The facts are speeking for themselves:
Round 11, Crete is shopping for Civilisation cards and is trading in 145 points of trade cards. For this he gets 1110 points of civcards, that is 6.5 times what he paid. I was impressed untill Africa anounced he was bying 1250 poins civcards for 47 points tradecards, that is 26.5 times what he paid! This time I was chocked.
Part of this is probably due to the fact that no one played Hatti and we (the western civs) got space enough to support 7-8 cities most rounds, and to the fact that we did lots of east-west trading effectively resulting in one more civcard per traded set (se my post Playtest May 22 2004 - No east-west trade please!) but over 1200 points of discount in one single round is still absurd. In fact we stoped playing before set time, as all agreed it was silly to continue playing under these circumstances. Henrik (the one playing Crete) and I developed a new, revised, credits system (or at least the base for one), and here it is:
Single colored cards should generaly give 10 credits to its own color, but only five points to ONE other color. Dual-collored cards recieves more credits so if they give less would only bee fair: 5 to each color. There is lots of cheap science and craft cards, so these should only give 5 to it's own color, as well as 5 to one other color. We also think that the discounts to specific cards should be lowered, but we couldn't agree if 10/20, 15/20 or all 20 would be best.
There was also an idea on having an minimum cost bying civcards, either a specific sum, different for each card, or a general statement such as 1/3 of the original cost, but IMO that would be unnessesary if we could just fix the credits system.

These problems has to be solved before putting the new civcards for download at the site. Any comments or new ideas is very welcome.

Another smaller isue was that we tought that the credit tokens (which btw makes it much simpler) should be availible with the values of 5, 10, 20 and 40 instead of 5, 10, 25 and 50, as this would require you to keep less tokens. Smaller denominations shouldn't be a problem if less credits is given.

Hmm... yes this will have to be addressed. I assumed you played with the most recent system?

Can you give me an example (like crete) on how he purchaced so much?

Yes, we used the most recent system.
As I said above, we did have problems remembering all the Civcards we owned even as we played, but after round 10 I (Thrace) had 11 civcards, 35 point religion, 90 points science, 55 points civic, 50 points art and 80 points craft credits. Both Crete and Egypt had more, and Asyria wasn't far behind me. Both Crete and I got Engineering for free, Crete had a total of 200 points credits towards engineering. Especially the dual-colored cards quickly became for free. If Henrik or Henrik (Crete or Egypt) has better memmory than me, they could probably help you more.

Personally I don't like the idea that the cards give credits to other colors. We want people to concentrate on one or two colors since that will give a more diversified game. With all these inter-color credits, you can go ahead and buy cards of any color you like with almost no penalty.

A first thing to do is to calculate credit/cost ratios for all cards. Then, we know where to change things. Since the aim of this project is to expand the original Adv Civ, not create an entirely different game (correct me if I'm wrong on this), the credit/cost ratios of Adv Civ should give pretty good guidelines on how to correct the credits in the Expansion. We want the early cards to give credits but as soon as you're buying 200 point cards, you shouldn't be getting any more discounts.

Another thing: the credit chits were great. However, they did no difference since you still had to read the back of the cards to make the correct purchases. Specific card credits have to be removed if we want the new system to work. Or, make credit chits that say "20 to Engineering" etc so that all credits can be counted with a glance.

Looks like I have to do some number crunching...

How about this rule:
"For buying duel colored cards you may use credits from either (not both) of the colors."

That would help eh?

I definatly think you are on the right track with limiting how much the dual cards give. I'm thinking cut everything roughly in half (round down in five increments).

Do you get the impression that the duel civ cards were the main problem or was it a deeper issue?

Dual colored cards is not the main issue, it goes deeper than so. Dual colored cards are extremes, where expensive cards for free was comon, but even on single colored cards more than half in discount was still very common. More has to be done.

Halfing the credits given over all is simple, but rounding isues will occur. Rounding down to a multiple of five and normal cards will give a total of 5 in credits (too litle) and rounding to a whole number and the math will be harder. Dropping bonuses to other colors is also a solution, but the larger freedom is appealing to me, so I think that at least most cards should give bonuses to other colors, but perhaps not all, and all cards of one color should not all give bonuses to the same color.

"For buying duel colored cards you may use credits from either (not both) of the colors." is not bad, but not the full solution.

I agree with aron on credit tokens for specific bonuses.

Single colored cards being half off would require the majority of the like minded cards to be purchanced. This is roughly on par with the old rules.



Right now each card gives two secondary bonuses. How about we lower that down to one. The sole secondary bonus will now vary from field to field rather than being fixed (i.e. a craft won't always give it's secondary bonus to Science, etc...)



Lets change it then



Just a note - The game was designed to be played with all the civs close to each other- Leaving out one unbalances things (sometimes very badly). Next time you should pick a civ on the edges of the map and block off areas. This will eventually be detailed in the scenerio book...



Actually I think that it would be less diversified. You would have the craft empire, the sciences empire, the Arts empire... ect, etc. However, people are free to create these now, they are just wasteing some credits that logically could be put to use in another field.



