Impossible domination victory on continents?

First: Aberration - Noun "a departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome." How is that rude?
Look for more acceptions:
3. deviation from truth or moral rectitude.
4. mental irregularity or disorder, especially of a minor or temporary nature; lapse from a sound mental state.
Perhaps that's a stronger word in my language.

I'm saying that such a thing hasn't happened to me, and 90% of my victories are conquest. (Some have been close.)

I play either huge on immortal or standard on deity. Immortal is beginning to feel much too easy though, so I'm mostly torturing myself with Deity. (Such an insane difficulty gap holy ****.) I play a number of civs, but almost exclusively on Tectonic map script. Also exclusively on epic.

As I said, I win 90% of the time with a domination victory. I've never had an unexpected cultural victory stop me, hence why I described such a thing as an aberration. I'm entirely unconvinced that we should do anything, but that's just my opinion.

Ok, that's your experience, not everyone's. Continents or Pangea? Is there an unpassable gap between continents? Could it be the epic pace is showing less tourism?
 
Could it be the epic pace is showing less tourism?

Epic pace multiply unit mouvment by 1.5
(More precisely, everything that is not unit mouvement is 1.5 times slower, so it is as if units were quicker)
So it is far easier to achieve quick conquest, so far easier to make a domination victory before a cultural victory.

The game pace is crucial when talking about domination victory.
 
Ok, that's your experience, not everyone's. Continents or Pangea? Is there an unpassable gap between continents? Could it be the epic pace is showing less tourism?

Think it's more a case of difficulty-settings, you said you were playing on King, right? On Immortal/Deity the AI have pretty insane culture-output which makes tourism-victory quite a struggle while on pretty much anything lower than that the AI just doesn't perform that well on that front. This is especially true when you're talking about civs aiming for a culture victory.

Your personal tourism output doesn't really increase at all when you go from King to Deity, in fact you're probably dropping quite a bit because you're less likely to get wonders, on the other hand the AI, especially culture/tourism focused AI generates upwards ten times more culture than they did on the lower difficulties.
 
Think it's more a case of difficulty-settings, you said you were playing on King, right? On Immortal/Deity the AI have pretty insane culture-output which makes tourism-victory quite a struggle while on pretty much anything lower than that the AI just doesn't perform that well on that front. This is especially true when you're talking about civs aiming for a culture victory.

Your personal tourism output doesn't really increase at all when you go from King to Deity, in fact you're probably dropping quite a bit because you're less likely to get wonders, on the other hand the AI, especially culture/tourism focused AI generates upwards ten times more culture than they did on the lower difficulties.
Ah, ok. Would your changes affect how it plays on higher difficulties?

EDIT: I mean, I want a more logical behaviour on normal difficulties, but at the same time I wouldn't like if it spoils the game for higher difficulties, like turning cultural victories almost impossible to achieve.
 
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Ah, ok. Would your changes affect how it plays on higher difficulties?
Probably. But it's kinda hard to tell without testing it out. I'm not even sure what the difference in power between peaceful tourism and aggressive tourism is at the moment so it's hard to say how badly that balance would be screwed over.
 
Think it's more a case of difficulty-settings, you said you were playing on King, right? On Immortal/Deity the AI have pretty insane culture-output which makes tourism-victory quite a struggle while on pretty much anything lower than that the AI just doesn't perform that well on that front. This is especially true when you're talking about civs aiming for a culture victory.

Your personal tourism output doesn't really increase at all when you go from King to Deity, in fact you're probably dropping quite a bit because you're less likely to get wonders, on the other hand the AI, especially culture/tourism focused AI generates upwards ten times more culture than they did on the lower difficulties.

Epic pace multiply unit mouvment by 1.5
(More precisely, everything that is not unit mouvement is 1.5 times slower, so it is as if units were quicker)
So it is far easier to achieve quick conquest, so far easier to make a domination victory before a cultural victory.

