Culture Victory Surprise

[jmrathbun]

I was playing on King difficulty in my second game, having easily won on Prince using technology. Suddenly, around move 300, I got this doom and gloom screen and it took me a while to figure out what happened. Finally I saw that America had a culture victory.

It would have been nice to have had a warning from my "advisor" in time to take steps. It would have been nice to at least have seen something like "America has won a culture victory" on the screen.

 

[God of Kings]

You have to check the victory conditions screen more often.

 

[RealAntithesis]

Checking the victory conditions screen very often is just a workaround (one that adds to the overall micromanagement) because the game itself does a pretty poor job of presenting this information to the player in a way that's obvious or fun. Just meandering along happily building your empire only to be rudely and abruptly cut short by a "you lose" screen seemingly out of nowhere just seems to lack the fun factor that an appropriately presented message resulting in the required sense of urgency would have conveyed. Same for suddenly losing in the race for wonders, great people etc (at least for great people you can see where you are relative to others - if you check the gp screen).

 

[TomKQT]

Well, it could have been much worse - if the victory screen didn't show all this information in such a detail (sort of...). In fact the victory screen, especially the score tab, is a source of so much information that you technically shouldn't have at all, for example the technology score of a civ you haven't even met, while you are in the ancient times with no global information systems.

I have absolutely no problem with the current implementation which requires me to check the victory screen from time to time, because as I said - you in fact should have no warning at all And it's not so hard to open it occasionally and it takes just few seconds to check the culture, religious and space race tabs, which all are IMHO quite well designed (compared to most other UI in the game) and you get the overview very easily.

And culture victory won't happen suddenly, you really don't have to check the screen every turn, not even every 10 turns. Probably not even every 50 turns, unless you already know that some civ is getting alarmingly strong in tourism.