Which types of victories are there? (Diplo, Terra, War, ?)

I've played a couple of Dune Wars games over the past week and while I haven't been able to win thus far but I'm having alot of fun. (I'm such an idiot for not guarding my cities when suddenly everyone wants to kill me )


I've been able to figure out atleast three ways of winning the game - but are there more than these three? Religious or Economical maybe?
Diplomacy - Laansraad Victory (like vanilla diplo)
Terraforming - 3% of Arrakis terraformed (can I check the progress percentage of this anywhere?)
Domination - Kick everyone else off of the planet.

In game, either press <F8> or click the 'fist' icon in the upper left corner underneath where your gold amount is shown, and the victory conditions screen will pop up. You should be able to get a general idea of the different victory conditions that are possible. Hope this helps.

At the moment the only real victories are religious (best done through Qizarate religion), diplomatic (best done through Imperial religion), terraforming (through Arrakis Paradise civic) and conquest/domination.
There's also *something* of a tech victory in that completing the projects for A monitor warship will make a conquest/domination victory a lot easier.
Cultural is still in there, but isn't really very achievable.

I can see us designing some kind of economic/spice victory, but we don't have anything like that currently implemented, and I don't have any particularly good ideas of a good way to make that work.

Possibly just a control X spice resources, but that would be very hard to balance so as to be neither too hard nor too easy, and to scale appropriately for map size. And its problematic too because there's not much you can do to *pursue* it, other than standard expansion, using culture to expand your territory, using Arrakis Spice civic, and building harvesters everywhere.

Haven't read the Dune books in ages, but perhaps something along the lines of blackmailing the guild, buying it out, or controlling X percentage of the total spice that can be output at any given time (including trade from other factions and the wonder) - or perhaps a wonder that consumes vast amounts of spice per turn as a way of stockpiling, and thereby controlling the spice monopoly.

To be honest there'd be plenty of ways to accomplish this, including a hybrid of the Liets Way, where only X percentage of Arrakis is turned into greenland and the rest is mined heavily for Spice (Didn't they do that in the books I think? Make zones for the spice worms and keeping them in? *shrug*)

Aaaaanyway, back on track. Thanks for the tip on F8. I'll have a look the next time I get ingame.

Well, lets think about some of these options more rigorously.

Design goal:
Create a victory goal around spice.
a) The goal should feel thematic and flavorful; it should feel like something that Dune-world factions would logically try to accomplish.
b) It should ideally require that the player to take some actions or play in a particular manner that is different from how they would normally act (to accomplish say a pure score victory). Diplomatic and religious victories have this feature, terraforming has it a little but not a lot.
c) Pursuing the victory should give incremental benefits along the way. This is one of the failures of the traditional Spaceship victory. b and c are somewhat in conflict.
d) It should be not too easy, not too hard, and should scale well for map size.

Proposed methods:
Method 1. Player must have X copies of the spice resource (in their capital).
Strengths:
Condition a) is satisfied.
Encourages player to try to get as many spice resources as possible, including through building the Project Amal Wonder, or spice purifier building (see feedback thread), or extorting spice from vassals (if this is possible given our current settings?).
Encourages player to invest in Culture, to increase potential territory for spice harvesting, as well as traditional expansion/conquest.
Weaknesses:
Very hard to pick right level of X, and to scale appropriately for map size.
Can be accomplished without deviating very much from standard good play.

Method 2. Player must have a within-culture harvester on each of X% of the world's spice resources.

Method 3. Player must control spice resources equal to X% of the spice tiles in the world.

Methods 2 and 3 are distinct, because one counts all forms of spice income (including those from trade, vassals, wonders/buildings) while the other counts only from harvesters.

2 and 3 differ from 1 in what we use as a baseline. In 2 and 3, the baseline varies over time depending on the whims of spice blows and destruction of spice from terraforming. We could see an extreme case where many other players using Paradise end up destroying a high proportion of the spice, making it too easy to achieve. Large numbers of cities with spice purifiers could also cause a problem by making the goal too easy to achieve.

2 and 3 also suffer from the same weaknesses as 2.