The game pace is crucial when talking about domination victory.

Funak and Moi Magnus are pointing out the same thing: the game varies so much with map type and size or speed setting, never mind difficulty level, that to make an adjustment because of any individual experience would be nuts. That's why, as much fun as most people here have proposing different changes, I'm glad most of them aren't enacted.

I was slow because I needed to wait until Astronomy for the next assault (if winning at 270 turns is slow in King, standard), as three other civs were waiting in another continent. With Authority, if I don't hit someone, science goes slow... Most of my other games ended about turn 350, even 400, so it took me by surprise that the cultural victory came so early. I had like 80 unhappiness (war weariness I suppose), I couldn't imagine that my tourism was so high.

Did you beeline for Astronomy almost from the start? That's what I always did when trying for a good Domination score on continents. That said, your one example may have been an aberration. And no, "aberration" doesn't have a different primary meaning in Spanish.
 
Look for more acceptions:
3. deviation from truth or moral rectitude.
4. mental irregularity or disorder, especially of a minor or temporary nature; lapse from a sound mental state.
Perhaps that's a stronger word in my language.



Ok, that's your experience, not everyone's. Continents or Pangea? Is there an unpassable gap between continents? Could it be the epic pace is showing less tourism?

What I quoted is the primary definition of aberration in english. No Ill-intent was intended.

Also Tectonic CAN form a pangea, but almost never does. (95% of the time it's closer to continents, islands or archipelago.)

Both higher difficulties and epic speed play a huge part in making domination victories happen faster and culture victories happen slower, so other people might have significantly different experiences. (Units basically move 1.5 times faster and AI generates more culture, while your tourism doesn't really increase.)
 
I see. It seems to me that any change would need to scale with difficulty and pace to avoid touching what is working right.
Like, for Funak's proposal, capitals weighting (9 - difficulty level) / relative speed. So, for deity and standard pace nothing changes. At Emperor and normal pace, every capital would count as three. If speed is doubled, capitals weight half.

@ElliotS, no offense taken, I was just surprised for the tone. I thought you wouldn't offend in purpose.
 
I've been reading posted vox populi stories (where we tell how we won).
1. There are very few domination stories, none in lower to mid difficulties.
2. Cultural victory is quite frequent lately.
The first point is what's not working right. The second one could be an imbalance towards culture as Enginseer thinks, or it could be a wish for trying the changes in Great Musicians from november. (But the wish for trying last siege unit isn't showing). Even Gazebo admited that some AI that were near a domination victory ended up winning culturally.
Cultural victory doesn't seem to be unbalanced in higher difficulties, tough there isn't agreement in this. Diplo and Science victories are achievable in any difficulty but cultural victory is more likely to happen, Domination isn't possible in lower to mid difficulties in non-tiny, non-pangea maps.

Some imbalances are expected: slower pace and smaller maps favor domination, islands favors Polynesia, ... and they don't deserve to be addressed, like Txurce said. I think this issue is different, this is unexpected behaviour. This breaks the fun for the player in lower to mid difficulties.

I'll make a guess. The scaling in difficulty is in no way linear. Getting wonders before the player lets AI snowball badly (the wonder they get, plus the wonder we don't get). But for science we have comebacks mechanics, and for diplomacy the AI is competing among themselves so it can't be abused so easily. Domination can be offset by being smarter. It's tourism what suffers more in the scaling. Even a time limit was introduced to avoid cultural victory to happen too fast.
What if tourism is tweaked to scale on difficulty? Higher difficulty, more tourism. Maintain the current output for Deity and lower the tourism output as difficulty lowers. This way, in lower difficulties cultural victory won't happen so early. We could start trying -10% to tourism output for every difficulty level. That's 100% in Deity and 30% in Settler. It's worth noting that AI will have a harder time to get cultural victories in lower levels, too.

Ok, let's sum up.

