Ten Things I Have Learned playing Avalon Hill’s Advanced Civilization
This is NOT the Sid Meier game; it’s a DOS game available (free!) at abandonia
1) Try to keep your people fed. It’s much easier to build cities and expand when the peasants have enough to eat. If you have poor land, then you must take some other civilization’s land. If that makes your major export “war,” so be it.
2) Use Military as a defensive tool, to save cities that might otherwise fall. While it’s tempting to eliminate an opponent you dislike, you may waste enough resources in so doing that a third civilization overtakes you.
3) Taxes are paid from stock. Stock is replenished as a result of spending or lass of population. If you suffer a tax revolt, you have only yourself to blame. If you have to build needless ships or invade territory you won’t win, simply to replenish stock, do so.
4) There is no particular defensive technology you need to buy first. Disasters are random. That said, Civil War is the worst, so Drama, Music, Law, and Democracy are a smidge more useful than the others
5) Agriculture helps you a) stay on poor soil, b) deal with famine and epidemic (you will have more population before those disasters take their toll), and c) help in slave revolts, as each city that falls is replaced by more workers, thereby saving you one or two cities. But, civilizations with large populations must move first. Therefore, acquire Agriculture if you are certain you can defend or isolate your cities.
6) If you choose a civilization in the center of the map, you will be invaded regularly. Metalworking and Engineering are good to have.
7) Technologies that do not have direct benefits ought to be avoided early, but by mid-game they make advanced technologies easier to attain. Winners purchase Literacy or Mathematics, ideally both.
8) Since Iconoclasm and Heresy are level eight calamities, it’s possible you won’t ever draw them. Deism, Enlightenment, Monotheism, Philosophy, and Theology are luxuries. Get them after the technologies that help people live and defend their lives.
9) Never build ships early unless you play Crete. The benefit doesn’t justify the expense. If you play Crete, get to the maximum number of ships early and maintain them every turn. Iberians might also need ships to take populations from fertile areas to build cities in barren areas. Everyone else? Wait.
10) If you have multiple disasters, how you play them matters. If you need a higher ratio of population to cities in Slave Revolt, take down your cities during Famine. If you have a Flood, apply Famine to a flood plain down to one population unit, then leave that one unit to be destroyed during the flood. Slave Revolt and Epidemic are complimentary: the slave revolt knocks your cities down and then replaces them with population, who can be taken by the epidemic. Two or three disasters do not have to wipe you out.