I can't see how wonder(s) that consumed spice would work. The problem with them is that they don't have any penalty until they are built - at which point they provide victory.
Suppose you had to build 5 copies of this stockpiling wonder. You could just almost build it in 5 cities, but not complete any of them until you were ready to build all of them, then instantly win without the penalty. So in practice this would basically just a standard space ship tech/construction win, with no particular spice mechanic.
One way around would be to force them to be built sequentially in a single city, I guess, with successive versions required in order to build the next, like Altars of Luonnotar.

Also, how would you deal with negative spice? Is it doable to have a building require X copies of a resource in order to be built?
Supposing we could solve this, I guess we could have:

Method 4.
Construct Spice Stockpile Mark 4 wonder. Mark 4 wins the game, it requires mark 3, which requires mark 2, which requires mark 1. Each wonder consumes X spice.

Weaknesses:
I'm not sure that a victory which is painful along the way to accomplish is the best design. It fails c). You wouldn't want to build any of the Wonders until you were near building all of them.
I guess we could give a large culture bonus in exchange for each wonder? Stockpile control gives political power?
So: Stockpile Mark 1 consumes 10 spice per turn, gives +25% culture in all cities. Mark 2 consumes 20 spice per turn, gives +50% culture in all cities. Mark 3 consumes 30 spice per turn, gives +100% culture in all cities.

Also, very hard to scale to map size.

Thoughts? Other proposals?

Ahriman said:

Proposed methods:
Method 1. Player must have X copies of the spice resource (in their capital).
Strengths:
Condition a) is satisfied.
Encourages player to try to get as many spice resources as possible, including through building the Project Amal Wonder, or spice purifier building (see feedback thread), or extorting spice from vassals (if this is possible given our current settings?).
Encourages player to invest in Culture, to increase potential territory for spice harvesting, as well as traditional expansion/conquest.
Weaknesses:
Very hard to pick right level of X, and to scale appropriately for map size.
Can be accomplished without deviating very much from standard good play.

Method 2. Player must have a within-culture harvester on each of X% of the world's spice resources.

Method 3. Player must control spice resources equal to X% of the spice tiles in the world.

Methods 2 and 3 are distinct, because one counts all forms of spice income (including those from trade, vassals, wonders/buildings) while the other counts only from harvesters.

2 and 3 differ from 1 in what we use as a baseline. In 2 and 3, the baseline varies over time depending on the whims of spice blows and destruction of spice from terraforming. We could see an extreme case where many other players using Paradise end up destroying a high proportion of the spice, making it too easy to achieve. Large numbers of cities with spice purifiers could also cause a problem by making the goal too easy to achieve.

2 and 3 also suffer from the same weaknesses as 2.

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Here's a proposal -
'Desert Spice Monopoly' victory condition: your Method #2 modified as follows - minimum number of spice harvesters required based upon map size in addition to X% of the total number of spice resources. It might take a little bit of playtesting to establish the minumums required for the map sizes, although I would imagine it might be similar to the requirements for terraforming. Also, AIs seeking this type of victory would have an incentive to eliminate any House(s) engaged in terraforming in order to be able to meet the required minumum number of harveters.

I'm not sure I see an advantage in a hybrid method of X% and minimum X. That could become a shifting target that was confusing to the player.

Also, AIs seeking this type of victory would have an incentive to eliminate any House(s) engaged in terraforming in order to be able to meet the required minumum number of harveters.

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Be careful about attributing motives to the AI. The AI is very dumb. It doesn't recognize any of these kinds of changes we make. An AI with Arrakis spice civic will already have incentive to go after a player with Arrakis Paradise civic because of the diplomatic penalties from them building catchbasins and reservoirs.
But creating a victory condition by itself doesn't make the AI do anything extra to achieve it.

Similarly, AFAIK the AI won't "recognize" the value of a spice resource provided by a Spice purifier building. I don't think its coded to recognize resources, and spice doesn't have any value to the AI (to avoid exploits where it will trade for it or trade it away unfairly to the human). So the AI will build the purifier only if forced into it by AI weights.
[I am not 100% sure on this.]

I'm guessing AI doesn't build spice purifiers much because it basically plays at Noble difficulty, and so doesn't need large amounts of health; it gets a large amount of health free and tends to have smaller cities. Health doesn't constrain the AI by the late midgame.
Also note though that the buildings you see in conquered cities aren't all the buildings they had, since many can be lost in the conquest process.