A) Tourism output depends on number of controlled cities. Capitals count as (9 - difficulty_level) cities.
B) Tourism is reduced in conquered cities without hotels by 10*difficulty_level %.
C) Tourism output is just 10*(2 + difficulty_level) % of current tourism.
 
This seems like a solution in search of a problem. Domination victory is not necessarily unachievable at lower difficulties; it's just hard to avoid a culture win while pursuing a Domination strategy since you rack up tourism from events and captured great works/wonders while simultaneously crippling the cultural output of your rivals. Domination can similarly aid most other victory conditions as well, though those are more easily avoided if you are so inclined.

The simplest solution if you want to avoid accidentally getting a win via Culture would appear to be disabling Cultural Victory as a winning condition. I'm curious if anyone has ever had the AI beat them via Culture Victory at King or below. Seems like it's effectively a human-only victory condition below Emperor, though as with all broad statements that could also just be a byproduct of my playstyle.

Alternate hypothesis: perhaps Cultural Victory remains too easy on King and lower (maybe even Emperor) difficulties. Possibly boost AIs culture bonuses per era as a counter? I know I have had a hard time not getting cultural victories in any game that is going well, even when I'm aiming at other victory types on King/Emperor, standard speed games.
 
Why not just make Cultural Victory harder by claiming that you need to not only be influential with all civilizations, but also dominant with half of the alive civilizations.
 
Honestly, I feel like all these suggestions are too complicated. Tourism itself doesn't need to be nerfed. Tourism as a side effect of conquest should be nerfed. You get substantial tourism from winning wars and capturing cities. Tone that down and it should be fine
 
Honestly, I feel like all these suggestions are too complicated. Tourism itself doesn't need to be nerfed. Tourism as a side effect of conquest should be nerfed. You get substantial tourism from winning wars and capturing cities. Tone that down and it should be fine
Except the fact is that Historic Events scale on the number of cities, so although wide civilizations are prone to being influenced with a modifier, they can hit back much harder with more powerful historical event tourism.
 
Why not just make Cultural Victory harder by claiming that you need to not only be influential with all civilizations, but also dominant with half of the alive civilizations.

That wouldn't scale well, it will make cultural victory too difficult in higher difficulties.

Honestly, I feel like all these suggestions are too complicated. Tourism itself doesn't need to be nerfed. Tourism as a side effect of conquest should be nerfed. You get substantial tourism from winning wars and capturing cities. Tone that down and it should be fine

Honestly, they don't seem complicated to me. Many things in Vox Populi are scaling and you don't get to see the formulae, just accept that it scales and work it out (Also, those were three different proposals, not all together). Religious pressure is something way more complicated than that. Perhaps the key is in Historic Events, but I doubt it. That was enhanced before for a reason.

I trust most of the opinions in this thread, and I believe most of their disappointments are due to differences in settings. There is a small consensus in that the main reason cultural victory for being so dominant is difficulty and speed.
 
Not sure how pertinent it is, but Rome of all civs just beat me with a cultural victory on Immortal/continents on t267. Is that unusually early?
 
I've been reading posted vox populi stories (where we tell how we won).
1. There are very few domination stories, none in lower to mid difficulties.
2. Cultural victory is quite frequent lately.
I'm not going to talk for everyone, because I know how weird that always gets, but I am going to explain the two main reasons why I almost never do Domination unless I'm purposely forcing myself to do it.

Reason number 1: Domination with anywhere above 2 AI civs in the game feels extremely grindy to me, you take cities, burn cities, wait for cities to stop sucking so you can balance your happiness again and repeat. It just gets so incredibly easy as well for some reason, the warmachine never stops.
Reason number 2: Capturing cities makes all other victory-conditions easier, so even if I get started domination I tend to divert towards the easier/more fun path once I have to peace out the first time (to deal with unhappiness usually).

I don't really think the actual problem is in Tourism at all, but in Conquest in general, Conquering like 3 AI just pretty much turns the game into an auto-win, no matter what victory condition you go for.
 
