(1-NS) Domination Victory

[ilmis9]

Requirements for AI DomV:

• meet all civilizations
• Victory is triggered if AI vassalizes 40-65% of Civilizations (depends on map size and era-and is reverse scaled) or reaches thresholds shown below⤵️

• 2/2 eras	Duel	Tiny	Small	Standard	Large	Huge
  % of Land	80%​	80%​	80%​	40%​	30%​	25%​
  % of Pop	80%​	80%​	80%​	40%​	30%​	25%​
  1/2 eras	Duel	Tiny	Small	Standard	Large	Huge
  % of Land	80%​	80%​	80%​	40%​	30%​	25%​
  % of Pop	80%​	80%​	80%​	40%​	25%​	20%​

• for Players scaling goes up for 7% for each map size but vassalization option is mandatory.
• there should be option to toggle off this victory type

Explanation

• DomV is nonexsistent for AI, it should be regional not global for AI
• DomV oriented AI should expose every neighbours, win opportunities, but it does not.
• AI is not capital oriented but often goes "fully genocide" which in this case rewards their behavior.
• Players will be forced to prevent AI for such actions making game more "fun" and more competitive as there would be more victory contestants.
• CV and DiploV pure oriented civs wins more than DomV oriented civs with war as just a tool for victory, this tweak should reward AI of going thru all warmonging penalties and focusing production/culture in military rather than straight tourism/diplo unit spamming etc.
• It does not ease up wining conditions for players as still if every threshold is reached, players would win eventually. This eliminates time wasting and rewards players with that splash screen.
• Its harder to catch up leading civs in tourism, so this opens up path for underdog AIs to have a chance of winning/ having comeback.
• This inserts bit of realism into game in larger maps as in history there were many empires "close" to what could be compared to DomV for their times, such as :The Umayyad Caliphate, The Qing Dynasty, The Spanish Empire, The Russian Empire, The Mongol Empire and The British Empire for example.

Example from my latest game
Map - Gedemon's YnAEMP Giant map (with own tweaks making Europe larger etc.)
Emperor difficulty
Germany had 22 influental civs with 2nd having only 3 or something.
All data taken from Info Addict and put into excel + mini map
Mostly land/population/military is correlated, in other hand there are few exceptions when there are civs with no victory potential with our current victory types, but this proposal would be something that would open up some paths for them.

 

[Dimmy]

In the latest versions of VP, the AI is not warmongering much so it is totally needed. And they are scared off and retreat very easily.

 

[ma_kuh]

I hear warmongering AI has a substantial fix coming soon. It would be good to analyze a fixed version of warmongers before changing warmongering win conditions too drastically, in my opinion.

 

[Jdoug312]

I hear warmongering AI has a substantial fix coming soon. It would be good to analyze a fixed version of warmongers before changing warmongering win conditions too drastically, in my opinion.

The AI wasn't winning domination victory before the recent tactical AI issues either, though.

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

It was before in VP, and certainly was able to swallow some other AIs and become 30-40 cities empire, even last year. For more complete domination you can look up Marbozir game of VP from youtube, iirc Shaka conquered half the world and won very early victory. So it's not like VP makes no AI able to pose a threat for the player or can't war, it just can't do it last few months. I was habitually kicked out of the game by a neighboring wamorger playing in 2021 and 2020, every other game, now it happens once every 20 games and nearly only with songhai.

 

[Tekamthi]

I like the general idea here, though not sure what the specific threshold should be. On 43 civ games I don't think domination is even achievable by human, if playing on a reasonably challenging difficulty level.

I'd add one additional criteria: control of 66% or more of uranium

 

[CppMaster]

Don't worry about 43 civ games. Let's focus on standard first and adjust for different settings later.

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

I'd add one additional criteria: control of 66% or more of uranium

Let's not and have open way of AI or player victory in modern era or earlier eras.

And yes, while, I support this (probably without this 1/2 and 2/2 science as it is probably redundant, just choose one, it looks like to many variables to code but I don't know), any game larger than standard or large shouldn't be balanced around. In this case it's just a poor.

 

[Tekamthi]

Let's not and have open way of AI or player victory in modern era or earlier eras.

Good point, probably should only kick in after the first Manhattan project is completed, if there were a uranium requirement.

Don't worry about 43 civ games. Let's focus on standard first and adjust for different settings later.

Pretty much the only game I play, outside of vanilla mp games. Anyway I agree, but would be nice to have a domination victory option that is at least obscurely achievable in 43 civ, whether as well balanced or not

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

Good point, probably should only kick in after the first Manhattan project is completed, if there were a uranium requirement.

Ideal, but I really don't know if Recursive will just not abdicate if we continue to throw millions of variables in any proposal at him at every corner. After all, he has to actually deliver the job (if he wants to).

In this case, the principle of 40/30/25% pop and terrain serves both standard and 43 maps equally well.

 

[Tekamthi]

Well this one I think would be relatively achievable, compared to some of the asks already in the proposal. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'm pretty sure existing Lua functions and hooks allow for a boolean-returning function to check for this in maybe ten lines or less of code.

Anyway just an idea for thematic flavor more than anything

 

[Jdoug312]

It was before in VP, and certainly was able to swallow some other AIs and become 30-40 cities empire, even last year. For more complete domination you can look up Marbozir game of VP from youtube, iirc Shaka conquered half the world and won very early victory. So it's not like VP makes no AI able to pose a threat for the player or can't war, it just can't do it last few months. I was habitually kicked out of the game by a neighboring wamorger playing in 2021 and 2020, every other game, now it happens once every 20 games and nearly only with songhai.

