Anybody Else Like the Score Victory?

[AntSou]

Note that you get points for Wonders owned, not constructed.

It's fairly unbalanced towards Domination Civs, which is why I hope they improve it in VII.

Score Victory was probably the main thing making me excited about Humankind, but that also wasn't implemented terribly well.

 

[InsidiousMage]

It's fairly unbalanced towards Domination Civs, which is why I hope they improve it in VII.

I think that's always going to be true because, at some point, having more (wonders, buildings, districts, etc.) means having more cities and that, nine times out of ten, means conquering your neighbors at some point. You can only expand peacefully so much, can only grow your cities so much, only have limited room for districts, etc. I don't think there is any way around outside of placing arbitrary restrictions that, to me, don't make a lot of sense.

 

[steveg700]

I think that's always going to be true because, at some point, having more (wonders, buildings, districts, etc.) means having more cities and that, nine times out of ten, means conquering your neighbors at some point. You can only expand peacefully so much, can only grow your cities so much, only have limited room for districts, etc. I don't think there is any way around outside of placing arbitrary restrictions that, to me, don't make a lot of sense.

In terms of what makes sense, this sentiment strikes me as too facile. Building up forces to take cities is a sink of time and resources, and as eras progress, it makes less and less sense that a civilization advances by endless land grabs. There are better ways to advance science and culture than by smashing and capturing foreign cities. Their campuses, encampments, and theater squares shouldn't just integrate into your empire and march to their enemy's beat. That is why most of the civilized world see transactional relationships as preferable to world-beating. Indeed, even looking at Rome, the model of Civ civ's, we are talking about an empire that was undone through endless, rapacious conquest that ultimately did not benefit the Roman citizenry standing around in bread lines.

Restrictions on how many meccas a civ have for science, faith, culture, and commerce would be sensible. If Sweden or India went on a sudden tear of expansion, that wouldn't give them ten more Genevas or Bangalores. It isn't arbitrary to have breakers in place to prevent an empire from having dozens of metropolises each with their own stock exchange.

 

[InsidiousMage]

That is why most of the civilized world see transactional relationships as preferable to world-beating.

Yeah, nowadays but that has been far from the norm, historically speaking. If you wanted more you, generally speaking, had to take it from someone else, mostly through conquest and warfare. And, to be fair, this shift is incredibly under-represented in the game due to do its winner take all nature.

Indeed, even looking at Rome, the model of Civ civ's, we are talking about an empire that was undone through endless, rapacious conquest that ultimately did not benefit the Roman citizenry standing around in bread lines.

Um. . . the (Western) Rome Empire fell apart centuries after its last conquest. Trajan's conquest were in the early 100s AD and Rome didn't fall until centuries later and fell because of a combination of internal instability and the loss of military supremacy over their neighbors. During the height of Rome's conquests during the middle and late Republic, Rome and the Italian peninsula benefited greatly from their conquests. Just like Spain benefited from its conquest/colonization of the New World, the Caliphate from its conquests, the Mongols and their conquests, and so on. Even during the colonization of Africa during the 1800s and 1900s, Europe material benefited from the access to the cheap resources and labor created by their colonization efforts. There is a reason why imperial capitals are magnificent, world famous cities and its because conquest is a massively profitable, both from loot and plunder from the initial conquests and then the artists, scholars, merchants and so on attracted to those capitals by the recently acquired wealth. Conquest is beneficial to the conqueror, its one of the reasons why they do it.

 

[bene_legionary]

Not entirely related, but there's a boardgame I admire called Tigris and Euphrates, where to win you have to have the most points; but the points derive from the lowest of 4 types of score that you get throughout the game (religious, civic, farming, trade). So at the end, if you focused on getting religion and avoided farming on the rivers (giving you 0 farm score at the end), you would have 0 points. It doesn't matter if you have 5 or 50 religious score; you had no food to feed your people! They've starved, and the gods can't do crap about that. Unfortunately I haven't been able to ever play this game because it's out of print at the moment and copies aren't cheap.

It'd be interesting to see how this would work in Civilization. Instead of winning by scientific or cultural or whatever victory, you need to gain a balance of everything; your military victories, cultural tenets and innovations, scientific discoveries, etc. Imagine if Humankind worked that way, instead of stacking up the points you had to choose which factions might have fit together the best to give you the widest variety of points. In something like Civilization, a generalised civ would perform much better while a specialised civ might have trouble achieving cultural and technological goals (not really believable or necessarily historic but something to think about). Because most civs are designed to specialise, that's an extra challenge, and there's not as much of a need to gun right for the campuses or holy sites.