Not sure how pertinent it is, but Rome of all civs just beat me with a cultural victory on Immortal/continents on t267. Is that unusually early?
That matches what people that play on higher difficulties say, cultural victory is not unbalanced in those difficulties. It's just on lower-mid difficulty.

I'm not going to talk for everyone, because I know how weird that always gets, but I am going to explain the two main reasons why I almost never do Domination unless I'm purposely forcing myself to do it.

Reason number 1: Domination with anywhere above 2 AI civs in the game feels extremely grindy to me, you take cities, burn cities, wait for cities to stop sucking so you can balance your happiness again and repeat. It just gets so incredibly easy as well for some reason, the warmachine never stops.
Reason number 2: Capturing cities makes all other victory-conditions easier, so even if I get started domination I tend to divert towards the easier/more fun path once I have to peace out the first time (to deal with unhappiness usually).

I don't really think the actual problem is in Tourism at all, but in Conquest in general, Conquering like 3 AI just pretty much turns the game into an auto-win, no matter what victory condition you go for.
I don't go domination mostly because I hate moving so many units. In vanilla, the civ that went all nuts conquering suffered severe underdevelopment, slow tech and policy progress. Here it's not so hard for the warmonger to recover. But I think that's another story. I don't complain for winning after conquering three other civs, I complain for winning of an unrelated victory condition. If you think you can find a solution for both, go on.
 
I'm not going to talk for everyone, because I know how weird that always gets, but I am going to explain the two main reasons why I almost never do Domination unless I'm purposely forcing myself to do it.

Reason number 1: Domination with anywhere above 2 AI civs in the game feels extremely grindy to me, you take cities, burn cities, wait for cities to stop sucking so you can balance your happiness again and repeat. It just gets so incredibly easy as well for some reason, the warmachine never stops.
Reason number 2: Capturing cities makes all other victory-conditions easier, so even if I get started domination I tend to divert towards the easier/more fun path once I have to peace out the first time (to deal with unhappiness usually).

I don't really think the actual problem is in Tourism at all, but in Conquest in general, Conquering like 3 AI just pretty much turns the game into an auto-win, no matter what victory condition you go for.

I agree with both your reasons, for what it's worth, and it matches with my experiences.

The times I tried to go warmonger I ended up getting bored and towering over the rest of the world; usually ending up winning culturally before I could take / be bother to take the remaining capitals.

I think the key is to make conquered cities less attractive for tourism, but not to the point where they are worthless (conquered cities could gradually become more culturally rich as time went by; to compensate for early wars), just like having different ethnicities in another civ game (I think 4?) made things more difficult (i think it a local happiness hit), to the point when if your city was too influenced by another culture / civ / whatever it was it would actually switch sides! (and no war was required, it could happen during peace time and was a viable strategy to take key cities in the border without DoW)

I mostly play Prince, Epic, Large with 24 CS & 10 Civs.

Cheers.
 
Maybe give cities -50% tourism if you aren't the original owner (number could be changed)? In theory you could remove the penalty after a while, but IDK what the options code wise would be. Civ5 doesn't really have a mechanic for different ethnic groups or assimilation
 
Maybe give cities -50% tourism if you aren't the original owner (number could be changed)? In theory you could remove the penalty after a while, but IDK what the options code wise would be. Civ5 doesn't really have a mechanic for different ethnic groups or assimilation
That wouldn't solve the issue of it being exponentially easier to win via culture on lower difficulties.

Like, all VC are easier on low difficulties because your AI opponents are weaker, but non of the other ones have their metrics really changed. It's just how much competition you see.

For example on immortal you might need 45 WC votes for Diplo, 8 capitals for domination, most of the techs for science and 20k tourism for culture.

Meanwhile on king you still need the same everything else, but now you only need 10k tourism.

Any changes need to consider the different difficulty levels, so as to make deity cultures wins not impossible.
 
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