How to not win?

[Spatzimaus]

Strange title, I know. I'm making a mod to include some future eras, for a truly Epic game. There's six eras in the existing game, I want to add three more based on the Alpha Centauri game. The problem is, I need to keep players from consistently winning before they reach these eras; in the current game, it's just a bit too easy to win by the early modern era.

So, the question: How can I tweak the game such that the existing victory conditions can't be reached quite as quickly?

Here's what I've got so far.
SPACESHIP: Replaced with a Transcendence victory at the end. Completing the spaceship instead unlocks a series of Centauri techs for all civilizations at the same time.
CULTURAL: instead of three cities of 50k, have it be (1 city of 100k and 4 of 50k).
DIPLOMACY: No nation can have more than 33% of the total votes from population, so that you can't just vote yourself a win. Completing spaceship parts or some future improvements and wonders gets you extra votes that can go above this cap, but even with all of these you can't have more than 50% of the total.
CONQUEST: Unchanged, obviously. Dead is dead.
DOMINATION: This is the tough one. The only way to keep military powers from rampaging across everything by the modern era would be to make military less effective on offense. Specifically, I was thinking:
> When fighting outside cities, add to strength based on the cultural ownership percentage of the tile. Border tiles might only give an extra 5% to the owner, while 100%-owned tiles could add up to 20%. Neutral ground, of course, favors no one.
> Cultural boosts to city defense go in 20% increments; increase this to 25% or 30%.
> Make bombardment less effective, so that you can't remove more than half of the defensive bonus of a city (similar to how aircraft can't remove more than half of a defender's HP now).

Any suggestions?

 

[WildWeazel]

You could also replace the UN with an AC wonder.

Have you considered new victory conditions? With event scripting you could create custom requirements for a win.

 

[Spatzimaus]

You could also replace the UN with an AC wonder.

I could; the SMAC equivalent was The Empath Guild (except it also gave contact with all the remaining civs, something that isn't really necessary in Civ4 by that era) and added 50% to the builder's votes. Since some elections were just 1 vote per civ (not dependent on vote numbers) this wasn't too out of control. I was just goint to have the Empath Guild add 25% to the builder's population-based UN votes, with the addition that this would raise the new vote cap to a higher number (40%?).

But, now that you mention it, I might just make it that the vote for Planetary Grand Poobah (the Diplomatic win) doesn't become an option until both the UN AND the Empath Guild are in play, and both wonders give vote bonuses to their respective builders. That should be an easy change, and it'll make it so that the game can't end until well into the later eras. But, this'll probably mean that there'd have to be three candidates for the win: the owner of the UN, the owner of the Empath Guild, and the most populous country (and if there's overlap on those, add the second and possibly third most populous).

Have you considered new victory conditions? With event scripting you could create custom requirements for a win.

Well, I'm doing the Transcend victory, which shouldn't be very complicated. In SMAC, it was just a 2-wonder progression, and you could cash-rush wonders, but I'll probably do something a bit more complex, like require one of each Great Leader type to be present when the final wonder is made. That might give too much of an edge to the Philosophical types, though.

Also, I might add a Religious victory; with more eras, you have more time to spread your religion, so if I add the condition that "If 80% of the cities have one religion, and 50% of the people follow that religion, the owner of its Holy City wins" that might work.

But that's not really the point; I don't want to remove the Domination, Cultural, or Conquest wins, and I'd prefer not to remove the Diplomatic from the U.N. entirely. Really, the only one that's causing a big headache is the Domination, since under the current game balance it's not too difficult for a militaristic person to take over 2/3rds of the planet by the end of the modern era (which I'll rename, of course. Nuclear? Electronic? Maybe "the Duct Tape Era".) So I'm trying to brainstorm ways to keep a military from being so overwhelming. More cheap pure-defense units (like the Machine Gunner)? Higher upkeep costs when units are outside of cities? Increase revolt times?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Forgot to add: one suggestion I liked was to give every unit, everywhere, a 1% boost to strength for each 5% cultural ownership of the tile the fight takes place in. That is, if I'm attacking a big city (100% yours), you'd get a 20% bonus on defense, but skirmishes on the border (where it's more like 55-45) would be much narrower (2% net). Plus, this means that if I attack my neighbor, my units would actually have a small edge over any third parties involved (his allies whose units are in the cities). For instance, if Germany attacks France, but England has located units in the French territory, the German troops might actually have the cultural advantage over the English, at least near the borders.
Also, since this would be an inherent rule change, you couldn't bombard it away, so enemy cities would almost ALWAYS give a 20% edge to their defenders.

Any thoughts? I'm just trying to slow down the Conquest victories a bit.

 

[niffweed17]

i like the idea. it'll solve the problem that every game seems to end in a space race, because it's far and away the easiest victory condition.

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's not just space race. A very aggressive player can meet the Domination victory condition before the modern age starts, or the Diplomatic as soon as the U.N. is built (at which point it supersedes Domination). In my mind it's not just that the game boils down to two victory conditions (D* or Space). It's that once you get on the roll that takes you towards victory, it's practically impossible for anyone else to catch you.

Once you get 40% of the population, no one else can win a Domination or Diplomatic win without knocking down your population in some way (like ICBMs) that tends to work against them in the long run. So, effectively this rewards a single playstyle; conquer as much as you can, as early as you can, so that in the endgame you simply can't lose, regardless of what advantages the other civs have. Really, the Diplomatic win COULD have been the equalizer here, allowing a small, diplomatic civ to win over a large, aggressive one. But, since the UN is population-based, that's not happening any more.

What I want, really, is to add ways to the game that the military game style stalls out, preventing the easy Domination/Diplomatic win. Adding that defensive bonus, for instance, means that if the enemy manages to stay close to your tech level, you'll lose more units than it's worth to invade. Sure, you CAN win the war, but at the cost of so many elite units that you won't be able to continue the military cascade (sweeping through whatever civ is closest, and so on.)

Anyway, that's what I'm going for. Ways to prevent the easy modern-age wins, so that more games reach the three new "future" eras.