Conquering a civ or 2 and amassing 30 cities is cool but unless every rival capital in included in those 30 cities, they have not won the game. There have definitely been versions where the AI is good at war, but there's never been one where the AI could honestly win a domination victory if a human was in the game. So I'm all for changing domination victory to something that the AI can achieve vs a human playing to win the game.

 

[CppMaster]

It could be the AI haven't won a domination victory with human player in the game, because once it'd take human capital, he would resign, so the game ends there.

 

[Jdoug312]

It could be the AI haven't won a domination victory with human player in the game, because once it'd take human capital, he would resign, so the game ends there.

In theory, sure, but in the 9yrs I've played with this incredible mod the AI has never gotten particularly close either. Never has the runaway warmonger on the other side of the world ever gotten most of the world's capitals.

I think the best I've seen from a strictly warmongering perspective was a civ who conquered 2 of his neighbors and vassaled another. But even if that was a standard 8 civ game (it wasn't), he'd still be way short of a domination victory.

Time and Domination are the only two victory conditions that I'm always certain I won't formerly lose by, and Time victory gets a pass on this end because the AI does great in accruing score; the reason it doesn't win Time victories is because it or the human will win a different victory condition beforehand unless the other ones are disabled (in which case the AI has a very good chance of winning a Time victory after all)

 

[Fluffball]

In 2000 plus hours of gameplay i don't remember an AI getting anywhere near a domination victory. I have frequently seen AI's take over half the world with me getting excited about some huge war i am likely to have to decide the game only to have the AI stall out and i have only technically won 1 domination victory myself as after a certain point the game is won and your just going through the motions. I therefore would support this idea.

I am though concerned that the requirements for standard and above are quite low. I can see where you got your thresholds from with the data from your example game but that is not a great representation of a 'normal' game as the example has many more islands/continents (where the AI where the AI usually has greater diffuculty in conquering) and many more civs (where it is usually more difficult for the AI to get a good start and start to snowball) than a 'normal' game. Using the suggested thresholds i would say most games would end upon someone discovering all civs in most of my games. I would suggest 70% for standard, 60% for large and 50% for huge as initial figures.

 

[Zanteogo]

I am against making the AI run on a different set of rules as to how they win.

Vassaling 50% of the world isn't that hard if you play a war civ and push hard early. It's usually 1 or 2 civs out of your starting reach that give you issues and slow down your march to world conquest.

Surprise, "what the heck happened?" victories are sort of lame to be honest. We get that with culture victories now, rather not have domination follow.

 

[ma_kuh]

It might be helpful to ask what a "domination victory" means in the context of human civilization. What else would the British Empire have had to do to "win a domination victory" after controlling 25% of the land area of the world?

The other part I'd add to this discussion is that a domination victory is the equivalent of destroying every opponent's buildings in an RTS. In fact, it's even more generous than an RTS, because in an RTS you can lose your main base and still be fully in contention for a win. It exists as a technical "if nothing else, you can not play the game after this point" elimination condition; generally games are called well beforehand, but they are called when the losing player themselves makes the concession. I think this concession should be seen as vassalization, and the focus should be on making this step smarter and more reliable, rather than adding arbitrary rules that risk ending the game for the player before they feel like they've lost.

 

[Tekamthi]

I am against making the AI run on a different set of rules as to how they win.

I missed this in OP; I agree, asymmetrical game rules are not enjoyable

 

[KlHannibal2]

I find the AI was much better at attacking and conquering before. It could give much more headache to a human player.

One the one hand, making an easier to achieve domination condition for AIs seems more balanced. But if you play a peaceful civ, and an AI on the other side of the map gets close to such a donination victory, it would be very hard to stop him.

Unless you get open borders with one of his targets and a few units there to block tiles, without declaring war. The AI is not smart enough to declare on you for doing that.

 

[nekokon]

I am against making the AI run on a different set of rules as to how they win.

Vassaling 50% of the world isn't that hard if you play a war civ and push hard early. It's usually 1 or 2 civs out of your starting reach that give you issues and slow down your march to world conquest.

Surprise, "what the heck happened?" victories are sort of lame to be honest. We get that with culture victories now, rather not have domination follow.

First, asymmetrical gameplay for single player game is ok. If it's too easy you can toggle the advance option to revert to old DomV rule. Most of the time when you already vassalized half the world you're already won so it doesn't really matter DomV or CV or anything else. Pretty sure noone ever said DomV is too easy they can simply vassalizing half the world if they do this and that, and if that's the case you can also pump up the difficulty.

Secondly there's no surprise to who's gonna win which since you can always see it coming miles away, it's the inability to do anything about it that's frustrating. CV gets this going since they benefit the more influence they got, so the closer to victory the easier they can win. However DomV is the completel opposite, the closer you're to victory the harder it becomes (due to a lot of warmonger penalties stacking on top of each other, thus the need to reverse scaling it down).
The difference this change is gonna make is allow warlike civ to reach the point where you need to (and can, obviously pretty easily too) interfere instead of a permanent free friendship boost to everyone else in the world with no trade-off. Think of how you can stop a close-to-victory CV civ if they're far away, vs how you can stop a close-to-victory DomV civ in the same spot (*cough*diplomacy*cough*) and see which one is easier and more fun to do. Heck, you can even compare it to SV/DipV and it still applies.

The concept is solid, but numbers are what need to be considered, since unlike most other victories DomV varies heavily depends on map setting. Having separated settings for each stage/map/speed are ok (just like DipV currently), we just need to come up with a good formula or table.