Tedious end games

[Napo981]

Every game I play usually end when... I'm too bored by endgames moving all my units.

Now, I've got a prince game with a very good start, get until modern era and I'm giving a final blow to my most serious competitor.. but I probably won't finish it.

I've got three little stacks of doom of about 15 units and my cities are popping up units like crazy. Get really bored moving all those units around. Even with automatic workers and automatics city management, this game seems really too long.



I know this subject has been discussed way over, I just want to share my feelings of not be able to end a very good game at the start .

They should have some kind of advisor managing endgames. Hope they will design something for Civ 5.

Still love Civ anyway

 

[snipafist]

I mostly agree with you. I think the tedium comes down to the fact that a successful late-game empire has managed to become a production and commercial powerhouse, so you find yourself blazing through techs and units. I wish they'd raise the cost of later-game techs and units with this in mind.

 

[RERomine]

Try setting it up with diplomatic and conquest as your victory options. That way, if you get tired of playing before you finish the other's off, you can vote yourself winner and be done with it. You just have to make sure you don't get voted off the planet before you get to that point

 

[Breunor]

I think the issue is that you often know you have won the game, with very high probability, meaning that you are waiting to finish but the competitive nature of the game has already finished. Therefore, it gets tedious. The tedium is exacerbated by the fact that turns take a lot longer as the game progresses. its the nature of an empire building game; the whole idea is to build your empire for riches in the future, so if you hav performed the early game well the endcan be inevitible.

The solutions are to end the game once you 'know' you have won, or to play on harder levels where you can't win so quickly. Unfortunately, sometimes the next level is quite hard, and sometimes you are pretty sure you have won but aren't 100% positive.

Breunor

 

[Garand]

I haven't yet reached an endgame in Civ IV that has been tediously boring. In fact, I had quite an exciting one a while back. I was the Germans and was on a pangaea, bordered by the Japanes to the east, and the Chinese and Mongols to the south. I had fought the Japanese in a war right around the Middle ages so I had peace with them because they weren't looking for another butt-kicking.

I had a comfy tech lead but the Chinese were gaining on me. They had a lot of room and had wiped out the Persians so they had a distinct population and city advantage on me. I began modernizing and expanding my army around the time infantry and tanks roll along, preparing for what I felt would be a showdown between Mao and me. Because the Chinese were becoming so strong, I couldn't bribe anyone to declare war on them to weaken them, nor could I get them to agree to help me in a war with them. I sent spies into Mao's territory and every single one of his cities had at least 10 modern units defending. Ouch.

I kept going with the military buildup, managed to get a few nukes built before the UN banned them, which meant I at least had a nuclear edge on everyone else. I began work on Apollo and resolved to win by spaceship while maintaining a large army as a deterrent. Well, about 5-10 turns before I finished Apollo, Mao built it before me. Time for panic.

I sent my spies in and his cities were cranking out casings and other spaceship parts. I set my cities to crank out parts, did a research crash program to get the parts I needed to launch before him, and massed my troops on the border for a possible blitz to derail his projects.

What resulted was a really cool cold war. Troops staring at each other across the border. Crash programs to send men to another planet. And spies. I sent out dozens of spies to destroy his casings, but this extremely expensive and drained my coffers quickly. I instead sent my spies out to destroy his access to aluminum and uranium. I destroyed roads and rails, demanded his allies stop trading with him. Anything to slow down his production. He caught my spies several times and was pissed but never launched an attack because of the size of my army on the border and his own preoccupation with constructing the spaceship. I had become wreckless in getting my ship off before him. And I succeeded. I launched about 5 turns before him and won. Down to the wire gunpoint excitement.

 

[RERomine]

It really depends on the type of game you play. I certainly can see space race games can be on the edge until the end. Most war related games are salted away fairly early. If you are playing a conquest game, it gets to that point where you know you've got it put away, but just have to stomp out all the little far flung cities. That does get tedious.

Domination games are rarely much better. I've only had one that was dicey up to the end. My civ, with a PA was facing off against another civ, with their PA. I had the pop to win and was within 1% of winning on land area. There were no other civs left. Usually, a domination game has a collection of much smaller ones around, but this game had one team massing over 40% of the land area. I was concerned a war would turn out to be a long, protracted affair if I didn't do it carefully. The AI team had interior lines meaning it could push into my least defended section if I didn't strike quick and hard. I ended up staging units near the AI team's most vulnerable spots. When I attacked, I had to keep what I took because if the AI team hit my weak spots, we possibly could have just traded cities. I ended up taking 14 cities in my first turn and my defense held them off; didn't lose any of the captured cities or any of mine. The game ended that turn.

Overall, that was the exception to the situation. Most games tend to be done long before the end. That can make them tedious.

 

[Socratatus]

I see this complaint about ALL strategy games. Once you start doing well ,which usually happens by the endgame, there`s little challenge because by natural law if you have beaten everyone there`s no one to stop you.

