) if you know any equipment I can borow etc.

I'm eagerly waiting for the new civcards to be printable, going with the quickchart in the meantime. I'm no good at artwork, but if there is anything else I can do to help and I will do it for you.

Print the tokens on normal paper (two sheet one for front and one for back)
Then carefully (expecially to front/back correspondeces) glue them on the two sides of an heavier sheet.

Then cut them out.

This is the best idea I have.

Raffaele

Thanks. Might aktually work. Gota gett better glue though...

So we'll have TWO boards at Lincon? Cool!

I glued my cards and counters onto 0.6 mm cardboard. With normal "Limstift" glue (whatever that's in English), most cards have held and some have needed a second gluing.