 

[Disgustipated]

Instead of winning by scientific or cultural or whatever victory, you need to gain a balance of everything;

This I would like to see in the future. Cultural victory in particular can be kind of screwy where you can win extraordinarily early and with vastly outdated military units.

I don't mind gaining score from conquest, but holding on to those conquests should be more difficult. And I don't mean the loyalty mechanic which I'm not the biggest fan of. Again, we're talking about balance. If you are all military and no infrastructure for amenities, you should be penalized.

 

[Melkus]

Also in favor of a score victory - formula could be improved, of course.

What I would like to see one day is a civ-like game where it's not just a race on a straight road to victory but a more cooperation-based approach would be viable. So you could just play to a certain point and the game hands you an evaluation based mostly on the state of the world (ofc also partly based on your achievements + influence, so you don't just hang around in a quiet corner until the end).

Would that mean that several or even all players can win - or there simply is no winner because you produced a hellhole together? So what?

Different players could have different goals / win conditions (like high living standards worldwide, some sort of preferred economic system, transforming the moon, making the planet beautiful - or at least keeping it alive). Some of those might change / get chosen during a game. The evaluation criteria could be either slightly or hugely different for everyone, so there would still be room for conflict. Maybe Mansa Musa still needs to earn the most money, so he sends an endless stream of spies to his economic rival. Lenin loses if the majority of the world lives in capitalist systems. Kristina needs to make sure that artworks get made, preferably in her cities. Still plenty of room for conflicting values (and hypocrisy).

As a player, you'd still be free to beat the other fools up who can't see the light and stream it to the world to show how efficient you are, as long as you can brush the bodies under the carpet before the end. The game wouldn't have to be an unrealistic hand-holding lovefest.
But cooperation would make actual gameplay sense (depending on the scenario) instead of being strategic or even purely transactional.

 

[steveg700]

Yeah, nowadays but that has been far from the norm, historically speaking. If you wanted more you, generally speaking, had to take it from someone else, mostly through conquest and warfare. And, to be fair, this shift is incredibly under-represented in the game due to do its winner take all nature.

In keeping with my point, this kind of expansion you refer to with Rome and Spain have to do with imperialism for the sake of what amounts to plunder: exploiting the resources from wherever a flag was planted to make the homeland more affluent. You can go down the line to make the case for whether it actually made the civilization greater, or just lined the pockets of the select few.

My point was to make the distinction between that and the kind of imperialist expansion versus the idea that conquest is the norm for building a more advanced civ with lots of district-rich metropolises. I think there are ways to curtail that seem more sensible than arbitrary.

 

[steveg700]

Not entirely related, but there's a boardgame I admire called Tigris and Euphrates, where to win you have to have the most points; but the points derive from the lowest of 4 types of score that you get throughout the game (religious, civic, farming, trade). So at the end, if you focused on getting religion and avoided farming on the rivers (giving you 0 farm score at the end), you would have 0 points. It doesn't matter if you have 5 or 50 religious score; you had no food to feed your people! They've starved, and the gods can't do crap about that. Unfortunately I haven't been able to ever play this game because it's out of print at the moment and copies aren't cheap.

It'd be interesting to see how this would work in Civilization. Instead of winning by scientific or cultural or whatever victory, you need to gain a balance of everything; your military victories, cultural tenets and innovations, scientific discoveries, etc. Imagine if Humankind worked that way, instead of stacking up the points you had to choose which factions might have fit together the best to give you the widest variety of points. In something like Civilization, a generalised civ would perform much better while a specialised civ might have trouble achieving cultural and technological goals (not really believable or necessarily historic but something to think about). Because most civs are designed to specialise, that's an extra challenge, and there's not as much of a need to gun right for the campuses or holy sites.

There's a lot that Civ could learn from modern board game design, but I think Civ wants to avoid homogenizing civ's to the extent that all civ's wind up pursuing religion, art, wonders, etc. And we could look at civ's in actual history and find some that are venerated without being well-rounded.

 

[Zaarin]

And we could look at civ's in actual history and find some that are venerated without being well-rounded.

