Military Conquest.

Sure, if your talking about G.R.O.S.S. they want a piece of this and a piece of that - oh I'm sorry you said peace... my bad

Of course they can't. Aliens must be used. If they are more powerful, I can pretend to be good

The issue is the penalty applied to every victory path *except* military.

Frogboy is under the delusion that these are easier and/or "too powerful" and are therefore properly punished; i.e. the claim is that the longer time to reach Tech or Culture means your score would have been too high because of extra points from pop, tech, wonders, etc. so they must be lowered. Alliance wins are just flat out hosed because not only do you miss out on all the juicy score from personally controlling the entire galaxy, you are penalized on top of that.

It's a most illogical and poorly thought out system because it leads to this:

We know the truth, your reward is greatest when you pretend to be pursuing the peaceful path to victory and then one by one backstabbing everyone. It's such a hopeful message

Well, you wanted realism!!

~SDC~

Not sure who this was directed at but I hope it wasn't me. I've been championing the cause of good gameplay over realism from day one. Good gameplay is not the result of "forcing" everyone to go for military wins. Alliance wins are worth it sometimes because they can avoid a lot of tedium, but they might as well disable cultural and tech wins because in 9/10 cases, if you're in a position to win by either of these, you're a few years from a military victory as well so after all that play time, why settle for 1/3rd the score?

It wasn't directed at you. However, my view happens to be in line with Stardock's. And you seem to have touched on the basic issue as well:



My take (opinion, of course) is that if it is easier, it shouldn't be worth as much. If you are in the position to win one way MUCH earlier than another, it should be worth less.

Note that points aren't the only reason to play! It is a lot of fun and a challenge to try different combinations of running your empire to see the results!

~SDC~

Maybe I am wrong and Aliens really are evil sub-human scum.

As in "Too Serve Man" Aliens have been ploting to Serve Man on a platter for years.

How can it be evil to catch some for slave labour and wipe the rest of the evil sub-human creatures out ?

I been brainwashed by aliens for too long. It may be time to visit some of their home worlds and take them.


[Message Edited]

The point I was trying to make and why I completely, 100% disagree with you is that you missed the forest for the trees:

In the overwhelming majority of cases by the time you can achieve cultural or alliance wins you have won the game except for the button mashing. In the cases of cultural wins you are always just a year or two (and sometimes just a single turn) from the military win. It is simply wrong that the game says if you want the points, mash them buttons.

It becomes even more bizarre and hypocritical when we consider the tech win: tech wins are almost always painfully boring to achieve. Except for that rare game where you're just treading water waiting to squeak over the finish line, there is NO reason to go for a tech win in this game other than to say you've done it, and when you turn around and hand out much less points for much more work, it's sort of salt in the wound.

So, we have one situation where people say you don't deserve more points because you did (marginally) less work than a military win, and we have another where you do far more work than miltary win but the same people say you deserve less points.

They should just take the conditions out of the scoring process and let people play how they have fun.

Well, Alliance Victory is way too easy to get anyway. If you are decently good you can wipe out the Drengin and Yor via miltary or culture or get the other to do it for you and then you have an alliance with the goody-goodies. I always turn off alliance victory because I don't want to win that way.

Tech victory is also relatively easy. Just need a big enough military to hold off the others or make limited strikes. Enough culture to also hold off the others and just sit back to beyond human bliss.

Culture victory is easier on smaller maps, harder on bigger maps. I think culture and tech victory go hand in hand and in my games it's whichever I get first. Larger maps are harder because you need to manage more culture bomb starbases and protect them.

Military victory takes a lot more time and effort into it to be able to conquer everyone and manage such large fleets.

These are just my opinions, I could be wrong.

I completely agree with bonscott. Alliance and tech wins can be easily achieved by just producing a massive fleet of corvettes, dwarfing anybody elses military ranking. With this high of a military ranking, the other races of your alignment naturally gravitate towards close, ie. alliance friendly relations. No one dares attack you because of your paper tiger military and tech/alliance/cultural victory can come easy over time. Military victory requires that you build up fleets that are competitive in actual battle rather than just on paper and that take time and strategy to balance this with the other needs of your civ.

Oh and techy....pick up the difficulty a notch or two...or is that how the canadians have been rising in the rankings?