What surprises me is how some complain about it. Football, cricket, racing, all get boring by the end cos we know who`s the winner since he`s gained the most points by endgame or the fastest lap. Only rarely does any game have a neck and neck finish, but that`s what makes them rare.

Say the programmer`s threw in a surprise super-enemy at the endgame to stop you being bored, you`d only get bored again after beating him and `pwing` everything. And if the surprise super-villain wiped you out, you`d probably complain, `not fair`.

The way I see it, getting bored in the endgame is where you `mop` up and complete your domination and pat yourself on the back. You won. Winning is boring. The excitement was in the battle.

 

[LlamaCat]

It would be cool if the game had an option to queue up several types of orders for military units. this might help manage the end games. so for example the way you can order a worker to first build a road, then a mine, then move and build a farm, using the Shift key... something like that for military. you order a unit or stack of units to patrol an area and take aggressive or defensive stances depending if enemy units are nearby. or you order all units built in cities A, B and C to immediately move toward enemy city D and attack, etc...

some other games have these types of options. for example in Age of Empires you can give units certain defensive or agressive stances.

 

[Sisiutil]

It can help if the AI gets beefed up, which may have already happened in BtS.

In a recent game Justinian was just trailing behind me as I worked towards a space ship win. I was just thinking I might built the Internet while I waited for the more expensive space ship techs to complete when Justinian went and built that project himself! Very smart. He wasn't able to keep up because I had a better production base, but it made the end game more tense than it otherwise would have been. Not to mention that I was fretting about someone sabotaging my space ship part production.

 

[RERomine]

I see this complaint about ALL strategy games. Once you start doing well ,which usually happens by the endgame, there`s little challenge because by natural law if you have beaten everyone there`s no one to stop you.

I can't say this isn't true. The challenge is the competition. Once it's all but put away, it gets to be mundane. It would be nice if the AI was more intuitive about things to make it more challenging. A human player is capable of fending off a greatly superior AI civ, while the reverse isn't true. But the negative to that is such a program would probably run 10 minute turns and people won't stand for that. It boils down to the nearly impossible task of programming an AI provide a significant challenge to a person on a straight up fight. Higher difficulty levels on most games give the AI a brute force advantage. At least with Civ, they didn't give them a combat advantage, too. At any rate, it wouldn't prevent that tedious point from being reached, but it would push it off farther into the game.

 

[Socratatus]

The thing is even if the AI was better (more Human) there`s still not much it can do once you own the world. Every thing it tries, you`ll just be better. It`s still going to get boring.

Put a another Human in place of the AI. What can he do if you`re the master? If he`s really lucky and smart he might do some incredible trick that gets him to rob you of your domination, but chances are he`ll just quit as a hopeless fight.

It reminds me of the saying, "And he wept, for there were no more lands to conquer.."

 

[Napo981]

I see this complaint about ALL strategy games. Once you start doing well ,which usually happens by the endgame, there`s little challenge because by natural law if you have beaten everyone there`s no one to stop you.

Well... not ALL..

Did you ever play PanzerGeneral... late conquest battle are longer but not as much as Civ. Same thing for Warcraft and RTS. Late games did have more units but this is not as tedious as Civ.

I think it's have to do with the game concept, where you have a empire to expand, and gradually have more units, more cities to control, more land to control, and eventually air and sea.

Moreover, as you advance in the game, each battle has usually less influence in the game.

But I agree this kind of slowdown is seen in other games. For example, Medievel Total War.

I think those kind of games failed to give players way to manage large territories and large armies.

 

[Gooblah]

I've had games like that: Playing as Louis (vanilla), i took out the eastern neighbors on my continent: Saladin and TOkie. I spread Saladin's religion, Hinduism, to the entire continent, every city, raking in around 30-40 GPT. The western neighbor was a relatively advanced (he was at Steam Power while i hit Industrialism) Alexander. Good neighbor. Even better was Genghis (wow, i cant believe im saying this) who gifted me crap and blahblah .He was on a seperate continent sperated from Tokyo by 1 ocean tile. A world map and a few caravels enabled me to spread Hinduism there. I found Vicky on the other continent a while later, and screwed her w/ Gunships and Tanks. Alexander and Genghis, though friendly, declared war on each other Stupid AI>That left me to wait 50 turns until a freaking domination in the late 1980s. Wow. the endgame sucked. Badly.

 

[AThousandYoung]

Ever try to finish of a Protoss player who keeps building Pylons in out of the way places? Very annoying.

 

[vicawoo]

At some point, I usually I assume I've won the game and I lose interest in finishing it.

But some things that help, using alt click, you can queue continuous production. You can rally point cities (and you can select multiple cities) so units built go to a specific point. And there are some mass commands that I forget.

You can also load up a build order for new cities.

 

[LlamaCat]

You can rally point cities (and you can select multiple cities) so units built go to a specific point.

how to do this? I would love to be able to do this... somehow I missed reading about this one.