I'm hard pressed to think of one. About the closest I can think of off the top of my head is that the Romans had no knack for art or philosophy, simply parroting others accomplishments. Most civs could be portrayed in many different ways, even if they're famous for other things. E.g., the Mongols are always portrayed as all war, all the time, but they promoted trade, built Buddhist monasteries, wrote history, wrote poetry, sponsored architectural wonders like the Forbidden Palace. This kind of reductionism is necessary to make the game interesting, but most civs that are noteworthy are noteworthy because they've done a lot of different things. This is why I'm often pushing for shakeups in how staple civs are portrayed: cultural England, trade-and-colonies France, culture-and-religion Korea, etc. It keeps things interesting.

 

[InsidiousMage]

My point was to make the distinction between that and the kind of imperialist expansion versus the idea that conquest is the norm for building a more advanced civ with lots of district-rich metropolises. I think there are ways to curtail that seem more sensible than arbitrary.

Civ6 is a game and, given the way the its mechanics works, if you want more districts, more buildings, more Great People, and so on then, at some point you have to conquer some cities is you want, say, some more Campuses. If you even want more gold you need more trade routes and you can only have so many trade route that aren't from Commercial Hubs/Harbors so if you want more gold you need to conquer someone. There is only so much space on the map and if you don't have enough space then you have to conquer someone. Its that simple and its always going to be the case that if you want more of something in the type of game that Civ6, and Civ7 as well, unless you place some arbitrary limits. And yes, they will always be arbitrary because Civ isn't trying to recreate history similar to something like Paradox's games are, and even then they have a lot of issues.

 

[rocksinmypath]

Also in favor of a score victory - formula could be improved, of course.

What I would like to see one day is a civ-like game where it's not just a race on a straight road to victory but a more cooperation-based approach would be viable. So you could just play to a certain point and the game hands you an evaluation based mostly on the state of the world (ofc also partly based on your achievements + influence, so you don't just hang around in a quiet corner until the end).

Would that mean that several or even all players can win - or there simply is no winner because you produced a hellhole together? So what?

Different players could have different goals / win conditions (like high living standards worldwide, some sort of preferred economic system, transforming the moon, making the planet beautiful - or at least keeping it alive). Some of those might change / get chosen during a game. The evaluation criteria could be either slightly or hugely different for everyone, so there would still be room for conflict. Maybe Mansa Musa still needs to earn the most money, so he sends an endless stream of spies to his economic rival. Lenin loses if the majority of the world lives in capitalist systems. Kristina needs to make sure that artworks get made, preferably in her cities. Still plenty of room for conflicting values (and hypocrisy).

As a player, you'd still be free to beat the other fools up who can't see the light and stream it to the world to show how efficient you are, as long as you can brush the bodies under the carpet before the end. The game wouldn't have to be an unrealistic hand-holding lovefest.
But cooperation would make actual gameplay sense (depending on the scenario) instead of being strategic or even purely transactional.

You touched on a few points I expressed on this forum in the past. I've proposed two different types of victory conditions. One is a sort of score victory, similar to what's being discussed here, but also similar to culture victory in Civ 6. The idea is that players would pay each other in influence points when they interact with each other. For instance, when another player buys a resource (strategic or luxury) from you, in addition to gold, the other player will implicitly pay you influence points. I say "implicitly" because how much influence is moved around is automatically determined by the game, and you don't need to have influence to perform transactions. A player with zero influence will still be allowed to buy things from others, so long as they have gold. You may find it to your advantage to try to establish a monopoly on different resources because this will significantly amplify how much influence the game rewards you every time someone buys off you. Other sources of influence could include tourism (pretty self-explanatory, I think) and technological advancements. You can collect a burst of influence by simply being the first to reach a certain technological milestone (e.g. landing on the moon). You could also gain influence through indirect means like establishing a monopoly on advanced manufactured goods. Conquest would never be a direct means of influence generation, but it can be an effective way of indirectly generating influence by appropriating influence-generating infrastructure from other civs (e.g. claim on more resources for a monopoly, increased tourism from stolen great works and wonders). Wiping out another civ won't allow you to automatically steal all the influence they've collected up until that point, so I think that should somewhat deal with the concern that domination would be overpowered in a score victory setup. In principle, if you haven't done anything noteworthy all game before wiping out everyone in quick succession, you can lose the game. The point I want to emphasize is that you cannot generate influence from yourself. They have to come from other players.