Fleet Captain plephart
'Manifest Destiny'
Join the Mid-Western Confederation http://idle.thehueys.com/midwest
We Want You!
[Message Edited]
[Message Edited]

Code Monkey,

I think you are using an exception as a rule. I'm certain there are situations that can be deemed unfair, or unintuitive. But I've been in situations where my cultural victory was WELL before I would have won militarily. Had I focused more on my military, I wouldn't have had nearly the influence.


~SDC~

OronHaus, you are the one talking exception. When I focus on culture, here's what I do: Wait until month 12 of the culture win, declare war.

By that point I have reached a two fold advantage. First, I've probably flipped a number of alien systems: advantage me. At that point, my military need is minimal because as I weaken and demoralize the enemy, my culture does 50% or more of the conquering for me. Then, within a couple of years, the enemy is gone, and I get all the credit for a military victory even though what I really had was a delayed culture win. At any rate if you think there should be a difference between those two scores, I have nothing else to say to you because you essentially are saying that busy work is worth 3X the score just because it's not the "easy" way.

Regardless, the point is that by the time you can win culturally, you *can* win militarily and the work is not significant even if it takes more time.




So by virtue of the fact that there's a cheese way to achieve tech victory, everyone should be hosed? Well, my culture way of achieving military victories is equally cheesey so I guess we have to hose those too. What was that? There's legitimate ways of achieving military victories. Sorry, don't care, since there is a cheesey way of doing it, penalize everybody, that's consistent with your comments for why tech should be hosed.

Code Monkey,

I'm going to take a look into switching modes and see. Perhaps you are on to something. I don't know what the remedy would be, then.

~SDC~

Code Monkey,

I'm going to take a look into switching modes and see. Perhaps you are on to something. I don't know what the remedy would be, then.

~SDC~

Here's the gist of the problem:

The actual victory type is determined only by the last turn.

Which means that you are rewarded for ending the LAST TURN militarily. That's it. So you get the usual score milking strategies:
- Win technologically except for resarching "beyond human". Then blow up everybody else with your uber-tech.
- Win culturally until the last planet. Then send in a small fleet of 10 ships and get it.

There's no reason to finish the game culturally or technologically since in both cases you can easily achieve military victory on the last turn (unless you're barely sneaking by tech-wise).

OronHaus, here's a question for you: in those situations of yours, could you have mustered a small number of strong ships to gain the last few systems? I can't see how not, considering that your production base was dwarfing everybody else's.

Therefore, as far as I am concerned, tech or cultural wins should NOT be penalized. However, alliance wins are cheesy as bonscott says.

Probably. In fact, I'm starting to think your way (and Code Monkey's).

~SDC~

Alliance wins would be less "cheesey" if it weren't so easy to achieve conflicting alliances. Because admittedly, you can just play nicey nice with all the survivors until you get them all close then ally with everyone in a single turn and win even though they may have been at war with one another.

OTOH, the alliance win is already penalized in that your pop, tech, etc. is probably much less than in any other victory method so why do we need an additional penalty?

If we did away with all of the path penalties, then you would just be scored on tech, pop, etc. and things would shake out where they did but no one would be feeling as though they always have to end things militarily.
[Message Edited]

Military is over-rewarded in my opinion. The four options should have an equal victory bonus. If the system must reward fighting as a priority, then really reward real fighting by assigning a high value upon ships killed and planetary defenders being trampled in invasions. Just assign each ship a point value, and rack up the score with those kills. Make every X people killed in the invasions worth Y points. Have those points be worth more than the equivelant received in researching a new tech or adding pop points or building a new trade good. This prevents the strategy of flipping most everything with peaceful means and then delivering a coup de grace with a last second rush. Make military score bonuses based on combat, not the last turn.

Great thread- I agree with CM in that although there are four ways to win, there really is only one way to win if you wish to score high, and that is a shame.

Those who said that tech win is cheese, try that on tiny/rare. Military is momentum on such maps. Who cares how one won? Win is win. Fleet of 20 SF can kill half of that number dreds if attacked. And what? Should I be proud for such 'deeds'? Contrary, putting a culture bomb in the middle of enemy sector with 6 systems is not an easy task with AI better than bright. As for easy 'increasing' military raiting by crancking corvets... Have you ever noticed price? And alliance could be necessity unless you 'want' tons of extra moves.