Where are the peaceful victories?

peaceful win: all players in an alliance win, once no one outside is left or everyone joined it, however I understand what your trying to say, like winning through culture, space race..etc. they might add different conditions in the future.

Ask a... TEC if he wants to life peacefully with a Vasari after they conquered dozens of their worlds... Or if an Advent wants to life peacefully with thos TEC's ...

Peace ha
Peace is for fary tales, War is the only answer.
Muhahahahahaha

Peaceful win 2: Play TEC, build 16 Sova carriers plus support and embargo all the opponents' planets until he gives up in disgust.

More seriously, I'm a fan of peaceful (and varied) ways to win too. I was a bit disappointed with the culture, even when playing Advent. It's just too easy for the opponent to put one or two media centers on a chokepoint planet and stop your culture dead in its track, especially if there are uncolonizable planets inbetween.

Most of the time, it just takes too long to wait for your culture to spread, and especially for planets to rebel. Sure, you can build 6 media stations on all your border planets, but it's soooo much faster to build trade ports instead and build a huge fleet to stomp over the enemy in a short time. It would be nice if culture spread a little faster.

To quote my friend Ian about the TEC exiling the Advent, "That's some major hatein'"

The Drath wanted to exterminate all life in the galaxy. The Drengin just wanted to enslave everyone so they could use their skin as a food source. It was still possible to get a diplo victory by allying with them (never actually did that, usually i had those insectoids wipe them out for me, but in theory).

This game, while being the first of its kind, is just too simple. It comes down to who can build the mostest ships the fastest. If we cant get some non-genocidal victory conditions, then we should at least get more options besides ship on ship combat.

Disclaimer: OK, lots of musing here.

From a gameplay perspective I'd like there to be more victory conditions and certainly better/more diplomacy but total annihilation does make sense within the context of the lore.

The way I see it is that when you're playing, you're playing as a 'commander' of a small part of a greater whole. The TEC empire (around which most of the fighting is supposedly taking place) is much larger than 1 to 5 star systems so you're basically just a small cog in a greater machine.

However, while a ceasefire makes sense, would your superiors give you the option to create a peace treaty with the other empires? I would of thought not but then maybe the empires may have a very decentralised political structure.


Of course, gameplay > lore but I'm not sure how they could make peaceful victories make sense. In civ, you're playing over 6000+ years so a lot can change but in sins, you've got 3 empires that hate each other and really only desire to annihilate their enemies. For them to suddenly go, "Oh HAI, I don't mind that you just killed 20 billion of my citizens, lets make happy families", seems counter intuitive to me at best.


As to actual solutions, I think the problem is that there's really not very much to spend your resources/time on, you build an economy to produce more ships faster and you to tech to build better ships. War in Sins doesn't really have any drawbacks, i.e. in Civ, war is costly and getting stuck in a 200 year war will really slow down your development and you always have a lot of other civilizations to consider. In sins, the worst it'll do is piss your opponent off and make you the target of bounties and counter attacks.

Unless they're going to completely radicalise the game, I think it might be best for there to be more methods (i.e. ones not involving mass destruction) for the defeating your opponents but ultimately, victory being the same, destroy your opponent(s).

On the other hand, a lot is already there. For example , teching to super weapons can be considered similar to the space race of civilization. Only instead of winning outright, you get to use them and hey, that's fun.

@Two posts up,

The Korath wanted to exterminate all non-Drengin species. The Drath were just a very spiritual peaceful race of flightless dragons who were the original inhabitants of Altaria until they got kicked off. Then in Dark Avatar, after the fall of the humans and their alliance, the Drengin/Korath came along and exterminated the Drath(and later, the Korx).