I also proposed a scenario-style game. A scenario would consist of some loose constraints on game generation settings and a set of objectives for the player to complete. Each leader would come with a set of scenarios provided by the developers (with hopefully more added by the community). The player would win a scenario upon completing all objectives. These objectives would normally be designed to be completed fairly quickly (~150 turns), and the player would be able to continue to play after this point, if they so choose. This was a proposal built on two concepts. One is that, in order to prevent the game from being dragged out unnecessarily, I figured there would need to be a way of dividing the game into phases. Scenario objectives are a way of telling the player there's nothing holding them back from leaving once the game has stopped being fun and started being tedious. The other concept is that there should be no universally correct way of running a civilization. It makes sense that every leader should have their own set of ideals they want to implement, and those don't necessarily have to be among the few victory conditions that exist in Civ 6. I'd also like to see a change in how the AI plays that's consistent with this idea. AI players should act like they're trying to realize certain ideals, rather than trying to kill the human player simply because they have a stronger military. There should still be room for conflicts, militaristic or otherwise, because as you said, even when different civs work toward different goals, there will always be overlap in terms of short-term goals.

 

[AntSou]

Civ6 is a game and, given the way the its mechanics works, if you want more districts, more buildings, more Great People, and so on then, at some point you have to conquer some cities is you want, say, some more Campuses. If you even want more gold you need more trade routes and you can only have so many trade route that aren't from Commercial Hubs/Harbors so if you want more gold you need to conquer someone. There is only so much space on the map and if you don't have enough space then you have to conquer someone. Its that simple and its always going to be the case that if you want more of something in the type of game that Civ6, and Civ7 as well, unless you place some arbitrary limits. And yes, they will always be arbitrary because Civ isn't trying to recreate history similar to something like Paradox's games are, and even then they have a lot of issues.

I'm not so sure about it being inevitable, and I don't think it's really that simple at all. Some of the arbitrary limits make it so you benefit from expanding rather than the other way around, e.g., the one-district type limit. It's arbitrary that the limit is one per city, rather than x per empire. You could have a capital with three campuses and a max of three campuses per empire, until something is unlocked (a civic or whatever). It's arbitrary that all cities have a three tile radius limit, rather than it expanding with population. It's all just design choices.

The "arbitrary limits" are just game design. The game can be designed this or that way. They are limits just the same. The only difference is that setting a higher production cost on settlers, for instance, feels like a limit, whereas having it on lower production doesn't. But it's the same thing, a production cost. There's nothing intrinsic or natural about one type of game design, other than people not typically enjoying constrains.

Another example: what's so inevitable about conquering cities with wonders being equivalent to a greater score? Wonders are set to 15 score, so conquerors have an advantage. But that could clearly not be the case by simply giving the score to the builder, not the owner. Even in Civ 6 that's possible to accomplish: just mod in +8 Era Score for building a wonder of the current era, and reduce score from owning wonders to 4 points. So if you build and own it, that's 12 points. If you conquer it, it's 4. If you build and lose it, that's still 8, double those of the conqueror. (obviously that would require rebalancing era score system, I'm just showing how it can be done).

The game is designed in such a way that expansion is always beneficial. But that's not an inevitability. In fact I'm pretty confident that at least in part this derives from Civ's focus on external conflict (conflict with other civs). That's been at the core since the beginning, but it's also one of the things that you often see people request to be improved: more internal conflict, as real societies and empires experienced.

There's very little of this in Civ, and the little we have is pretty barebones and oversimplified. E.g. the Dramatic Ages mode. It just means it's an area that can be improved. Rather than an abstract and tedius Global Happiness, give us mechanics to meaningful interact with the empire.

 

[InsidiousMage]

I'm not so sure about it being inevitable, and I don't think it's really that simple at all. Some of the arbitrary limits make it so you benefit from expanding rather than the other way around, e.g., the one-district type limit. It's arbitrary that the limit is one per city, rather than x per empire. You could have a capital with three campuses and a max of three campuses per empire, until something is unlocked (a civic or whatever). It's arbitrary that all cities have a three tile radius limit, rather than it expanding with population. It's all just design choices.

The "arbitrary limits" are just game design. The game can be designed this or that way. They are limits just the same. The only difference is that setting a higher production cost on settlers, for instance, feels like a limit, whereas having it on lower production doesn't. But it's the same thing, a production cost. There's nothing intrinsic or natural about one type of game design, other than people not typically enjoying constrains.

