Hi guys,
I have seen your great work expanding the area of Civilization just to Bengal. Same for me as I want to "upgrade" my German version to advanced. The German version is the Gibson games variant (yes, the ugly map, but at least the "1" labels are readable), and the only expansion existing is the western map which I own as well. The principle things I am missing are the extra trade cards, the new AST, and the civilization cards.
I have seen the trade cards and the Civilization cards for your expansion which look really nice. The problem is that I want to translate the stuff into German, which would be a bit tricky for the commodity cards due to the structure of the background. Are there any unlabeled trade cards and civilization cards around so that I can label them with German names myself? The other problem is that I don't know the exact text on the civ cards, does anyone have the texts so that I can translate them?
Another question: are the non-tradable calamities still marked by a different another coloured background? I have just played the computer game and couldn't find out. Is there another change in order except that resolving calamities is now before acquiring civ cards?
Another point: in my browser's headline I read Advanced Civilizaion: The Expansion Project - with a missing t.

Greetings.

Hi and welcome to CivProject


All sources are available in the Archive.
The commodities and calamities are PSD files. You'll need at least Photoshop CS for the layer structure to remain.
The advancements are also in PSD format, but those layers aren't nested, so Photoshop 7 or later should do.


The exact text for CivProject on the advancements are available in the PSD's. The text on the reverse is the same as the Advancements Quick Chart, availible as ODT (Open Document Text; for any recent word processor but those from Micro$soft) or PDF (I assume everyone knows what this is ).
CivProject are about improving on Advanced Civilization, not duplicating it. So we don't provide original Civ or Adv Civ stuff, as users are expected to own those already (see legal disclaimer to the left).


In Advanced Civilization all tradecards has the same, black, background. In earlier versions of CivProject the background differed between east and west cards, but those are now distinguished by the letters "E" and "W" on the front instead, so now CivProject should use all black backgrounds.


The calamities them self has changed(see the rulebook, the Adv Civ one is available through Google), but otherwise I don't think there is any change in resolution (I've never played original Civilization, only Advanced Civilization and CivProject).


The site title is a known issue, but should be resolved soon. It's an artefact of the old budget set up of the domain (or rather, the inability to correct the typo is). The domain has been transferred to another registrar and given a more "normal" set up, and as soon as that has propagated to your local DNS server, you should get the new title "Civilization: The Expansion Project".
The latest expectation of when that should be done was last Wednesday or Thursday, so who knows when it actually is going to happen.

Well, to put that right: I would really enjoy participating in the project myself by translating all the meterial to German, for I know that this project is being recognized in this part of the world, too. For example, in two weeks there be a con called Hannover spielt!, on which a game is planned: http://www.hspielt.de/index.php?link=programm
Unfortunately it would be quite a bit to go, and I have other things to do that weekend.
Nevertheless, it is hard for me to find 17 other people that are the same as freaky as me and therefore I need a smaller board to play on for "common" purposes. I own Civilization with the western expansion in the German version (Gibsons Games), but after I played advanced civ on the computer, I feel quite unhappy with what I have: first of all the missing trade goods due to the fact, that the trade card expansion has never been published here. The second point is the fact that one can hardly win ones he falls behind on the AST. The fact that you have to own 5 cities at the end of adv civ combined with the calamities fixes that problem.
Avalon Hill now is a trademark of WotC, but it is unrealistic that they would relaunch Civilization like they did with History of the World because they sold their rights to Activision AFAIK which caused some trouble with Microprose/Hasbro/Firaxis.
Long story short: the eastern expansion is a great progress of civ, but every game would be a greater event. For smaller groups I could play my old civ with western expansion but due to the problems of this version I would like to upgrade it to a German version of adv. civ which has never been issued.

Back to the stuff: I think, I will be able to use PhotoShop at work, and OpenOffice is no problem at all. The problem is that I do not have much spare time to spend on the project, so it will take quite some time to get things work. But I'll hook on it.

Well, to set you straight: There is no problems playing CivProject with less than 18 players. 5 players is minimum, though 6 is strongly recommended. So you'll only have to find 4 or 5 friends willing to play, not 17. If you'd like you could even use your current map, though using part of the CivProject would probably be better.