GalCiv 2, despite being advertised for it's 4(now 5 with the Precursor Ascendancy in TA) victory conditions, is still heavily biased for military wins. You are inevitably going to get attacked on any level above Challenging, and have to either kill the first attacker quickly, make peace and then go on a military offensive, or else get dogpiled on by several AI forces. The biggest thing that the AI looks at when deciding their relations with you(and therefore your Diplomacy Victory) is the size of your military compared to their's. Culture(for your Influence Victory) is best spread by invading alien planets with military force and setting up Stock Markets on them. And if you go for a Technology Victory, you are invariably going to get noticed by the AIs and attacked if their military is any bigger than yours. The Precursor Ascendancy is basically going to be the same thing as Military Victory, but with Precursor Artifact resources becoming the targets, not planets.

Sins at least says 'exterminate to win' openly and on the cover. In a game where there are desperate aliens running from an unknown godlike enemy, psionic fanatics with a millennium's worth of vengeance and hatred to unleash, and a ridiculously entrepreneurial and freakishly industrial 1000-year old capitalist empire sandwiched desperately in between the above two, where can one expect peace to come from?

Teching to Returning Armada may be considered by some as Sins' Technology Victory, but you still have to use the free ships to kill the enemy and actually win.

Always get the Drath mixed up with the badguys. Must be how they look. Anyhow,

Im unimpressed with the planet busting cannon. Oneshotting planets is nice and all, but the defenses and fleets still have to be killed the normal way. Havent played the other races yet so no comment on their ultimates.

Re: Lore:
The lore is made up. It can be changed any way they want. But lore is a bad excuse anyway as this is, well, a game. Gameplay>*.

Just finished a large map scenerio 5v5 where there were only four of the original allies left at the end. All I wanted to do was break the alliance and attack the others to conquer all the systems for my own. Why would I want to waste a perfectly good fleet and production facilities now producing at top capacity? It seemed like such a waste of 15 hours of gameplay having to share the victory with others.

That wouldn't be much fun for an RTS.

If you could win any other way, the game would be called "Virtues of a Solar Empire"

This is a RT strategy game. Does C&C or Rise of Legend or any other RTS game have a peaceful victory. 4X is is only the wrapper, this is a RTS game at heart.

Yay i like war its fun.  even if there were more ways to win everyone would still go for the fight if anyone disagrees please quote me and say it to my face.






Supcom FA rules dude(no way of using diplomacy to win wars):HOT: 

Spamming unholy amounts of Deliverance Engines as Advent can give you a win without actually attacking, but I've only seen it work against an AI, and it really required an absurd number of the things (over 20), it also took forever. Considering the cost of the things, and the time, it would have been an easier investment to just spam really any type of ship (even just Siege Frigates) and wipe the worlds clean.

I only really use culture to boost my income (place a couple in centrally located worlds, they spread out and it's a decent return on the investment). Later in game if I notice an opponent has no culture, I'll build Broadcast Centers at the edge of my territory, and with Advent you can have research to see the planets under your culture. But players see this, build a couple Centers of their own and quickly undo my culture creep.

I don't really bother with any "offensive" use of culture, but as Advent you can get their Broadcast structures so early that they can be a decent thing to have within your boarders, assuming you will control enough planets to justify the use of the Logistic Slots.

Actually, that would be me... I'm much more interested in the non-combat aspects of strategy games than I am in the "war".

Quite a few "non-combat" victories are possible, even within the scope of the game's "everybody hates everybody else" setting.

These are a couple of ideas for technological victories, one for each group. They kind of suck, but oh well.

Advent: Through the player's industrious efforts, the Will of Unity is finally made manifest. The Vasari colony ships and TEC factories at last fall silent, as the minds of your enemies are overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the fully-awakened force. The few who must the will to fight on are quickly defeated by those who were allies, or eventually snap under the constant psychic pressure.

Vasari: You need not run anymore. The Empire's struggle is finally at an end. Thanks to increased study on the workings of Phase-Space, you have discover the means to send entire colonies into lanes, and to stay there. It will not be an easy life, but you will adjust, just as you did to a migratory life. In time, you might build a new Dark Fleet, one larger than before, if it strikes your fancy. Should your enemies manage to survive against the enemy that one pursued you, perhaps they may yet find a place in your society, as they did in the past. Of course, after the long war they most likely will not be as "valued" as they once were...