Another example: what's so inevitable about conquering cities with wonders being equivalent to a greater score? Wonders are set to 15 score, so conquerors have an advantage. But that could clearly not be the case by simply giving the score to the builder, not the owner. Even in Civ 6 that's possible to accomplish: just mod in +8 Era Score for building a wonder of the current era, and reduce score from owning wonders to 4 points. So if you build and own it, that's 12 points. If you conquer it, it's 4. If you build and lose it, that's still 8, double those of the conqueror. (obviously that would require rebalancing era score system, I'm just showing how it can be done).

The game is designed in such a way that expansion is always beneficial. But that's not an inevitability. In fact I'm pretty confident that at least in part this derives from Civ's focus on external conflict (conflict with other civs). That's been at the core since the beginning, but it's also one of the things that you often see people request to be improved: more internal conflict, as real societies and empires experienced.

There's very little of this in Civ, and the little we have is pretty barebones and oversimplified. E.g. the Dramatic Ages mode. It just means it's an area that can be improved. Rather than an abstract and tedius Global Happiness, give us mechanics to meaningful interact with the empire.

When I'm talking about arbitrary I'm not taking about things that are intrinsic to game design, like X districts per Y population, but how you calculate the score, which is where I think your focus on wonders is kind of misplaced. I play on the largest map size so my final score ends up at a least 1,000 and can go up to around 1,300 so the 60 to 75 odd points I get from controlling wonders doesn't really matter. What really matters is cities, districts, buildings, population and so on. Even if you want to go with a "full score for building, half score for controlling," conquest is still probably going to be the best option because your score is still going to go up and your opponents down. Fundamentally, this is about the whole wide vs. tall debate and while I'm fine with limits to empire size in Civ7, if they remove the domination victory, and I'm totally fine with making tall a viable playstyle, but I think making it an equally viable style to wide does mean you have to arbitrarily place caps on wider playstyles.

And this isn't to say that I think conquest should be 100% viable throughout the game. A big issue I have with the game right now is that the AI can't maintain its military strength by the end of the game and the lack of coalitions against aggressive civs. I do think that aggression should be less viable towards the end of the game but do feel like in the early and midgame most civs should be aggressive towards at least some of their neighbors and I do think some civs do need to be eliminated from every game beyond what the player does.

 

[AntSou]

Even if you want to go with a "full score for building, half score for controlling," conquest is still probably going to be the best option because your score is still going to go up and your opponents down.

Absolutely, I just disagree this is something inevitable that can't be avoided in Civ 7. They've tried to "solve" it in the past with different mechanics, but the solutions are superficial because ultimately there's nothing else to do in the game but to expand and interact with other Civs.

There would be no need for "artificial limits" if instead there were entire mechanics dedicated to social and political conflicts occurring internally. Then limits to expansion would be weaved into the game experience, rather than be felt as a braking device slowing down inevitable expansion.

 

[steveg700]

I'm hard pressed to think of one. About the closest I can think of off the top of my head is that the Romans had no knack for art or philosophy, simply parroting others accomplishments. Most civs could be portrayed in many different ways, even if they're famous for other things. E.g., the Mongols are always portrayed as all war, all the time, but they promoted trade, built Buddhist monasteries, wrote history, wrote poetry, sponsored architectural wonders like the Forbidden Palace. This kind of reductionism is necessary to make the game interesting, but most civs that are noteworthy are noteworthy because they've done a lot of different things. This is why I'm often pushing for shakeups in how staple civs are portrayed: cultural England, trade-and-colonies France, culture-and-religion Korea, etc. It keeps things interesting.

There's a difference between building Buddhist monasteries and saying a civ is particularly accomplished in establishing itself as an empire of faith. If a civ isn't famous for something, then they didn't go far enough to scored their place in history for it. Saying there are no aetheist empire is not the same as saying that every civ is well-rounded in the area of faith.

As you touch on with the Romans, they did not regard artisans highly, and they are a minor pit stop in art history classes. We have do have some Romain paintings and cool marble statues, that just doesn't round them out well in whatever you want to call that category.

And then we have had civilizations that are purely at a tribal level. They didn't get past oral tradition as a means of retaining knowledge, so they cannot be said to have made a lot of progress on the tech tree.

 

[InsidiousMage]

Absolutely, I just disagree this is something inevitable that can't be avoided in Civ 7. They've tried to "solve" it in the past with different mechanics, but the solutions are superficial because ultimately there's nothing else to do in the game but to expand and interact with other Civs.

