One possibility would be randomly placing 3-4 super powerful special artifacts into the galaxy. When one player or a team controls all the planets that have these artifacts, a timer starts and if they can defend the planets long enough, they win.

Simple Solution:

Multiple Victory Options...

Currently you just have to destroy everything to win... They should have options like Civilization...

"Space Race Victory"
"Artifact Vistory"
"Control Point Victory"
"Conquest Victory"
"Control % Victory"

And so on...

Each of these options would be selected at the start of the game... For those ppl who want a 12 hour 5+ star system game that never ends... they can select conquest victory.

For those who want a "possible" 2-3 hour game (these are ppl with jobs, lives, school, and so on... They can enable all or most of the other victory options... If an opponent refuses to die... then you can persue an alternate method to win... (say researching a tech to become gods... or seek out... destroy... colonize and cap all the artifacts in the system...

IMO Artifact Control would be an AWESOME game mechanic / victory condition... as it would give players something to really fight for... making 1 planet much more valuable than others...

Currently... Most planets are just as valuable as any other. While Terran or whatever might have more upgrade slots... its really not "that" much better than anything else. But if a player could "win" by controlling all the artifact planets... then defending those (and not running away as this whole thread is about) would become much more important...

They might also include a game option that weighs it more for RTS or more for 4X depending on the players and the style of game... Maybe quicker movement, more damage, faster tech for the RTS setting- and more drawn out research, slower movement, less damage for the 4X game.

I also like the idea of several victory conditions. Space Race, Artifact Conquest etc.

and i think catering to RTS players who will be gone the next RTS title that comes out is a waste=P

Spend more time making this a real time 4x game, not a slightly larger RTS.

If this game is supposed to be more grandiose and 'epic' than a RTS, its going to HAVE to take longer to play a game of. Risk takes longer to play than stratego.


IF you want a smaller, faster game. Then use the map creator. Make a game that has

1. 3 planets per player (which is what happens if you add players but no extra planet stuff)

2. fast everything.

There. Have fun rushing expansions and sending your streams of LRM frigates.

+1. And it would be nice in the editor to assign VPs to specific planets. Then perhaps have whoever gets a certain score first wins.

Some problems with this thread.

First, super weapon criticisms.

The TEC weapon is the best, yet does something almost entirely pointless? Blowing a capital up is nice, but blowing up 2 credits income isn't real great. If the place is already maxed out and you aren't killing it, you're basically just making them upgrade eventually. The Vasari and Advent weapons are more strategic in use, you can duplicate the TEC weapon by sending 30 siege frigates into a system just fine. The Vasari weapon allows you to briefly neutralize a system, and it's actually quite powerful, you can blow up a lot of stuff in 30 seconds with a big enough fleet. It's not just disabled turrets, it's disabled repair platforms as well. The Advent weapon is the most powerful though. Immediate recolonization of an enemy stronghold deep inside their culture. Can't resupply your fleet in an enemy controlled solar system and they get ripped to shreds before you can recolonize and start building? Not a problem, just pop that off first, wipe the culture out, take the planet, and immediately start popping out frigate factories instead of waiting a few minutes.

As to needing to be stronger. If you want to fire a second shot, build a second one. This is a big duh here, you could build 20 of the Vasari ones and wipe out one fortification after another with no losses, blow up worlds in rapid succession as TEC without even attacking. Wipe out the enemy culture from their own worlds with the Advent. They are already a game over weapon, you just need more than one of them. Kinda like you need a few hundred ships to actually assault a well fortified solar system, you'll need more than one super weapon to actually kill people with it.

Edit: whoops.

Second, taking too long to bombard planets. I thought people were complaining about them being too quickly dropped eh? Build more siege frigates guys... 10 following your fleet around is minimalist in approach, try 30 if you're bored. A novel idea, if you're winning big, use three or four fleets and drop them that much faster too.

I would like to see capitulation though, alternative win conditions and massecred ai offering a peace treaty with their conquerer would be great.

I agree. super weapons are far from being too weak; just right for my taste.

I strongly disagree. Not all players have infinite time to play games. I certainly don't. I love this game and larger maps, but the game simply takes too long to play. an AI surrender or having other optional victory conditions would speed things up immensely (and help pacing), and of course, it shouldn't be too hard to make those victory conditions optional so players can turn them on and off before starting a map.

In addition, it would give players something to aim for. Right now the game forces you to wipe out every last enemy. It's tedious for a lot of people as this thread is demonstrating. Victory conditions give players something to shoot for, and several different methods to beat the game. All good things in my book.

An AI surrender option is a awesome idea, though it would involve a lot of thought and variables to implement. Under what conditions would they surrender? Loss of planets? Control points, loss of capital? It's a sticky programming issue. I would say that loss of all planets (and their support structures) should constitute a loss, with all ships remaining of that faction turning into pirates in whatever system they're in. Also, surrender to a faction could come if they've lost a certain (high) percentage of their planets to a faction. Again, this victory condition could be toggable by the player before a game.

For multiplayer games, players should also be given the option to surrender as well.

Victory conditions are a great idea. Making them optional shouldn't be too hard for those who want to play the current style of play. I like the list the poster up the thread posted.

The problem is time is the only real contributor to 'scale'.