TEC: With balance finally established in what was once a tumultuous economy, there is little doubt as to your victory. The war may not be finished yet, but already the enemies' citizens eagerly devour the goods produced on your worlds. With new, more defense-oriented, factories already in construction, it is only a matter of time before the enemy cannot sustain their attacks. You will, at least, win through attrition. After all, it will not be long before you control not just the flow of credits, but the flow of food, toys, and multimedia. Some of your enemies are already realizing this, as the occasional "new discoveries" into nanotech and the mind demonstrate.


I agree that there pretty much cannot be a cheery "galaxy peace" ending, but there it isn't that hard to figure out possible "peaceful" solutions.

The whole concept is absurd if you think about it. If they want to conquer a planet you throw nuclear bombs on it like salt on the ice... Genocide as standard solution should be strangely enough, but the point is the Seraphim are enslaving humans to do their dirty work. So what does the TEC to fight for humanity? Right they are bombing billions of HUMAN slaves to dust. Brilliant idea! And against the Advent? "What the population has fallen under an foreign religion? Nuclear fire!" Thats even worse than the medival catholic church...
In Star Trek Armada the planets had a civil population and a soldier population which was 1/10th of the civil one. As they dropped at the same rate under bombardment you could actually overtake the planet with about 90% of its population.
For my part i renamed the "population" to "soldiers". That way it isn't that ridiculous

I think I read a post some time back of a guy who won a game without shooting anyone. I'll try and find the thread.

Here found it.
Advent Culture

WTF double post.

You bought an RTS, not a 4X game. If you were hoping for something with the depth of a 4X game you have my sympathies, I made the same mistake.

I could imagine a campaign ending peacefully if we're dealing with the same race, but when it's any of the three races against any other race, I don't really see a peaceful way out when you read the manual and watch the intro. Well, the Advent and the Vasari MIGHT find a peaceful solution.

The Advent hate the TEC for what they did in the past and want to exact their revenge on them either by annihilating the TEC or assimilating them to the Unity.

The Vasari are running from a bigger threat, and due to not being able to establish any real economy and infastructure, their only way is to take what they need by force and move on. Doubt they care much about neither the TEC or the Advent, they just need to bugger out before the big bad evil catches up.

On one hand, the TEC are caught up with their sins from the past haunting them, and on the other, the Vasari laying waste to their worlds as they go.

They aren't talking about what the game IS, just what they want it to be. Who says that the 4X aspects can't be improved on/modified in the future?

I'm a 4X gamer myself, and bought it because all the reviews I read implied that Sins a 4X game in real time. It really does have most of the 'basic' aspects of a 4X game, just not all of the traditional ones.

BTW, I haven't played an rts since Command HQ because I found I didn't like even the well-reviewed ones. I was lured back by Sins promise, and I find that I do like it. I just think it could be better by adding some more depth.

As far as peaceful victory, why not? One of my favorite adages is 'If all you have is a Hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail'. In other words, if all you know is how to kill, then all your enemies start to look like future corpses. Who says that there isn't another way?

Hell, it's happening today, right now -- I'm not saying it's good or bad, but enemies get bribed to not fight, or to betray their country of whatever. Like that quote from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" -- "If he'd just pay me what he's spending to make me stop robbing him, I'd stop robbing him.".

Why do people keep saying that? This is not a RTS, or a 4X, its a RT4X. Its an entirely new concept, and at this stage really more of an experiment than a full fledged game in my opinion.

Why do people keep trying to claim it's an entirely new concept and a new genre when it's just a run of the mill RTS? Seriously, this kind of nonsense is what prompted me to waste money on the thing, so I'm here to tell any potential buyers that no, this is NOT a 4X game in any sense. It is a combination of Supreme Commander and Homeworld with a couple of elements from Rise of Nations thrown in (and the hero system from Warcraft 3), it's a pure RTS in every sense. It really ticks me off that so much of the press about this game misrepresents it so badly.