I mean, you say “fairness” but it’s not fair, because the AI can’t really play the game. Giving the AI a game it can play, and giving you a different game that you can play, has always seemed like the best solution to me. It’s too rare, though.
That said, yes, a big finale of the sort you describe is certainly better than nothing. Trouble is, in many games that include one, the “friendly” AI’s are totally incapable of responsing to it properly.
The best victory system I have yet seen in a Grand Strategy or 4X game is the Seals Victory from Age of Wonders 3.
Seals of Victory is a victory system where there are some sites distributed off-center but symmetrically on the map. The sites are heavily defended by neutral armies. When a player or AI takes a site, they accrue points towards victory every turn. The more sites you control, the faster you accrue points. If you hit a certain threshold of points, you win. This creates great tension and opportunity for the AIs.
If the player got close to a win, the Seals system would ensure that the AI would attack the player’s Seals sites pretty vigorously so it provided a challenge. Also, since it was pretty easy for the AI to grab at least one Seal, the AI was often competitive in the endgame in ways that are rare for AIs in most of these games. Also, the AI would just generally go for the Seals more often than the AI in Planetfall goes for Doomsday so there was much more back and forth.
That remains the one thing I would like to see added to Planetfall - some version of the Seals of Victory system.
Yeah, that was a nice feature of AoW3 and it would be pretty easy to implement in Planetfall lore-wise. There are already powerful Star Union sites all over the place, the notion that holding certain old Star Union facilities (perhaps after having to pay a hefty cost to restore them) would grant victory is pretty well grounded in the lore. I get the sense that Planetfall is feature-complete, unfortunately, but maybe in a sequel…
One of my favourites too, and I think I can articulate why.
it’s because to win the seals victory often involves alot of pressure from the Ai, and just tough enough indepenedents, that periodically spawn.
Plus the risk/reward calculus of controlling a seal makes it always a tense and interesting decision.
You need to put one unit ion a seal to control it after you conquer it, but every so often the guardians of teh seal will attack, and try and recapture it. So, do you leave just one unit, meaning any old wandering indie unit, or another player, can easily capture it, or do you camp on it.
And those are units you need to wage war on other players.
PLUS, and this is one for me that is imho huge, possibly key to the whole thing, capturing a seal starts the timer, capturing more seals accelerates the timer, losing seals slows or stops the timer, and holding a seal doesn’t make your empire stronger, in fact might well make it weaker (on account of having to guard it.) Plus, there’s a strong element of racing to be the first, as the loot is usually pretty good.
The doomsday victory otoh is very much something you do when you are already quite strong, and it just makes you stronger, and you control the sites anyway.
It is also something the AI is very well suited to playing, as it will, on higher difficulties, usually have many more units than you do.
I think Planetfall could have benefitted from having something more like the seals victory, i.e. an independent location on the map for you to fight over.
IIRC, there is a grails victory, which is in a way like that, i.e. you research anomalies until you decipher the grail locations, then go fight on those locations and eventually unlock the grail.
Which doesn’t give you victory immediately iirc, but gives you some very hefty bonuses.
Fairness maybe isn’t the right word. What I mean is it is a bit unfun to suddenly have your AI opponents spawn massive armies out of nowhere, or beeline to your undefended cities when they have no vision.
I.E, when the cheating is…well…blatant, it isn’t much fun.
But if the entire game is built around this, then it can be much more fun.
I have often thought how the end game in PF could be made more interesting, and one thing I liked, from RTS games of all places, is the idea of depleting resources.
So, your gold mines might start out at 20 per turn, but in the mid to late game they start to run out.
This could force/encourage conflict and end things quicker than the current status quo in 4x games where you either have a stalemate, or the player victory is assured but not finalised for another 20 plus turns.
I think we essentially agree. The AI needs to be playing by clear rules. They don’t need to be the same rules we’re playing by, though.
Man, you should have played the first one! Super cluttered, text everywhere.
Totally agree on Seals, great points from both @BloodyBattleBrain and @Sharpe there. The absolute keys IMO are that they come at a cost (and not being out fighting is a HUGE cost in AoW3 – the loot and xp from clearing neutrals or obvious benefits of fighting other players is absolutely crucial to victory) and that the AI can meaningfully engage with it.
Now I want to go play some AoW3, dangit.
How did the Civ 4 incarnation of Colonization compare to the original?
I honestly don’t remember enough about the original to say! When I mention Colonization, I should probably specify that I’m talking about that Civ IV re-make.
-Tom
Yeah, my memory of the original is very hazy. It looks like the civ4 re-make was a popular one for mods. Off to conquer the new world.
Yeah, seals are a clever addition to 4X formula. Usually in 4X you have a traditional zero-sum elimination victory condition. Then you have turtling victory, that is all about holding off while directing some resources to a victory sink. It can give you benefits like Rise of Nations wonder victory is about holding powerful wonders and Doomsday victory gives you bonuses. So it’s not correct to compare Doomsday to Seals, Doomsday victory is still in a vein of Civilization 1 turtling space ship building.
Seals is wonderful cause it adds a new dimension to a map, suddenly it’s a wargame with victory points, but it’s on the same map where the whole conquest warfighting happens. It’s as if they’ve made a sport where people play football and tennis at the same time and you can win by getting enough points in any of the games, but you never have to commit, that same player can swing and kick when they need to.
It’s quite hard to go back to it after Planetfall, so many little things got improved.
For example, off the top of my head, in PF, the neutral parties get their own turn, so you can predict and position and prepare for their movement to a degree.
In AoW3, they are part of the regular movement queue, meaning you can advance your party somewhere, and in the time it takes to select your 2nd stack to move to support your first stack, and independent army of Undead Titans has engaged your first stack, and you can’t win.
Very frustrating.
Plus no research or production rollover, plus lower tier units gets obsoleted much quicker…
Ugh, rollover, yeah.
I play aow3 with simultaneous turns but generally just let all the AIs go and then go last, so the npc movement thing doesn’t bother me.
Most of the time I win with the bulk of my armies being t2 - tbf I play pretty aggressively, but I have always found the tier balance to be pretty good.
Hero item management is much more annoying.
Terraforming feels tedious at times.
Overall I much prefer tactical/strategic/doctrine spellcasting to the shared pool.
Mama economy is still often funky.
Still, probably a top 10 all time game for me ;)
I feel like both AoW3 and Planetfall are “10s” (which is a rating I rarely give) but interestingly neither released as a 10. AoW3 had a number of rough edges and a notable lack of endgame on release so I’d say it was an 8 on release. Planetfall was more fully cooked on release but still had some rough edges. In both cases, the Devs did something very rare in game design IMO: they were able to see and acknowledge where work was needed and through patches and DLC fully baked each game into awesome strategy games.
I have a pretty damn high opinion of the AoW dev team at this point. It’s one thing to come up with a good game design but the slow evaluation and improvement of good into great, that’s impressive to me. And given how many devs learn the wrong lessons or “improve” their games into the dirt, my hat is off to the AoW devs.
Does any game release at this level now?
TS are awesome at this btw, in and out of betas.
75% off for $12.50 on Steam right now until March 26.
Screwing around right now. Trying to grasp the value of annexing vs setting up new colonies.
Do I just want to cram in as many colonies as possible in every other territory (since they can’t be adjacent to another colony)?
And is there any kind of “tax” on setting up TOO many colonies like with maintenance/global happiness? (other than building the colonizer unit)
And speaking of Colonization, I didn’t care for the Civ 4 version but someone told me the original was different and a lot better. True?