Regarding your translation: If you were to produce a plain translation of the CivProject components, I'd love to host it here at civproject.net. We got a German translation sent to us earlier, but it was only PNG / PDF, was including their own house rules, and thus unsuitable as a semi-official translation.

And regarding the trademark, it is actually currently owned by Take Two Interactive, the company publishing Civilization IV (the computer game that has mostly nothing to do with Advanced Civilization). The copyright, however, is a different matter. It's current ownership is somewhat unclear to the general public, as it has changed hands multiple times, and not all legal agreements have been revealed (or at least not been made generally available).
My current research in the area shows that their is two different owners, one for the original Civilization and the Western Expansion, and one for the Advanced Civilization Expansion. The owner of the former would be either F. G. Tresham, Hasbro, Inc, or Atari, Inc (It was created by F. G. Tresham, who may and may not have transferred copyright to Hartland Trefoil Ltd., the original publisher of Civilization. If he did so Hasbro, Inc would have acquired it bundled with some computer games. All those was later transferred to Atari, Inc, and it is unclear whether Civilization, if indeed part of the bundle, was separated prior to the transfer to Atari, Inc.) The owner of the second part is slightly clearer. It's either owned by Hasbro, Inc. or Wizards of the Coast, Inc, and as Hasbro owns WotC this hardly matters.
All this is under American law. Swedish law does not honour the American style default transfer of work done by employees to employers (it instead grants the employers a non-exclusive royalty free licence), though it does allows for explicit contracts doing the same. So under Swedish law (which is what this site operates under) the copyright is probably still held by F.G. Tresham, Mick Uhl, Charles Kibler, Dale Sheaffer, Bruce Harper, Jim Eliason, Jeff Groteboer, Eric Hunter, Steven Padgett, Gray Rapanos, Michael Roos, Jeniofer Schlickbernd, Jeff Suchard, Charles Kibler and others.
All this with the usual disclaimer: Ianal, Ianepootv (I'm not a lawyer, I'm not even playing one on TV).

Thank you very much for somewhat explaining what happened to the license or whatever of Civilization. As for work, I don't know what is the exact judical text in Germany, but as far as I know from working contracts, there is always a point in the contract that every material and mental work, that includes inventions, automatically become property of the employer. The employee has no right on other payments than his normal wages. But in fact, a good employee who benefits a lot, will get some more payment than others, that for sure. Otherwise he would change the employer very soon. But in the case of games I don't know. The game designers I know (and in this country there are quite some) are private persons who send their prototypes to publishers, and if a publisher is interested in a game design they will get an invitation for working on changing a prototype to a product for sale. Often the game's background has to be shifted while the game's mechanism is very clear in a early stage of development; it just has to be balanced. But the background change can be that enormous that the designer doesn't recognize his own game. And other authors get the job to design a merchandising product where the background is fixed but not the mechanism. I am not sure how that works in America and whether Francis Tresham was an employee of the company or a free designer with his own idea.
Well, nevertheless, me personally, I am not a friend of too many house rules. The net is full of sites of RPG groups who present their own mostly silly house rules. I have seen so many "good ideas" which were just ridiulous, because they obviously wouldn't smoothly fit in the existing game design. In fact, there are very few unofficial "extensions" of which I would say that they are practicable an well balanced. Most of them just show that the "originator" lacks understanding the matter.
This project is one of the few which are different. It does not consist of a small group of local friends who want to present their house rules, this is a big community of well experienced players and gaming veterans, of people who at least have a basic understanding how gaming mechanisms work together and which screws have to be tightened to reach the wanted effect. In fact, everything looks very professional. I am not that self confident that I could go and design my own game, but I got quite some gaming experience by playing quite some German style board games with different gaming mechanisms. But for the beginning, I would like to do some translation work, for which I would have to get used to the software being used in this producing process. I was just concerned that this game would be that big that I could never play it in acceptable span of time with a considerable number of players. As you said, the game could be played on the original maps as well. How does the huge number of commodities and civilization cards fit in that? Are there exact rules for that? What I liked in AH Civilization was the fact that everyone (except Crete) was starting at some point on the rim of the map rather than on a fixed starting position, an idea which has been dropped in the German version of the game where e.g. Africa starts in Carthago.
To get back to the translation: what kind of files should be provided? Of course the working files, but also the finished PNG/PDF etc.?

