Solo testing and some changes

My wife has been away this week and I've solo tested the game several times to try out a new action selection system. Instead of the prefect abilities laid out in a 4x2 grid, they're now arranged in a 3x3 grid (Raid and Conquer functions are now split over 2 prefects). Instead of choosing one action each turn, you choose two, but they have to be adjacent in the grid. It speeds things up a bit, because naturally related actions (eg populate-produce, or migrate-conquer) are placed together in the grid.

I've also managed to streamline some of the bureacracy, by giving each player an abacus to track resources, by having achievement token payouts hard-wired into the action display, and by cleaning up the way events work.

And, some of the fiddly rules are removed or relocated. One of the biggest culprits was the definition of a "trade route". Now, it's simply a city or capital adjacent to a foreign city or capital. The details about citizens in an isolated city or foreign citizens in your capital is removed, BUT the effect is still present in this way: when you produce and receive achievement tokens for your trade routes, if another player has a citizen in one of your cities or capital, he gets a token too. Several other systems have similarly been cleaned up.

My solo tests seem to be taking about an hour per epoch for 4 players, and that's with me playing all 4 positions. Real players in all 4 seats might be able to go much faster. An hour per player isn't too bad but 45 minutes per player would be even better.

Yet another 3 player playtest

It seems like we can only ever find three of us at a time to play the game. Anyway, we tried out a new rule whereby the cost to build structures is your Unrest + the building's level, instead of the product of the two. The goal was to prevent easy building of everything in your hand, but also to make high levels of unrest less crippling. It more or less worked, but a couple of events made the overall vector of the game a bit screwy. I'll post the session report in the game's DropBox folder.

We played 3 epochs (we chose to forego the fourth since the eventual winner was obvious and it was getting late), with each epoch taking about an hour. This seemed acceptable but one of the players brought up the issue of downtime. I've begun to think about how to address that. I have come up with a fairly substantial change that would rework the turn structure. I'm running it through solo tests now and it seems interesting so far.

3 player playtest

We had a 3 player playtest with 3 experienced players. The game was odd in that 6 of the game turns were 5 actions or more, which is statistically very unlikely. The game was relatively close between 2 of the players. Once again, the "production explosion" was a factor, with players having such enormous production that they could easily bottom out their Unrest and then build out their entire hand of structures. I don't think this promotes the tough choices I want to be central to the game. Despite that, it was a fun session. A detailed recap is posted at the game's DropBox folder.

3 player playtest

We had a 3p playtest on Labor Day in which 2 of the players set up a lucrative network of Bazaars in the Med, connected by Roads. This led to a network of Cities, and from there, to many points. The recap, and some potential (small) changes, have been posted in the game's DropBox folder.

New rulebook uploaded

I have uploaded v15.4 of the rules and the latest Advance cards to the game's DropBox folder. This latest version removes the "Discovery" cards from the previous version and groups the Advances into three decks, by achievement category. It also adds 3 new Advances, bringing the total to 24 unique Advances.

3 player playtest

Last night, we had a 3 player playtest that took a more militaristic turn than previous sessions have. It was enjoyable to see the game go in that direction, and it still held together just fine. I've posted a full session report at the game's DropBox folder.

The Goal

A while back, I posted a comment to a
blog article by Shannon Appelcline that captures what I think a civ building game ought to include. I'm posting that here as a good summary of the overall goal of this project:

I would say that the following are elements that a Civ game needs to provide to really communicate the right feel:

* Growth: The player's empire gets larger both in its footprint on the board and in its population. Population growth creates additional capabilities but also brings pressure to expand. Territorial expansion also brings benefits but results in interaction with a player's neighbors, which can lead to conflict as space becomes scarce.

* Enhancement: The players have ways to receive additional abilities or upgraded forms of existing abilities that they do not possess at the game's beginning; their civilizations grow and progress as the game proceeds, and players can steer that progression.

* Differentiation: The particular set of enhancements that a civilization acquires is different for each player and, ideally, different in each playing; it isn’t necessarily forced upon the player by the game.

* Specialization: As players progress down a particular path of differentiation, it becomes either easier to continue down that path or more difficult to switch to following a different path.

* Multiple paths to victory: The scoring system accomodates the different cultural paths that players will follow, and allows a variety of paths to lead to victory. These allow a player to attempt to emulate different historical civilizations as well.

* Cooperative interaction: Generally implemented via trade, but the idea is simply that players can interact in a way that results in a mutual benefit as opposed to a diminishing of one player's position by the direct action of another.

There are a couple of additional elements that I think are important to the theme, and that haven't been incorporated into any game terribly well yet (which is why I'm trying to incorporate them!)

* Self-aggrandizement: What we know about the ancient world comes primarily from historians who wrote about what they observed or heard about, and from rulers who boasted about their accomplishments. By making sure that much about your civilization is recorded, you can insure that tales of your greatness will survive the test of time.

* Political control: Growing an empire involved conquering territories, but then the real work of managing and governing began, and some empires succeeded at this better than others. The idea that a smoothly-administered empire will be more successful should be communicated by the game in some fashion.

* Cultural diffusion: The idea that your culture can "rub off" on the foreign civilizations you interact with.