The maps in this game are not all that big. What makes them 'seem' big is how long it takes to do anything. I could take the current game and replace each planet with an individual galaxy graphic, that wouldn't make the game any larger. Its all about time.

Speed up the game and all you have is another RTS.

I think the key is to play with people who are willing to surrender once totally overmatched.

The other option my friends and I are toying with is allied victory win conditions... where once your beaten, rather than quitting the game on the spot or griefing and making it take forever to kill you, you make some sort of cease fire terms and ally with the guy who was killing you.

Thus the game ends when all players cede that their empires won't be getting any bigger and any further conflict will simply have a high cost for no gain. At which point they ally up and call it a day.


The key is that NOT surrendering when your beaten is a form a griefing, and we as a community should encourage people to surrender when they're dead, but not be jerks about it.

I would love a game mode where if you destroy your enemies home world, they lose after X minutes. The TEC super weapon wouldn't be able to hurt the capital though..

But yea, I would love some small options to make gameplay much faster; they're called options for a reason. It wouldn't make the game into another rts.

I'm loving the 'Domination' (control a adjustable % of planets) and 'Critcal Planet' victory ideas!

A 'control all artifacts' vic cond would be cool too. The more vic conditions the greater replayability IMO.

My only suggestion is that if a 'Domination' style victory condition is implemented that as you adjust the percentage "bar" it states the *actual # of planets needed on the game screen as well as the game-join screen in multiplayer.
(I.E. adjust to 50% on a 16 planet map would state 'control 8 planets to start dom timer'; while putting it to 75% would state 12 planets....so on and so forth)

Towards the tenth hour of a thirteen hour game (of straight play) I started to wish for something more.

To someone earlier who spoke about the weapon that makes enemys recollinate:
If a race is forced to recollinate a planet, wouldn't that reset their planetary defenses? Sooooo, a 6000hp planet suddenly goes back to 1500... Yeah, that's not powerful

Oh, and you can't stand ready to capture the flag, as someone mentioned after you do something to their planets. Usually you have to wait a long time because the spread of culture can really slow ya down.
If there were an in-game feature to speed the game up from normal to fast in single player it would be nice.

As far as multiplayer, it's a tough call. I had over 300,000 credits and 80,000 or so of both resources, unable to make more than six capital ships because the enemy couldn't kill my regular ships. That's after I did every research, aswell as every planetary upgrade. Just because I had nothing better to do while I waited anxiously, hoping the enemy would be lucky enough to destroy a few ships of mine while I went from planet-to-planet in the most sluggish blitzkreig immaginable. Granted it was a 30 planet map, but maybe they could make a super-super weapon that cost an astronomical amount for those types of situations. Like maybe, 40,000 credits, 20,000 metal and 10,000 crystal or more, (because if you have that many of any resource you're obviously not able to spend it on much) similar of a 'deathstar' like slow-roaming planet destroyer that just destroys the planet instead of forcing you to wait aginizingly long for a culture of a planet with no population to dispearse presense.

I really enjoy this game, completely and I like it the way it is pretty much. But the in-game ability to make it go faster (and maybe a vote option to excel the game speed in-game for multiplayer) would be a quick-easy-patch that could improve this game. (Not fix, there's nothing broken. I like improvements though, don't you?)

I think this, and the option for "Loss upon death of Homeworld" are two of the best ideas for optional victory conditions so far. It seems very strange that the RT4X tries to bring in the best of both genres, but hasn't brought in the progress either have made as far as customizable victory conditions in recent years. It feels a bit like a next gen FPS going back to pure deathmatch/team deathmatch play and ignoring all the CTF, control point, escort, etc evolutions over the years (which people expect nowadays).

More options are always a grand thing. The domination timer is a grand idea. As is the Battlefield-esque idea of player tickets depleting on various triggers, be it again domination, or ship loss, etc. Perhaps could have an adjustable ticket amount pregame, so could set short and quick 500 pt matches or more epic 50k matches. Frigates worth 1 point, cruisers 2-4, cap ships 10, structures 5-10, flagship 50, asteroids 50, planets 100. (As an example)

The thing with domination is that it would definitely have be able to differentiate between asteroids/planets and other systems you cannot actually capture, such as wormholes or space junk. It could be possible if the game can't tell the difference in these nodes to have a map where it isn't possible to own 70% (or so) of a map without basically completely eliminating an enemy anyway. But I guess even if this IS the case, we can simply have a lower figure to compensate, 50-60% as the baseline standard for Sins.

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The other idea I would very much like to see is a formalised surrender system, that can apply to both AI and players. Basically give the player an option to plead to their oppressor (or the oppressor an option to show mercy to their victim) for the option of becoming a vassal.

A vassal player would have no option to declare war on their former oppressor for the rest of that game, and share enemy and friendly status with the former oppressor.

This should work even in locked team games, and would be a rather interesting dynamic. Do you accept and fight your former allies for the chance to remain alive a little longer? Or do you fight to the bitter end, hoping your allies will come to your rescue, or even if not, that you can harm the bad guy enough that they might later succeed where you have failed?

It would also be nice if there could be degrees of vassalage. For example, a beneviolent superior force may simply make the offer with no strings (aside from the aforementioned) attached. A more demanding superior force (or perhaps if the soon-to-be vassal has made them ask more than once before accepting) they may tithe a certain percentage of their resource income for the priviledge of life.