If I am on a midgame rush the game is quite finished. Get some good ships and air adepts and I'll rush a continent quite quickly, because the AI builds so many useless units and their marine is a joke. Tower of Divination for Pass of the Ether and you're done (One of my favorite strategies). First conquer an easy civilization to be able to teleport dozens of units (especially Mages with Summoner, which are anyway on the same path as Pass of the Ether) and you'll be able to win on turn 300-350. On maps with many islands i have never tried there it could be different. I usually play on large fractal maps, Pangaea only in MP (to have player interaction from the beginning). Ok Altar helps the Civilization by itself by boosting production if you manage to complete later stages, so this one I exclude from my judgement. For Tower you have to have a very very good production (Khazad, Sidar, Luchuirp) to make it a real option. But independent from the difficulty of win conditions you have to admit that Spaceship race is much more interesting than Altar or Tower just because it's really a race. Therefor I think both win conditions should be made more dynamic.
And for cultural victory, come on 100 turns of pressing enter, if there was at least some acceleration and automatization (like in MMO 2, where turns were skipped till something interesting actually happened). I would prefer if wonders were linked to cities with high culture or if they increased the percentage in every city with your culture that those cities flip on your side or some other twist. I wished for a civilization that could really fast complete the Cultural Victory like one with the World Spell of Luchuirp only that it's artists not engineers that can be collected in one city. And why the Hell does the AI not use Cultural Victory. Can't we just use Blake's AI? It's essential the same as in vanilla. 100% culture after let's say champions or some other good unit and if the player doesn't pay attention he loses to culture victory.
And for cultural victory, come on 100 turns of pressing enter, if there was at least some acceleration and automatization (like in MMO 2, where turns were skipped till something interesting actually happened). I would prefer if wonders were linked to cities with high culture or if they increased the percentage in every city with your culture that those cities flip on your side or some other twist. I wished for a civilization that could really fast complete the Cultural Victory like one with the World Spell of Luchuirp only that it's artists not engineers that can be collected in one city. And why the Hell does the AI not use Cultural Victory. Can't we just use Blake's AI? It's essential the same as in vanilla. 100% culture after let's say champions or some other good unit and if the player doesn't pay attention he loses to culture victory.