Ahriman said:

I'm not sure I see an advantage in a hybrid method of X% and minimum X. That could become a shifting target that was confusing to the player.

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Perhaps. The Dune encyclopedia would have to do a good job of explaining it. I think players already know that spice is variable (e.g. spice blows depositing new spice) and the key would be for the victory conditions screen to display the total spice the player has and the total amount in the world at that time. The only reason to have a minimum is so that the player wouldn't win by having say 50% of 30 spice resources. Maybe the hybrid method is not the direction you want go. I'm not so sure I like your method #4. I would just stockpile four great techmen and build the wonders (national?) in quick succession, or however many I needed to complete the wonders in four turns.

I think players already know that spice is variable (e.g. spice blows depositing new spice)

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While the number of spice resources within a player's territory is variable, I don't think that the number of spice resources in the world as a whole varies that much. A Law of Large Numbers effect starts to come into play.

If we had a method that could count the number of spice resources, we could run some simulations and plot the total spice over time for various map sizes, and this would inform the discussion.

The advantage of method 1 over 2 or 3 is that we don't even need to count the number of resources.

I'm not so sure I like your method #4.

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I don't really like it either, but its the best I can think of that codifies HerrMansen's suggestion.

Let's see what Deliverator and David think.

Another "spice monopoly" suggestion (or set of suggestions):

(This is somewhat based on the "corner global energy market" victory condition in Alpha Centauri, which might be useful to consider in general as a rough analog of how this type of victory could work.)

A combination of several listed ideas:

Once built, each of these national wonders would provide extra income from spice, but would also shut down spice income for several turns. these wonders might require a certain amount of spice resource in the base. (I'm not sure if this is possible to code, but some sort of negative effect along these lines would be useful, to simulate the effects of storing lots of spice rather than using it, plus providing an unavoidable disadvantage). To win the game, the player would need to control the final wonder in the series, plus have a certain amount of income from spice. (This way, even if the player rushed the wonder, they'd still have to defend themselves for however many turns were needed to actually regain their spice income.)


As a flavor thing, if any wonders are used to win the spice victory, it may be useful to have a great merchant be able to build them (This would also give some CHOAM synergy, which seems sensible backstory wise)


I don't really like the "control X% harvesters" type of victory, since, as mentioned earlier, it is something that people playing will be going for anyway, and could end up too similar to other expansion type victories. Perhaps combining a harvester%/spice# with a big project might be more useful, so there would be something else to do rather than simply playing as normal.

but would also shut down spice income for several turns

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plus have a certain amount of income from spice. (This way, even if the player rushed the wonder, they'd still have to defend themselves for however many turns were needed to actually regain their spice income.)

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I don't really understand how this would work in practice or codewise. Can you elaborate?
It also seems quite complex.

and could end up too similar to other expansion type victories.

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I'm open to replacing standard conquest victory with Holy War, Terraforming and Spice victories, that still requires significant expansion.

Ahriman said:

I'm open to replacing standard conquest victory with Holy War, Terraforming and Spice victories, that still requires significant expansion.

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I think in practice, Holy War has somewhat displaced conquest as a victory condition already. The past four games that I have played have been Holy War victories except for one Diplomatic victory. IMO, getting rid of the standard conquest victory wouldn't be a big deal.

What I mean is; its ok to have victory conditions that overlap with domination, because we are effectively replacing domination with these three.

[I meant domination in posts above, not conquest.]

Ahriman said:

I don't really understand how this would work in practice or codewise. Can you elaborate?

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Codewise, I'm not entirely sure how this would work. (The suggestion includes a number of specifics, but is really meant more as an example of how this type of thing could work rather than a specific" must do it this way")

"Additional spice income" would just be similar to how spice silos work.

The idea behind the lack of income suggestion is that it causes a current disadvantage, but than creates a later advantage as well (similar to, for example, how catchbasins consume water at first but than supply a lot more water as terraforming occurs,.) In the suggestion, the main point isn't so much the lack of spice income for several turns as it is the fact that some disadvantage occurs, and that it has to do somehow with storing spice.

