We are playing with self imposed limitations designed to make the game more challenging by reducing the impact of the human advantage. Instead of the game-imposed soft limit on productive cities, which in any winning game results in the player's complete domination up to the point of the player's fortitude in stretching the timeframe of the game out, we have imposed a hard limit on number of cities which limits our population, production, income, research rate, and access to resources.
By placing limits on ourselves, we are implicitly challenging ourselves to sharpen our human strengths of better strategy and tactics to overcome the opponents looming advantages in the above mentioned areas, most importantly production and research rate. I don't think we're really meeting that challenge right now, hence this thread.
We should start with criteria which must be satisfied to have any winning strategy. From that we can build such a strategy driven by aspects of the game which make the game fun for the most people, combined with the attributes of our location and our opponents.
Obviously, winning strategies all share the attribute that it is possible to win using that strategy. Taking each of the victory conditions we get:
This thread is not about choosing a victory condition
By placing limits on ourselves, we are implicitly challenging ourselves to sharpen our human strengths of better strategy and tactics to overcome the opponents looming advantages in the above mentioned areas, most importantly production and research rate. I don't think we're really meeting that challenge right now, hence this thread.
We should start with criteria which must be satisfied to have any winning strategy. From that we can build such a strategy driven by aspects of the game which make the game fun for the most people, combined with the attributes of our location and our opponents.
Obviously, winning strategies all share the attribute that it is possible to win using that strategy. Taking each of the victory conditions we get:
- Conquest -- Superior units, which can be achieved by technology advantages, advantage in numbers (difficult to achieve in 5BCC due to production limitations) and resource advantages.
- Domination - not possible
- Diplomatic - Squeaky clean reputation, good relations, helpful to have a tyrant opponent, build the UN
- Spaceship -- tech lead or parity, careful use of prebuilds
- Culture -- build culture as early as possible
- Histograph -- overcome the other civs population advantage
This thread is not about choosing a victory condition