Well how about this. We create a token for each advance. On the front it shows the credit and the advance it applies to (e.g. +20 Monothiesm). On the back it shows the name of the advance granting the credit. This could also replace the civ cards optionally.



Well its import to emphasize the word "guidelines". Many of the advances have changed dramatically and are worth more or less than in the original game. The mechanics and feel of the original game are here but every advance should be looked at in a new light.

Doing both these changes would result in each card giving 5 to its own color and 5 to one other color. The question is if a card should give more bonus to it's own color. Thats up to you, and I see the problems with rising the bonus of it's own color to 10, so I don't know what's best. It's up to you for now and then we will see what the next playtest comes up with.


We new this, we just didn't care [:p]. We didn't thought it would be such a difference, in ordinary AdvCiv it will spread around the whole map and balance out, but not in he Expansion Project. We won't do this miss again


I side with you Velusion.


I wouldn't think they'd be good for replacing CivCards, as you wouldn't be able to put any text on them. I think it would be better just to write what bonus they give, not to confuse the buyer if he by mistake places one up-side-down.

Ok my inital reaction on the credit problems:

Leave the primary credits alone
Remove half of the secondary total credits.
Allow only one type of credits to apply to the purchace of dual cards.
Lower the special specific credits for one advance down by 10 per card.

Let me run some numbers and see what happens.

Your adjusments sounds ok to me Velusion !

Good work. I Liked the old system very much though. I don't think it is necessary to add secondary credits on all cards, just add them to the cheaper cards so that people can make crossovers to other categories early on.

Staffan

I ran numbers from original Civilization then pulled together the following proposal:

All Advances provide 5 Credits to the same Group. Twin-Group Advances provide 5 Credits to each and accept all Credits from each. All Advances which cost less than 100 provide 5 Credits to two Groups. Empiricism provides 5 Credits to all Advances, Literacy provides 10 Credits to all Advances (so they only count once for Twin-Groups). All Advances which cost 200 or more have a cheaper Advance that provides 30 specific Credits.

This would result in an estimated minimum cost, if you have every possible credit and without factoring in Credit bonuses from Wonder of the World, et al., for each advance of:

Agriculture-40 Masonry-0 Metalworking-10 Mining-120 Pottery-0 Roadbuilding-110 Trade Empire-160 Trade Routes-100 Engineering-15 Wonder of the World-125 Monument-60 Anatomy-155 Astronomy-0 Calendar-95 Cartography-75 Coinage-5 Empiricism-0 Library-105 Medicine-55 Mathematics-85 Written Record-0 Philosophy-80 Architecture-65 Cultural Ascendancy-175 Diplomacy-105 Drama & Poetry-5 Music-5 Politics-115 Rhetoric-55 Sculpture-0 Literacy-0 Mysticism-0 Advanced Military-155 Democracy-115 Law-95 Military-75 Monarchy-0 Naval Warfare-105 Provincial Empire-165 Public Works-125 Urbanism-0 Theocracy-0 Deism-5 Diaspora-165 Enlightenment-85 Fundamentalism-75 Monotheism-125 Mythology-0 Theology-145 Universal Doctrine-85

With more than a dozen potentially free advances still, it might be appropriate to add a rule about only taking one free advance per turn.

Of course these are only theoretical numbers...

The problem with this is that it would be hard to implement. If this is done you can't trade in tokens of every color to multi-colored tokens, becouse you'd lose credits when bying dual-colored cards. Or we would have to ad another credit that counts towards all advances, but not twice to dual-colores. Makes the math more cumbersom in each case, and the idea with the new credit tokens (correct me if I'm vrong) was to make it easier.


I don't see a problem with cheep advances comming for free, what I got probems with is expencive advances comming for free. And the cheep ones would not be free in practice, becouse you would have to have all credits from more expensive cards first. So no max one free advance rule would have to been added.


I think this would work, and be a loot of easier than Coyote's solution. However, number-crunching will only give you a hint, you can't know what will happen until you've tested it, so decide something so I can fix the cards, and hope there will be another playtest soon.

Based upon Velusions ideas I have made a proposal you can download from http://jon.severinsson.net/civproject/a ... oposal.doc

I have tried to give credits to fields related to the advance, and did not just remove half of the cards giving extra bonuses to a single color.
All colors get a total of between 155 and 165, which is about 2/3 of the credits given by the old rules (210-235). This together with only one color's bonus to dual-colored cards should be enough to balance things out, but as I sad earlier, you'll have to playtest it before you'll know for sure.

Coyote's suggestion isn't bad, though there are no multicolored tokens, so that would have to be worked out. I'm going to have a hectic day so let me see what I can do.

I totally missed the dual colored problem which would have made your test game better (I'm kicking myself for it) but I was afraid of the east-west for awhile. I'm leaning toward martin's suggestion of simply eliminating any benefit from east west trading, or making the bonuses for doing so much less...

Jonno, I'll hopefully take a look at your cards here today sometime.

Thanks to you guys helping out. Obviously testing BOTH the credit system AND the east-west was trying and I really appricate it.

Here is a question: Did the tokens and simplified (if unbalanced) credit system seem to be easier and quicker than the old? Did new players catch on easier?