The other point is, as with the Alpha Centauri victory condition, that it avoids the issue of instabuilding wonders to win, by still giving them a chance to try and disrupt the civilization that is attempting this victory.

It also seems quite complex.

I'm open to replacing standard conquest victory with Holy War, Terraforming and Spice victories, that still requires significant expansion.

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I think in practice, Holy War has somewhat displaced conquest as a victory condition already. The past four games that I have played have been Holy War victories except for one Diplomatic victory. IMO, getting rid of the standard conquest victory wouldn't be a big deal.

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On complexity: The sugggestion above looks more complex to write out than to actually play. When playing, it would amount to building the wonders and preparing for the temporary loss of income. (The terraforming description also looked complex when I first read it, but isn't too difficult to play in practice.)

On Holy war and conquest: I'd agree with this also (It's usually how my games work out as well.)

With spice harvesters and conquest, however, the overlap is even more severe, since players will be building spice harvesters no matter what they do (except perhaps with lots of terraforming), and when winning a holy war/conquest victory, following up with spice harvesters is an expected thing to do. (so the same strategy all the way through would be used for the two victories.)

A victory involving wonders would involve a different playing style than one involving capturing territory. (Another possibility is to use a straight gold payment, perhaps, which might be simpler than the loss of spice income mentioned above.)

"He that controls Arrakis, controls the Spice, and he that controls the Spice, controls the Universe."

This is the basic problem with making a Spice victory that is distinct from the other ones.

It would seems very anti-theme if you could win a Spice victory when you only control say a third of Arrakis. Until you have near complete control of the planet it doesn't really make sense to say you have a spice monopoly. Even if you have stockpiled a lot of spice, as long as there are alternate sources you cannot be said to really control it. Controlling the Spice and controlling Arrakis amount to the same thing.

a) The goal should feel thematic and flavorful; it should feel like something that Dune-world factions would logically try to accomplish.
b) It should ideally require that the player to take some actions or play in a particular manner that is different from how they would normally act (to accomplish say a pure score victory). Diplomatic and religious victories have this feature, terraforming has it a little but not a lot.
c) Pursuing the victory should give incremental benefits along the way. This is one of the failures of the traditional Spaceship victory. b and c are somewhat in conflict.
d) It should be not too easy, not too hard, and should scale well for map size.

Click to expand...

I suppose this is covered somewhat by (a) - (d), but I would add
(e) it should be fun.

I've not looked at victory conditions too much before, but presuming it is simple to remove them, I would favour dropping the Domination and Conquest victories and just having Holy War, Terraforming and a new Spice victory. The Spice victory might amount to pretty much the same thing as Domination anyway. It would add to the flavour at least.

I would be interested in making the CHOAM religion a bit more tied in with Spice production. One interesting thought I had was making the location of the CHOAM holy city/headquarters relocate based on who has the most spice harvesters, and/or the CHOAM HQ can be used to take a percentage of spice income from other players cities that have the CHOAM religion in some way. This does have the danger of being a slippery-slope mechanic I suppose.

From the CHOAM entry on wikipedia:

Because of its control of inter-planetary commerce, CHOAM is the largest single source of wealth in the Old Empire; as such, influence in CHOAM (through partisans within it and control of directorships) is the central goal of political maneuvering, both to receive dividends and also (it is implied) to skim off profits. In Dune, Herbert notes:

"You have no idea how much wealth is involved, Feyd," the Baron said. "Not in your wildest imaginings. To begin, we'll have an irrevocable directorship in the CHOAM Company."

Feyd-Rautha nodded. Wealth was the thing. CHOAM was the key to wealth, each noble House dipping from the company's coffers whatever it could under the power of the directorships. Those CHOAM directorships &#8212; they were the real evidence of political power in the Imperium, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Landsraad as it balanced itself against the Emperor and his supporters.

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I'm not sure how this would tie in with any spice victory condition. You still have the problem that if you control the spice, you effectively control CHOAM as Duke Leto says:

"But the important thing is to consider all the Houses that depend on CHOAM profits. And think of the enormous proportion of those profits dependent upon a single product &#8212; the spice. Imagine what would happen if something should reduce spice production."

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It would seems very anti-theme if you could win a Spice victory when you only control say a third of Arrakis.

