There are many reasons to doubt that Advanced Civilization is the better game. In my opinion, the limited pool of advances in Civilization is important. It means that your buying strategy is a critical part of a successful game winning plan. It interacts with decisions such as whether to accept going back on the AST (or more properly, standing still for a turn while every one else advances), where in the turn order you want to go, whether to pick up the Mysticism millstone, etc. etc. In short it's a feature and is _designed_ to be in there as an important element. It is most certainly _not_ a broken feature of the game that requires fixing, as has been inferred elsewhere.

Again IMO, Adv. Civ. is a dumbing down of the superb basic Civilization design by making things a little less ruthless and a bit more friendly. Particularly the disasters, the trade card sets and the advances. Civilization is a killer game for ruthless grown ups, eight hours or so of very intense gaming where a single mistake can screw your game irrecoverably. Advanced Civilization allows you to recover from mistakes, stops people being nasty with disasters and makes the trading less vicious. You need to plan less and can trust to 'luck' a bit more.

I know which I prefer.