Well, most corporations in Sweden also insists on similar contracts, because they are required. In US the common practice (from what I hear, and I hear a lot about US copyright) is not to do them, as the same effect is achieved (at least locally) by default. In Britain such contracts is (from what I hear) common, the reason I think F. G. Tresham might still hold copyright to original Civ is because all UK editions, and some US ones, are bearing the copyright notice "Copyright© 1980 F. G. Tresham". On the other hand AdvCiv is "Made under licence from Hartland Trefoil Ltd., Northampton, England", which suggests that HT at least had a wide spanning licence (the Swedish default licence wouldn't be enough to licence the right to another company to do a derivative, but the UK one might, I don't know). If so that licence belongs to either Hasbro or Atari, while copyright still belongs to F. G. Tresham.

Regarding house rules, I'm all for them, if properly researched and giving some kind of improvement over the original game. I do agree that many house rules for RPG's on the net doesn't fulfil these requirements though...
The problem with the prior translation is that I couldn't judge the house rules, as I'm not fluent in German (though I do know some, as I did study it for 4 years in school, 6 years ago).

Regarding "at least have a basic understanding how gaming mechanisms work together and which screws have to be tightened to reach the wanted effect."
Well, I do think we have a basic understanding, but the tweaking of screws has largely been trial and error. We have been doing this for a while though, so by now we have removed more errors than we have introduced...

Regarding "for which I would have to get used to the software being used in this producing process".
Well, don't get to comfortable with the current tools, as I'm not satisfied with most of them, and is looking for better ones. I've already swapped MS Office for OpenOffice, and is working on slowly getting rid of Photoshop in favour of Incscape and the Gimp (Recently converted the counters, working on the advancements. The commodities/calamities will remain Photoshop for a while though, as I have no issues with them at the moment). McBeth is additionally working on getting rid of Illustrator, something I'm all in favour of doing (see misc threads in the mapboard sections for all the issues we have with it), but long ago decided was to much work to do for the gain, at least at that time.

See section II in the rulebook, as well as the scenario handbook, for information on playing with less than 18 players. Basically you always use all 51 CivCards and all 16 major calamities, but the amount of commodities varies based on amount of players, with zero to two sets of minor calamities + possibly an extra set of major calamities compensating.

Regarding starting locations: Actually we moved them from the edges as it had some problems, including an early race for the centre of the map, and a prolonged setup time, as players had to carefully choose in which area to start, based on where they thought other players would start. One of the minor goals of CivProject is to reduce overhead time (before and after the actual game) so one can play more within the same amount of time (quite necessary to make 18 players complete a game in one day, and useful even otherwise).

Regarding translations: All I'll need is translated original files. All derivatives I can easily do myself, some I even have scripts for.
And if you find any errors in the current files, please do not just fix them in the translations, but tell me so I can fix them properly in the originals. However, please make sure that layer names, or similar, remain in English, so I know what I'm doing...

I just managed translating the comodity cards to German. Where should I send the psd file?

Please send them to jonno@civproject.net

I've got the first components. They can be found in the archive, and will be joined by derivatives and more components as soon as they are ready.

I just wanted to say that I am too busy right now to work on the translation, but there are other components to come.

Nikioko, I am located in Siegburg. For future reference, perhaps we can pool friends and have a large game?

Sure, why not? Do you already have any components yourself?

I have not read all thing here on this topic, but i understand you are a player used to Civilization withou "advanced"

My group contains at most 9 players a time so we made ourselves a new map containing only the original, and the WXM. This saves a lot of space on the table. We are currently finishing it for the last details.

I can share this with you if you like, you could also draw yourself a new one.

Don't know for other countries, but it took me 5 years to find a store in the Netherlands that sold the WesteXtenstionMap. Sad thing to me is, that this WXM is thin cardboard, where the rest of the board is a lot thicker.

That is why we decided (after years of playing with this 3-pieced board) to make ourselves a new one. When it was almost finished I discovered this site, which I really dig!

greets
Flo
:D

Hi there,

here's another player from the western part of germany. I'm located near Koblenz. Usually I play one game of civ per year with some friends between Christmas and New Years Eve. So maybe we might get some people together for a game of C:TEP.

I've now updated the translated Commodities to the 2.10 draft, and finally generated the print sheets. Hope I didn't mangle any translations when I copied them from the old to the new template.
The new files can be found in the Archive.