Best laid plans...

[darski]

I have decided that I need to develop my ability to win by conquest. I generally play for dom wins.

...So I started this small map/ continents game since I had won on a Pangaea. I am notably bad at trans continental warfare. I had a good start: Iros w/ a cow and my second city on fresh water. The only other Civ on my continent was the Spanish and I first blocked them in then eliminated them. My time was taken up with building settlers to claim all my land... took a while.

My problem was in getting out to find the other land mass. By the time I found it they were pretty well mapped out with 4 civs on hand. I found a couple of little continents which I settled but they were not going to get me to a warfare scenario.

Fortunately I got the Great Lib and got Republic for free. This let me change horses in mid stream and I switched my plan to cultural win instead.

Just curious... Have you had a major change of mind once a game got underway?

What cues do you look for to determine if you should change the game plan?

I did recently have a game where I was going for space race and Domination just seemed a better solution. (dom VC was tagged.) How about you?

 

[Raliuven]

I recently started an emperor level game where I was going to win by a cultural victory. After I got out of a half-dozen wars, I looked at Japan's culture (double mine) and my measle 20k current culture and decided to wack the AI instead. I thought about going to for conquest but I reached the domination limit and took it. I didn't choose the wars - I played the victim until I finally decided to kill the AI. But I was involved in enough fighting that I could never properly focus on culture. Once I started pointy stick tech development, I never got back on track to a space race practical (not impossible, just tedious). I have a hard time racing to the domination limit and then not going for the kill.

Domination seems to be the easy win most of the time, except on huge maps were a cultural win seems to just 'naturally' happen if you haven't destroyed your neighboring civs quick enough.

 

[dze27]

Virtually all of my wins are domination wins now, even though I don't specifically plan for it, it just seems to happen that way. I used to get mostly Space Race wins but after improving my game and doing more warmongering and less building (often useless) city improvements it's usually over sometime in the Industrial Ages.

I had a recent game where I was planning on Space Race for a change (I had all of one large continent, everything all railroaded and going smoothly, up a couple of techs, and the other continent was split between 2 decent civs) late in the Industrial Age, but I realized one of the AI civs was going to win by 100K culture before I could launch a spaceship, so I had to change plans and get a D-Day invasion going. It was definitely an effort to assemble everything but it went pretty smoothly (minus a few annoying cultural flips).

 

[Ataxerxes]

Virtually all of my wins are domination wins now, even though I don't specifically plan for it, it just seems to happen that way. I used to get mostly Space Race wins but after improving my game and doing more warmongering and less building (often useless) city improvements it's usually over sometime in the Industrial Ages.

Are you my long-lost twin? You sound exactly like my playing experience.

 

[dze27]

Are you my long-lost twin? You sound exactly like my playing experience.

I *knew* there was something my mom wasn't telling me

I've just moved up to Emperor and have a couple of wins under my belt. The last one was domination in 1510 as the Dutch for 6551 points which was my best ever. I'm planning on giving DG a go after a few more wins. I've had some issues (i.e. losses) with some of the slower-starting civs on Emperor though.

 

[Opies]

It took me quite a while to get a space race win under my belt because I kept winning by domination. I finally had to switch to democracy (for the first time ever) to force myself not to keep warring and actually win by space race.

Some of us are born to war, some of us are born to build, what can you do

 

[darski]

It took me quite a while to get a space race win under my belt because I kept winning by domination. I finally had to switch to democracy (for the first time ever) to force myself not to keep warring and actually win by space race.

Some of us are born to war, some of us are born to build, what can you do

I know that feeling. I just want to build and my need to get the biggest and best empire causes me to trip the dom limit. I've had to turn it off to get another kind of win.

 

[The Omega]

I usually get domination wins as well; something about covering most of the map in my nation's color seems great.

In one game, I was preparing to invade a group of smaller, backwards civs so I could build up my power before I tried to take on take on a scary powerful AI (Probably one of the most powerful AI foes I've seen in a monarch game. They had spent most of the game as just a moderately powerful civ, only to come out of nowhere and suddenly crush every nation on their borders simultaneously, and then catch up with me technologically despite massive lead I'd had....)
Well, the big bad scary AI declared war on me just as a turn away from me declaring on everyone else. So instead of attacking the weaker civs, I had to unite them all against the stronger enemy.
Then I had to change plans again, when all my allies got eaten up shortly after declaring, and I had to just hold off the massive hordes of enemies coming at me until I could get a space race victory.

The cues I saw that made me realize I had to change my game plan was when I saw my three armies which I had sent to invade their territory get instantly killed by a massive swarm of bombers the first turn they cross the border.

 

[darski]

.

The cues I saw that made me realize I had to change my game plan was when I saw my three armies which I had sent to invade their territory get instantly killed by a massive swarm of bombers the first turn they cross the border.

Yeah - that would tell me something too