There would be no need for "artificial limits" if instead there were entire mechanics dedicated to social and political conflicts occurring internally. Then limits to expansion would be weaved into the game experience, rather than be felt as a braking device slowing down inevitable expansion.

I would agree that more internal mechanics that push back against endless expansion would be nice but I wouldn't get my hopes about them being in Civ7, unless there is a massive overhaul of the victory types, or even being effective. Mechanics that "distract" you from conquest are not the same as ones that limit conquest. In pretty much of all Paradox's historical GSG, literal world conquest is possible regardless of the barriers the devs put up, including in Victoria 3 where the game was explicitly designed to not be a map painter. I would be nice to see but I'm guessing where still like a decade or more away from those kinds of mechanics being a full part of a game.

 

[steveg700]

Civ6 is a game and, given the way the its mechanics works, if you want more districts, more buildings, more Great People, and so on then, at some point you have to conquer some cities is you want, say, some more Campuses. If you even want more gold you need more trade routes and you can only have so many trade route that aren't from Commercial Hubs/Harbors so if you want more gold you need to conquer someone. There is only so much space on the map and if you don't have enough space then you have to conquer someone. Its that simple and its always going to be the case that if you want more of something in the type of game that Civ6, and Civ7 as well, unless you place some arbitrary limits. And yes, they will always be arbitrary because Civ isn't trying to recreate history similar to something like Paradox's games are, and even then they have a lot of issues.

Well, it doesn't have to be that way. You can just have enough territory to do what you need to do to win the game. The process of creating a mecca city can just be sufficiently intensive that quantity doesn't equate to quality. Taking a city with universities or museums wouldn't instantly translate into having more research or tourists flowing in. Of course, we are not talking about the game in its current state but rather a reconceptualization.

 

[InsidiousMage]

Taking a city with universities or museums wouldn't instantly translate into having more research or tourists flowing in.

Again, nowadays, but that's not been the norm historically because its not easy for people to just up and move, even if they wanted to. Babylon was still Babylon after it was conquered by the Persians because unless there are some kinds of intense acts of violence to drive people away (the sack on Constantinople at the end of the Fourth Crusade, the Mongol sack of Baghdad) it is incredibly risky to leave everything behind. The fact that Jerusalem had been conquered and reconquered several times in the decade or two before the Crusade didn't diminish its importance as a pilgrimage destination either. People fleeing violence is, outside of some notable exceptions (the Goths fleeing from the Huns) a modern phenomenon that, even then, is only so true. Most people in Paris didn't flee from the Nazi invasion after all.

The process of creating a mecca city can just be sufficiently intensive that quantity doesn't equate to quality.

The process of creating these mecca cities is funded by imperial conquests though, either through the actual loot and plunder of the initial invasions or from the taxes and tribute generated by ruling over a large empire. As always, there is the occasional exception of a city that is a major trading hub that generates enough wealth to create a grand metropolis but, if you want a world famous metropolis you basically need an empire to fund such an endeavor.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I’ve been playing this way for a year now. It avoids stupid cheese straregies and the awful late game tedium

Turn limits also makes it possible to lose to the AI

Yeah, nowadays but that has been far from the norm, historically speaking. If you wanted more you, generally speaking, had to take it from someone else, mostly through conquest and warfare. And, to be fair, this shift is incredibly under-represented in the game due to do its winner take all nature.


Um. . . the (Western) Rome Empire fell apart centuries after its last conquest. Trajan's conquest were in the early 100s AD and Rome didn't fall until centuries later and fell because of a combination of internal instability and the loss of military supremacy over their neighbors. During the height of Rome's conquests during the middle and late Republic, Rome and the Italian peninsula benefited greatly from their conquests. Just like Spain benefited from its conquest/colonization of the New World, the Caliphate from its conquests, the Mongols and their conquests, and so on. Even during the colonization of Africa during the 1800s and 1900s, Europe material benefited from the access to the cheap resources and labor created by their colonization efforts. There is a reason why imperial capitals are magnificent, world famous cities and its because conquest is a massively profitable, both from loot and plunder from the initial conquests and then the artists, scholars, merchants and so on attracted to those capitals by the recently acquired wealth. Conquest is beneficial to the conqueror, its one of the reasons why they do it.

Rome destroyed itself with internal conflict from competing elites and those same elites exploiting the working class to extinction and then importing Goths and Vandals to fill that void

And the imports exchanged glances, asked themselves why they were taking orders from corrupt sociopath Roman Elites

“A few moments later”

And now Odoacer is King of Italy