Cultural Conquest Victory/Defeat: Discuss

1. Maybe have an advanced option screen for these type of settings

2. Not sure how hard 80% is until I try it
Might be worth in beta allowing us to change this to
try and balance the setting.

I've changed it to 6/7ths for now. 4 out of 5 is turning out to be a bit too easy still.

(1)I like a lot of pre-game settings for these type of strategy games and the more that there are for creating variants, the longer I tend to play that game just to try all of the different tweaks.

However, If you had the settings at the beginning of the game for the victory conditions and then added multipliers(to the endgame score) for increasing the difficulty of winning, the challenge would be to increase your score on the metaverse as well as to challenge yourself.

(2) with the addition of resources, I'm willing to bet that the sectors with little or no habitable planets will be snatched up for resource gathering, so 80% sounds pretty good. In fact, you might make it more likely for resources to pop up in sectors without habitable planets for just that reason.

I am not sure what this means if you are trying to win by conquest and conquer 80% of the galaxy the game is over ?

You will control 80%

'(1) Should victory conditions be optional? I am personally wary of this precisely because I tend to turn off victory conditions i"m not good at which I think takes a lot of the challenge out of the game.'

My main problem with things like this is that some victory conditions in games that aren't simple conquest are impossible to stop, except by doing it first yourself, and I don't like situations like that.

The most common offenders here are economic or technological victories. GalCiv has dealt with the first by making it trade based instead of total income, but the second still works that way.

If someone's anywhere close to being able to complete a tech win, you're not going to be able to remove them simply by destroying things, because they're most likely already going to be better than you at that.

These are good points. Hmm, will have to look at having check boxes for settings on this.

I am of mixed feelings about being able to select the winning options you want to allow. Certainly in CIV 3 those settings were the only way to get a chance to try different methods. But in CIV 3 the wins for wins by some methods came so abruptly it was difficult to get any sense of the game, so being able to turn some win methods off is essential (in CIV 3). But for GC/Win?

One thing is certain, however. It may be necesary to have them during the Beta to test specifically for the win cases, to ensure that they work well.

The last game I won everybody was my Ally, it would be nice to play alittle longer so I can develop new technologies check ot other ways to win.

I don't really see, as it has been said before, how the cultural victory (80%) is different from the conquest victory, after some point in the game where nearly every sector will be occupied. We'll have to see how it is handled, but I think it may be better to change the way cultural victory is handled. Should cultural victory be linked to the amount of controlled space ? Shouldn'it be the contrary, ie the fact that you can exert your influence DESPITE not being the major bully around ? Of course, sector control is not directly linked to military conquest, but I fear that prestige enhancing building on a single planet will have a tough time countering the influence of two or three underdeveloped colonies. We'll have to see how well it works, anyway.

On another matter, how about having to select the victory conditions you want to achieve at the beginning of the game ? Each race could choose to win in a way, that would follow the traditionnal scifi cliché of races of one profession (warrior race (klingons), merchant race (trade federation, Ferengi)...) and add have not everyone trying to go for the easiest victory condition...

I think any victory condition needs to be optional and possibly settable.

I agree with the comments expressed above that an 80% control of the sectors is very similar to a military style game anyway. What would the difference be? If the other empires were superior militarily then you would not culturally own 80% of the sectors. Would you?

I would prefer the cultural victory conditions be related to cultural achievements / goals. This could be building the cultural galatic achievements, establishing cultural buildings in other empires, achieving a required influence level and then being voted 'galatic culture'. This suggests other empires will revert to your culture and you win.

Similarly I would like to see the trade victory also change slightly to building trade goods / trade galatic achievements / establishing trade buildings in other empires / amassing influence and being voted 'trade empire'.

Paul.

One of the annoyances of some games is to be forced into ending the game before you would otherwise like to end it. Case in point:

Given the description of cultural victory that started this thread I can foresee a situation where I'm rolling merrily along, crushing all before me, and once things reach a stable state I decide to go for a technology win. A cultural win condition could very easily be met before the tech tree has been researched but I don't want to end the game there.

From my perspective I would like settings available when starting the game that allow me to disable any and all win conditions, save one, if I so chose.

Having a slider to choose a percentage, for things like cultural victory, would be a plus as well.

If I interpret Brad's meaning of "cultural win" correctly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with military might. With the enhancements we're supposed to see in Beta 3, I suspect it would be a real challenge, though not impossible, to control influence in a sector where your race was actually the minority, population-wise.

--Mark

That's the problem : balance between the two. If the threshold for cultural control is set to high, it will be far easier to invade a populated world to gain control of a sector than to try to convert it culturally. On the other hand, any attempt at military victory may fall short because cultural victory will be achieved first...

We'll have to see how it works before complaining though

Hmmm. You guys are right about gaining a cultural victory on the way to conquest victory. I'll need to put some more thought into this.

This is probably very dumb but...

What if you had it worked out so cultural victory depended on how many alien civilizations were left alive.

Say you had a high number set for each size of galaxy at the beginning of the game (higher than the amount of influence you would have if you controlled every system) then to win culturally you had to have enough influence x the number of alien civilizations that are left.

That way if you were going to try to win by conquest you would be killing all the alien civilizations and couldn't win by culture.

Or you could take all but one planet away from each one and still win by a cultural victory. This still sounds a bit shaky.

How about: The other races have to be relatively pleased with you. If you conquered all but one of their planets I would think they would be forever angry at you but just too afraid to take you on.l

Yeah, but if you went for conquest you would probably just wipe out one civ then move on to the next.

Exactly. Therefore there has to be something that keeps you from getting a cultural victory if you have reduced the other races to the point where they fear taking you on.

On the flip side, if there is an unusually aggressive race that is trying to take all of the other races out, I would think that eliminating that race would make the other races quite happy with you, provided you didn't go after them next.

Maybe some way to track which planets defected to you through Culture and which ones you took by military force? Have a set number of worlds that have to culturally come into your empire to win?

True. But if races had to be happy with you how would you get enough influence to win without taking some of their planets.

Damn this is hard!

One big problem with Reaver9's initial idea is what would happen if you were busy expanding culturally but another race was busily trying to win via conquest.

A cultural win would be impossible in that circumstance.

mabe if it just counted if you wiped out a race

If say the Drengin's wiped out the Torian's then it would be harder for the Drengin's ONLY to reach cultural victory. (And impossible for the Torians )

I still think there is a fundamental flaw in the idea, no offense, but sometimes a race is just not willing to coexist peacefully, at least not without more bribery than it's worth, so wiping them out shouldn't preclude a cultural win.