Turn Time of Different Victory Conditions

[Spoonwood]

A conquest loss can take fewer turns than a conquest win.

A domination victory, if you have tight enough of city spacing, might actually take fewer turns for an AI to win than for a human player to win. The human player's strategy I think would be to capture a large amount of territory, and produce settlers. Then when having maybe 40-50% of the domination tiles, give all those cities away to the biggest AI left.

For 20k, 100k type victories, spaceship, and diplomatic victories, I think that for the best players, the human player can win in fewer (or the same) number of turns than an AI can.

 

[BlackBetsy]

This is a fun thought experiment!

A domination victory, if you have tight enough of city spacing, might actually take fewer turns for an AI to win than for a human player to win. The human player's strategy I think would be to capture a large amount of territory, and produce settlers. Then when having maybe 40-50% of the domination tiles, give all those cities away to the biggest AI left.

I would think you could pair this with a strategy of fighting with an AI's close neighbors to allow them more room to expand. I could imagine a situation where you and an AI are on two opposite ends of a pangaea. You expand aggressively, and also wage war against the AI on its border to slow down their expansion to the benefit of the AI you want to win. I assume that an AI in a war produces fewer settlers in favor of military units?

 

[Lanzelot]

A diplomatic loss can be produced in the same number of turns as a win: just reduce the number of civs to 3 during the game, or make sure everyone hates you, and when you call the vote, vote for your opponent.

 

[vorlon_mi]

To engineer a loss by 20k culture, one would need to do a bit of planning. Ensure that at least one AI loves building wonders, e.g., Inca, then use the "clear the way" military tactic BlackBetsy described. Encourage them to expand, so they can indulge their wonder addiction. I'm not sure it would take fewer turns than a human player winning by 20k, though.

To engineer a loss by 100k culture is a bit trickier. Culture is accumulated over the whole game, so perhaps Babylon is the AI best suited for it. In my experience, the AI nearly always build all the buildings, so they would need to be encouraged to do that. Conquering cities then giving them away is less effective, since the AI would need to build culture buildings from scratch -- the buildings would be younger. A peaceful AI with 40 cities might do it.

To engineer a loss by spaceship would involve both gifting cities and gifting techs. I'm not sure if diplomacy would keep the AI from attacking you, after you've strengthened it. We've observed that the AI go war-crazy in the Industrial age; might they also go war-crazy in the last age? Since the AI don't do prebuilds for the larger spaceship parts, I think that a human would always win by space faster than the AI.

 

[BlackBetsy]

I'm not sure it would take fewer turns than a human player winning by 20k, though.

At higher levels, where the AI has a build discount, for sure it would go faster. The hard part would be to get the AI to build the wonders in a single city. The AI seems to spread out its wonder building among its core. You'd have to be on a higher level, wipe out all but one AI, and leave that AI as a one-city civ and somehow encourage it to build wonders. Now that I think about it, seems to be a pretty tall task.

 

[Lanzelot]

Now that I think about it, seems to be a pretty tall task.

In any case much more difficult than achieving the 20K victory yourself...