Hi Stefano. I have read the original rules and the FAQs and I have asked all my doubts in the official forum. Now I´ve got my rules without mistakes. I like playing this game like Glenn Drover (the designer) made it. When you change the rules of a complex game you have to ensure new rules don´t break the balance of the game and then you have to play a lot of times with diferent kind of people, I think. Are you sure the game is balanced with your rules?. Glenn have experience but he took a long time to make Civilization.
Hi Nis,
I'll try to explain what we have done in CHR in this year.
First, we played as you did with original rules, but we realized that the game was missing something (that explains, in our opinion, the score of this game on various sites: from 6 to 7, even BGG).
During initial plays we didn't realize what is was. Then we saw that Commerce and Production were too slow and boring to do (lot of calculations every turn). We enjoyed more the Movement and Battle phases. Next I've found the ABAkUS v2.0 by Rattle and things got better for a while. We thought to have fixed the slowdown problem, but we still didn't enjoy the game as we expected, we realized that this game can be more fun. In addition to this we realized that it was too long to finish without a good clue for it.
Next I've see that we weren't the only one to sav this feeling because of the many house rules available on the net. There were many good ideas out there, so we started introducing just few of them (like OWL House Rules). The game experience with this house rule was improved without causing side effects to the overall balance. We were excited. That is what we wanted to and, just for the sake of curiosity, we tried to download all house rules available on the net to see how many other good ideas there were out there. We found many, even forum posts, and we started to became anxious to test them all. That day we started CHR! Initially we merged some well tested house rules with others adding special corrections to leverage differences and points of conflict. We played many times with 10 different people, fixing balancing errors at every play (you can see the long history of changes of CHR and ABAkUS). Every change has been introduced to balance the game a bit more compared to the previous edition of CHR: the result is a year of gaming and fixing. The last big addition to the game are spies. Rules for spies have been introduced to give the game a new layer of strategy that is to be used in conjuction with the overall game strategy. I must admit that spies have not been tested so much, but if you don't trust us relating this, just avoid using rules for spies.
There is a special chapter on the manual that describes how to play CHR just adding rules at every match giving you the opportunity to learn rules step by step without having to read 100 pages manual in one time.
After this introduction I'll reply to your question: "Are you sure the game is balanced with your rules?".
We are not professionals or game makers but we trust in what we have created.
We tested a lot these rules, with our best efforts, to give Civilization new life.
We tried to fix all possible problems we found during plays.
We do not want to play anymore to Civ using rules other than CHR but rather adding new rules to CHR as we did until today.
We were so satisfied with our work that we packaged it for the public because it was a pity that only 10 people could benefit from this.
We released it to the public even to see if our thoughts were right and to share ideas about this new game system: in our opinion many people coming from different countries work better than 10 italian ones.
Maybe that for someone these rules are not perfect, and maybe they are, but perfection is an illusion in my opinion: all we can do is fix problems every time they arise.
That's all.
Stefano Coletta
http://www.mindcreations.com
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