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This page has been accessed 1 times since December 2001.

JP's Civilization Page

Advanced Civilization is a board game from the now defunct Avalon Hill games company. The suspects like to get together on long weekends to indulge in eating, drinking, talking and playing Advanced Civilization. We have made many adjustments to the rules of CIV, some of which are listed on this page.

JP's CIV Spreadsheet
The CIV spreadsheet (written Using EXCEL 97 for Windows) started out as a method to keep track of discounted values of Civilization cards, especially when using the "Group Discount" variation. This turned out to be so useful that everyone started suggesting adding more and more features. Now it has grown into a monstrosity.

CIV Cards Page

Features of the CIV spreadsheet include:

Calculating discounted Civilization Card values.
Keeping track of the AST.
Showing orders for movement and trade card acquasition.
Showing which player is winning etc.
Showing graphs of players' number of cities, population, empire size, AST Position, Points on Civilization cards, and total points.
Keeping track of Disasters
Keeping track of how long each turn takes

Some of these features were added simply because we could. Others were added in a serious attempt to see how changes to the rules affected various aspects of play.

Instructions for using JP's CIV Spreadsheet
AST Page

Setup:

On the AST Page:

Hit the Reset button to clear out all statistics from the previous game.
Type names of players into the Player Column.
Tick the "save on Alter AST" box if you wish the sheet to be saved at the end of each turn. (Recommended)
If desired, you can hide the rows for empires not in use.

On the CIVCards Page:

If you want to use the "Group discounts" rule, tick this box.

Play:

During the Cencus phase, type each players' population into the POP column on the AST page.
Use the AST page or Orders page to determine movement order.
After the Build Cities phase, type the number of cities for each player into the Cities column on the AST page.
Use the Orders page for trade card acquasition.
During the Resolve Calamities phase, use the Disasters page to racord who has each Calamity. (If desired)
After resolving calamities, recheck the number of cities for each player on the AST page.
After each player has purchased Civilization cards, enter purchases on the CIVCards page.
At the end of the turn, hit the ALTER AST button on the AST page.
At the end of the game, type Total Commodity and Total Treasury values on the EndGame page to determine final positioning. This is only required if play is stopped before players reach the end of the AST.

I think that it was the first time we were using the spreadsheet that someone said "we need another PC so that more people can look at the spreadsheet at once". So then we had to setup a LAN with multiple PCs to allow lots of people to look at the spreadsheet at the same time.
Unfortunately due to problems with EXCEL sharing spreadsheets with more than one sheet, I had to create a second spreadsheet that could be opened on other PCs. This second sheet only has the Civilization Card Discount Calculator Page and requires the main spreadsheet to operate. All data entry is done via the main spreadsheet.

Download JP's CIV Spreadsheet
If you want to try the CIV spreadsheet you can download it here. You can also download the CIVCards spreadsheet here. Note that the CIVCards spreadsheet requires the main spreadsheet to operate and is only required if you want to use multiple PCs.

If you use the spreadsheet, please email me at jcp_at_jcp_dot_id_dot_au and let me know what you think.

Suspects' Rules (or should that be Suspect Rules)
Over the years we have made several variations to the rules of CIV. Some of these changes we got from the web (check here), others we made ourselves. Check out the Suspects' Rules.

The Suspects' CIV Map Extension
When we first started playing CIV, we had a lot of trouble getting enough people together to have a decent game. As time went on, however, we started getting more and more poeple until eventually we had to start looking for ways to allow more than nine players. We had always used the Western Extension map and found David Bofinger's Eastern Extension Maps and tried this as an option for getting more players. We played with only the Persia and Lower Indus maps and the Persian Empire.
The main problem that we found with these maps was that Persia could sit back in their little corner with only Babylon as a neighbour and no other players could attack them.
So we decided to create our own Eastern extension. While we were at it, we thought - why not scan the original map and create one map that could be laminated in one piece. We also took the opportunity to change the colour of the population limits on the board from white to black. So here it is!

The Suspects' Extended CIV Map

Our first attempt at the map included two new start areas (Persia and Indus) and the Arabian Peninsula. We had to warp the Southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula in order to fit the shape of the map, but otherwise it should be reasonably accurate. Our Map Extension

Before we had even started playing the first game with this board, people were asking "Why can't Arabia be a start area?" We had never intended this to be the case but we tried it anyway.

A few of the problems we encountered with the first version of our Map:

Arabia was too weak (to be expected)
Babylon was too strong
Movement was too restrictive through some areas

Changes we made to the map Version 1.2:

Changed some of the areas in Arabia
Added a start area for Arabia
Changed some of the areas in Persia
Moved the Babylon start area
Changed the AST for Babylon

This is the version of the map shown here. The main problem we had with this version was that Arabia was still too weak. So in our next game we extended Arabia's start area one area to the West. This allowed Arabia to gain access to Palestine before other players and in fact Arabia ended up as one of the top empires in the game.

If you are interested in a full version of the map for printing, please email me at jcp_at_jcp_dot_id_dot_au.

The Extended map and spreadsheet in use
Here are the suspects in action using both the extended map and a network of PCs running JP's CIV Spreadsheet. The suspects at play Note the PC on the right showing the AST Page from the main spreadsheet and the two PCs in the room at the back with the Civilization Cards, running the CIVCards spreadsheet.