Domination Thresholds

[Tristan_C]

I was just wondering what the formulas were for determining pop / land benchmarks for Domination. A forum search revealed that yes indeed, the victory condition known as "Domination" exists. I ran a notepad++ search through all the game's libraries but nothing about the thresholds turned up, except for contingency AI stuff. Did you know they start trying to spam stuff when they are near the population mark?

As you may have noticed, the requirements for fulfilling the Domination VC get adjusted in real time. For instance, at the beginning of T1 before a single city exists, the pop threshold for dom is 100%. When the player founds the capital the threshold goes down to 25%, and the player actually fulfills the pop condition for domination at this moment (having 100% of the world's population). However, he is quite unlikely to fulfill the land requirement. At the beginning of the second turn, T2, the AI's have all founded their capitals. The pop and land thresholds are adjusted according to how many civs there are in the game.

POP / LAND

civs T1 start T1 done T2 start
3 100/72 25/72 58/72
7 100/64 25/64 39/64
18 100/51 25/51 30/51

I screwed around with different difficulties, different map sizes, and different amounts of water on the maps, but they do not seem to affect the dom limits during these initial steps. I can't recall off-hand if the land requirement ever moves. Is it solely based on how many civs started?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Population limit is 25% more then the second placed Civ.

Land is supposed to be fixed at the beginning of the game but the experts in the Hall of Fame have found that if you create enough vassals to knock original AIs off the scoreboard you can increase the domination limit!

 

[Tristan_C]

Aha, well that was easy! Thanks!

 

[Tristan_C]

Land is supposed to be fixed at the beginning of the game but the experts in the Hall of Fame have found that if you create enough vassals to knock original AIs off the scoreboard you can increase the domination limit!

How does this work, exactly? I have never seen a demonstration of it. So an AI is created by liberating cities and it fills the memory space of a dead civ. I can't see how the land threshold is supposed to be adjusted. And would this only work in games with 18 starting AIs, and islands to liberate?

 

[elitetroops]

How does this work, exactly? I have never seen a demonstration of it. So an AI is created by liberating cities and it fills the memory space of a dead civ. I can't see how the land threshold is supposed to be adjusted. And would this only work in games with 18 starting AIs, and islands to liberate?

Land domination limit is supposed to be determined by how many civs there was at the start of the game. However, the game seems to only be able to remember a total of 18 civs, which is how many places there are on the scoreboard. If you create a colony when there is already 18 names on the scoreboard, one of the dead civs will be knocked off the scoreboard and not be accounted for anymore when determining land dom limit. At best you can start a game with 18 civs and if you manage to get all 17 original AI off the scoreboard, dom limit goes up to 76%.

In theory this could work with any map size, but since you first need 18 names on the scoreboard, it is only really feasible on large or huge maps with lots of civs from the beginning.

 

[Pangaea]

The map itself also needs to be feasible for such tricks, which rules out Pangaea (nooooooo!). Big and Small type maps are probably ideal, as there are many small-ish islands. To create a colony, there must be room for two cities on an island. And you can't create colonies from your own landmass. Nor can you create many colonies from the same land mass. So the rules (thankfully) limits this exploitation a fair degree.

 

[Tristan_C]

Thanks very much, both of you, for the explanations. I was worried that this might have been exploitable in some way and I was systematically failing to exploit it. But yeah thankfully, it sounds like it is very map-dependent, what with needing all those islands, to really push the land threshold around...

 

[dutchfire]

In normal games, you want to reduce the domination limit to win, not increase it to avoid winning.

 

[Tristan_C]

Yeah, of course. This applies to games played for score or other, weirder, objectives.