GOTM #3 question re domination victory

[SirPleb]

I'm a long way into GOTM #3 with the world well under control. I've really enjoyed it so far!

But I'm having ongoing discomfort with the issue of domination victory. The question is: does anyone know a way to tell how close a game is to a domination victory? I keep thinking there must be a place in one of the info screens to show something about it (percentage I control, or number of land tiles, or something) - hopefully I am just missing something obvious.

Earlier in the game I just went for whatever I could take, reasoning that if I happened to go past the 66% mark it would be fine, the early win bonus would be great during that phase, I'd take it if I got it. But by the time I could see the whole world the date had advanced so far that the bonus had lost much of its appeal, and I'd rather play the game out to 2050 for a better score that way.

Eyeballing the world map, it rather looks as if I already have more than 66%. Maybe it is just very close. Of course I'd like to take the maximum amount of land that I can without exceeding the limit.

So I'd like a non-cheat way to find out where the limit is. Trial and error (take land till you win and then go back and do it without taking quite that much) is a cheat to my mind. I could of course tediously count all the land tiles (yuk!) But even then I'd need to be sure exactly what the game's rule is: Is it really 66%? Although the reference is explicit about it being land tiles, is that really true or do some other tiles count?

Any advice on this subject?

 

[Aeson]

There are a couple posts in the GOTM3 spoiler thread that deal with this. The only sure way of knowing when a domination victory will be awarded is to count the number of land tiles, then make a map with exactly that many tiles and play it out to domination (saving a lot so you can go back and fine tune the exact number of tiles). A rough estimate is going to be 75-80% of the land tiles. The percentage varies inversely to total number of landtiles. Meaning you need a higher percentage for smaller landmasses, and a lower percentage for larger ones.

 

[SirPleb]

Thanks Aeson, I very much appreciate your reply!

Too bad it isn't great news. Sure is messy, the domination percentage varying like that, and no simple way to tell.

Hard to tell by eye but I may be pushing 75% and my luck, unless more land turns up in yet unexplored areas, I think I'll keep just what I have now. (Will get greedier if more land shows up!)

 

[Spoonman]

when you do have control of the world (as i do at 1450 AD, tech lead, largest civ) whats the best way to finish score wise?

is it to kill off everyone asap, launch spaceships, UN, or just to grow until 2050 ?

ta

 

[SirPleb]

Your best score will come from winning in 2049 (or 2050 - I haven't tested yet, if one arranges things to win, e.g. launch spaceship, in 2050 whether that counts as a win or as a retirement.)

What I do is, when victory is in sight, I estimate my score for winning now vs. playing it out.

Start by noting your score, playing your game one turn further, and see how much your score has increased. In these notes let's assume that your score is currently increasing by 16 points per turn.

Suppose you guess that you could win in 20 turns from the current position. That would be date 1450 plus 20*5 = 1550. Your score for winning in 1550 would be your current score, plus 16 points * 20 turns (not a perfect number, your 16 points per turn might fluctuate a bit, but for this calculation it is close enough) plus (2050 - 1550) * 3. The 3 is the multiplier for regent level. So for an early win 20 turns from now yopur score will be your current score plus 1820 (1500 + 320)

Now we need to estimate how much your score can increase if you play the game out. This is much harder. It depends on whether there's still a lot of land you can take, how much your sphere of influence can still grow, how much your population can grow, and how much happier you can make your people. If you already have most of the land you ever will have, and there are a lot of turns left, then it will probably not be possible to maintain the current rate of increase for the remainder of the game. But I'd say it is a safe bet that you'd still be gaining at a rate of 1/2 the current rate in 2049AD. So we could guess that a minimum average increase for the rest of the game will be 12 points/turn. (16+8)/2.

There are 260 turns left in your game. (60 turns until 1750 at a rate of 5 years per turn, 200 turns after 1750.) So if we use the numbers in the prior paragraph you can expect to improve your score by at least 12*260 = 3120 by playing it out.

So it seems clear that you'd get a much higher score playing it out than winning soon.

Of course you want to be sure to build the UN in order to be able to stop the vote. And you want to be sure that the other Civs are not advancing so fast that they end up being able to build a spaceship before the end date.

There is a simpler way to look at all of this which applies in this case. In 1450, the date is advancing by 5 years per turn. So the "lost bonus" for each turn you do NOT win is currently 15 points. (Regent level, bonus is 3 * difference in dates.) If your score is increasing by more than 15 points per turn the decision is easy - keep playing! As the date advances this ratio will only improve. Later on the date increases by 2 years per turn and the lost potential bonus per turn for an early win goes down to 6 points. And later on down to 3 points per turn. What this means is that the decision is no contest in most games once the date has reached somewhere between say 500AD and 1000AD. (From 250AD to 1250AD the rate of "lost bonus" is 30 points per turn. Earlier dates are much higher again.) The actual cross-over point for any given game will depend on the map size and on whether domination victory is enabled.

 

[SirPleb]

I just tested from my GOTM#2 final save and delaying the spaceship to complete in 2050 works ok (I took it in 2048, seems I should have milked it further), it still counts as a Space Race win, not as a Retired win. I imagine the same is true for other win types though a UN win might be different - depends on when in the game's internal timing it decides to call the vote. Has anyone tested that?

 

[Spoonman]

ah as easy as that

thx for that sir

can you tell me what the point bonuses are for each type of victory?

 

[Aeson]

When determining the bonus awarded for an early victory (regent), just use the formula (2050 - Date) * 3. Then add that to your score. Each victory type gives the same bonus by date, so it doesn't matter which. At 1450 that would yeild a bonus of 1800 points (give or take a few), which is exactly what Sir Pleb already said. 1800 points really isn't much at all, and in the final 250 turns (what is left from 1450 to 2050) you would only need to average 7.2 points per turn to exceed the bonus you are passing up.

Because of the way the scoring system averages out your score by year, your 2050 score will increase roughly 1.75 times what you have right now (without any changes whatsoever to land and population in that time). This is because there are 540 turns overall, and you have played 290 of them. Your current score is determined by the averages of all 290 turns played so far. Since everyone starts at 0, that means your score for the current turn is about twice the amount of your overall score in most cases (if your expansion has been somewhat steady). As far as what your current situation is, and how much further you can build up before you would trigger domination, you would have to judge.

All that being said, I would guess that if you don't conquer the world before 500AD or so on this map (might be as early as 10AD though), that building up to 2050AD yeild a higher overall score. The 500AD date is just an average for standard sized maps, the smaller the landmass, the earlier that date becomes (and vice versa). Take for example the first GOTM, it was closer to 1000AD, because there wasn't much room to build up on (small map). For the GOTM2, it would have been 1500BC or so to win, as there was so much land (large map), and domination was disabled.

If I were you I would try to win with culture or spaceship as early as possible, or go for the highest score you can at 2050. A 1450AD conquest isn't going to score very much in comparison to the 250BC - 250AD conquests that shouldn't be too uncommon on this map.