Contact victory extremely boring

[Fabio1701]

Turning the contact victory into a form of economic victory is a brilliant idea. What if it required an extreme amount of energy to activate AND cost you a great deal to maintain, and if you at any point ran out of energy it would shut down. If you had spare energy, you could devote it to the beacon and win faster.

I completely agree. there are too many victories already which are basically the science victory of civ5 (build and wait). SMAC had an economic victory, and it is missing here.

 

[Tomice]

If those turns didn't exist I would have a real issue to get my army numbers up and start invading other factions territories.

We definitively need to know soon enough about other players who are about to win, to be able to interfere. But it could also be on the turn when the production of the beacon is started. Plus a final warning when it's completed/activated (assuming we reduce the "transmission time" to 10 turns from 30). It is a mile-high tower after all, you won't get far trying to hide it

The contact victory requires that you get no energy profits while the beacon is active. Unless you have really saved funds (and that well above the initial amount that is required), you can easily find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time should anything bad comes your way.

Yes, it is a good penalty in theory. But it has a huge flaw: There is no difference between +1 and +500 energy, making the state of your empire pointless. And there are ways for a skilled player to avoid energy per turn in favor of "cash" energy, especially through diplomacy.

One way we haven't mentioned: The beacon could have a fixed energy consumption of 100 per turn (or so). It would drain our economy, and if we don't have as much, our energy reserves melt, possibly causing bancrupcy.

Bottom line: I'm in favour of any solution that really forces you to devote something to the project.

 

[m15a]

It'd be nice if there was something like a 100 energy per turn requirement and you weren't allowed to use stored energy. That way, opponents would have a lot of ways of interfering. They could mess up your trade routes, possibly pillage improvements, etc.

I don't know if it'd make as much story sense, but having a fixed science-per-turn requirement might be interesting mechanically, too.

 

[Ryoga]

Personally, I think Firaxis needs to reduce the waiting times in the victories. Maybe change the Contact Victory to 20 turns instead of 30 and change the Promised Land victory to settle 10 earthlings instead of 20. This would at least reduce the tediousness a bit. The player would not have to wait quite as long. After all, the victory are multi-step. I feel like you've done enough to deserve the win that you don't need to also wait another 30 turns.

Would you want it to be that quick if it was the AI that was doing that?
No you wouldn't. You'd need that many turns to have a chance to stop them.


I have a different idea on how to make those turns interesting.
Make the whole world DOW on you as soon as you complete the planetary wonder.

 

[omniclast]

I think maybe the reason the AIs don't DoW is that because of other imbalances, you are way ahead in science by endgame. If you can build Xeno Titans and they're stuck on cNDRs DoW is pointless. May be why they are such wusses.

 

[Ryoga]

I think maybe the reason the AIs don't DoW is that because of other imbalances, you are way ahead in science by endgame. If you can build Xeno Titans and they're stuck on cNDRs DoW is pointless. May be why they are such wusses.

Even then what do they have to lose?
They might as well try by combining their armies.