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It is important that victory conditions be at least moderately feasible. The main point of a victory condition IMO is to have something that says "you win" that lets you avoid tedious late-game mopup.

In every game, there is a clear point where you have "won" in practice, where you are the most powerful player by far, and then often a long grind before you meet the actual victory conditions.
IMO the gameplay goal is to have the victory conditions be attainable not too long after you have become the de facto winner, and so to minimize the amount of grind.

Also, there is a distinction between controlling 1/3 of Arrakis, and controlling 1/3 of the land area. We have to remember that in any game, most spice tiles will still lie outside the "control" of any faction.

(e) it should be fun.

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Absolutely.

I've not looked at victory conditions too much before, but presuming it is simple to remove them, I would favour dropping the Domination and Conquest victories and just having Holy War, Terraforming and a new Spice victory. The Spice victory might amount to pretty much the same thing as Domination anyway. It would add to the flavour at least.

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This is what I meant in post #13.
Conquest needs to stay as a backup; at a minimum if you destroy every other faction you've won. But it should be unlikely to ever occur, because you can meet one of the other conditions before then.

I would be interested in making the CHOAM religion a bit more tied in with Spice production.

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There is a pretty strong tie IMO already with the CHOAM shrine, which acts as an extra spice corp. I think the shrine is powerful enough as it is without needing to penalize other players.

One interesting thought I had was making the location of the CHOAM holy city/headquarters relocate based on who has the most spice harvesters,

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I don't think this is fun. If you beeline to try to found CHOAM, you should retain that benefit rater than losing it because someone else went for economy/expansion already.

You still have the problem that if you control the spice, you effectively control CHOAM

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I think this is an argument for not needing any explicit tie to CHOAM. If you control a big chunk of the spice production, then you have de facto power whether you control CHOAM or not.

The partial problem is that for gameplay reasons we have a disconnect; in the books, CHOAM owns all spice production, whereas in the game we have individual House spice corporations, that have no presence in the books.

So in game, by necessity we've made CHOAM more about trading other goods, rather than just spice.

Deliverator said:

"He that controls Arrakis, controls the Spice, and he that controls the Spice, controls the Universe."

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It's been so long I can't even recognize that quote - guess I really need to read the book again

But you make a good point - To control the spice you would either have to control Arrakis, or the worms - either sounds remarkably similar to the Liets Way and various Conquest victory conditions. It makes spice seem like a means to the end, rather than an end by itself.

HerrMansen said:

It's been so long I can't even recognize that quote - guess I really need to read the book again

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I think that quote might actually be from the 1984 film rather than the book, but the point is good...

I think the method I like most so far is some version of Jesters:

'Desert Spice Monopoly' victory condition: your Method #2 modified as follows - minimum number of spice harvesters required based upon map size in addition to X% of the total number of spice resources. It might take a little bit of playtesting to establish the minumums required for the map sizes, although I would imagine it might be similar to the requirements for terraforming. Also, AIs seeking this type of victory would have an incentive to eliminate any House(s) engaged in terraforming in order to be able to meet the required minumum number of harveters.

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You could make it that you need to have X% of the harvesters in the world instead. Make it more of a spice production victory, rather than controlling spice tiles.

I can also see the point in having a minimum threshold:

The only reason to have a minimum is so that the player wouldn't win by having say 50% of 30 spice resources.

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I wouldn't see this as a hybrid method. It is just a victory condition with two fairly simple to understand conditions.

Deliverator said:

You could make it that you need to have X% of the harvesters in the world instead. Make it more of a spice production victory, rather than controlling spice tiles.

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Best idea yet IMO. I have noticed the AI destroys my spice harvesters when I am at war with them. Could the AI be 'encouraged' to do so even more? I like the idea of having to build and protect my spice harvesters while destoying the enemy Houses' harvesters. Spice war anyone?

After thinking about it some more, the "%spice harvester" victory still doesn't seem that divergent from other "expansion" victories, thanks to the fact that spice harvesting is something players would be doing anyway. (I can see pillaging vs. city attacks as somewhat of a difference, although either way it would involve building a large military of some sort.) Some sort of production element to the victory still seems useful to provide more of a difference between a spice victory playing style and other types of playing styles.