What if Domination worked slightly differently?

[DeckerdJames]

Do you think Domination games in civ 6 would be more interesting if it required you to either capture the capital or to reach level 3 alliance with all civilizations? I am finding it useful to have a couple of allies.

 

[vorlon_mi]

I was/am a bigger fan of the military victory condition in other games in the franchise, specifically Civ3 and Civ4.

• Conquest: kill all the others (Civ3), kill or vassalize all the others (Civ4)
• Domination: your civ occupies X% of all the land and Y% of all the people (Civ3), where X and Y depend on map size; your civ and your vassals control X% of all the land and have a majority of the population. (Civ4)

I always found it fun to watch the mini-map grow more and more with my color. Conquering specific cities -- original capitals -- was less fun for me, especially if those cities had natural defenses like impassable mountains. Vassal states was a feature added in the 2nd expansion of Civ4, where a smaller civ might simply surrender during wartime, or even throw itself at your feet in peacetime, if your civ was sufficiently more powerful. The feature served to reduce some of the grind involved in tracking down and conquering the last few small towns of an AI civ that you were "dominating" (pun intended).

I like your idea that building a level 3 alliance means that civ is (more or less) a part of your empire. The civ might still be competing for a diplo victory, so it's not quite the same as a vassal. Reaching that level of alliance with *all* the surviving civs would require some clever diplomacy. In most of my games, at least one of the surviving civs keeps denouncing me. Perhaps one would have to be very careful to either a) not occupy any cities of the survivors, or b) totally destroy all cities of a civ, once you start conquering.

 

[Miserable Old Git]

I make domination more interesting by setting my own condition: to either occupy or raze every single city (exc. city-states) on the map. (I play deity on huge splintered fractal maps, or on true earth)

 

[Urlance Woolsbane]

Do you think Domination games in civ 6 would be more interesting if it required you to either capture the capital or to reach level 3 alliance with all civilizations? I am finding it useful to have a couple of allies.

No, but having a level 3 alliance with all or most civs would make for a vastly more interesting Diplomatic win-condition than Civ VI's misbegotten alt-victory-point system

 

[Quintillus]

Rome II: Total War behaves this way - the cities of your treaty allies count towards the threshold for victory.

I think it could work well either towards domination or towards Diplomatic.

I've yet to win a Domination victory in VI because it's kind of tedious. Technically you don't have to conquer every city, just the capitals, but in practice it's not often feasible to capture just the capitals. Is it more or less tedious than the Civ3 and Civ4 domination conditions? Probably depends on the map. In those iterations, you can focus on conquering the easier areas to conquer, and in IV you can vassalize as well, but if there are some really inconvenient capitals to capture in VI, too bad, you still have to conquer them.

The macro level problem, IMO, is that in VI (but also III and to a lesser extent IV), the amount of conquering required to achieve domination is so far beyond what is needed to dominate in practice that it's just not interesting near the end. I'd argue that another avenue to make it work better would be if you were required to conquer half the original capitals, or half-plus-one. Much less tedium, and more urgency for the other civs to intervene if someone has conquered three, four, or five capitals.

 

[Naokaukodem]

The allies counting for "vassals" could make fulfill the leaders agendas interesting. Anyway, your allies could have allies, it's just the first to have everybody as allies (or allies level 3) that would win. It could be done...

There could also be something like "becoming a superpower" and then you would win within 50 turns if no other superpower emerges. (making spies activities more interesting to weaken/overthrow other countries) But it would be kind of tricky to define "superpowers". Certainly not by size of territory or size of population (China and India were a long time the vastest and most populated countries but only "emergent countries"), but also with science, gold output and military power. (counting nukes)

 

[DeckerdJames]

The allies counting for "vassals" could make fulfill the leaders agendas interesting. Anyway, your allies could have allies, it's just the first to have everybody as allies (or allies level 3) that would win. It could be done...

There could also be something like "becoming a superpower" and then you would win within 50 turns if no other superpower emerges. (making spies activities more interesting to weaken/overthrow other countries) But it would be kind of tricky to define "superpowers". Certainly not by size of territory or size of population (China and India were a long time the vastest and most populated countries but only "emergent countries"), but also with science, gold output and military power. (counting nukes)

A chain of allies could be a problem. If everyone is allies you would have to use diplomacy to break them up?

 

[Naokaukodem]

A chain of allies could be a problem. If everyone is allies you would have to use diplomacy to break them up?

Well what I said was a nonsense, at least in reality. We cannot have allies if we do not have enemies or potential enemies, so it's weird to have everyone as allies. It should work the same in the game I suppose... although it would be tough to define 'enemies' this time. Civilization games have always been terrible to match the player's real enemies with the ingame "enemies" that don't like you because meh.

Instead, in order to have allies, we could be enjoined to choose an enemy first.