Notes are up!

Thanks for an good pod cast. Some interesting ideas on the nature of 4x games.

I thought I might add something on the win conditions which (I think) hasn’t been mentioned all that often: the Civ IV mod Rhye’s and Fall of Civilizations had custom victory conditions for each civilization, inspired by what these cultures had achieved or tried to achieve in history. There is also a modmod with randomisation options where a variant of these conditions is retained.

Now, clearly, those goals are somewhat confined to history-based games. However, abstracting from there, an interesting approach could be to have a series of discrete high level objectives that factions need to pursue and they get awarded victory points for achieving them (first). Maybe sort of like a beefed up version of Risk, so board game inspired. One could add some flavour to make it less gamey, e.g. package it as scholars writing about the deeds of great empires and factions literally wanting to secure their place in the annuals of history/galactic chronicles.

The advantage is that such a system could be very dynamic (if balanced well) and make it feel somewhat more natural to win that some end-game achievement or set of achievement that supposedly ends the game. The disadvantage is it would seem to add a whole meta layer for an AI to cope with in which objectives to pursue. Building an AI that is efficient in building and maintaining and economic engine and waging war is tough enough. Taking into account which objectives – e.g. being the first to circumvent the map, control a star cluster, build a particular (combination of) wonders, destroy/subjugate an enemy faction – is most achievable with its geo-strategic set-up seems super hard.

But, just a thought. To an extent, Humankind’s star single victory point system seem a bit like this, barring in mind how little we know at this point. If so, it would seem like a good opportunity to package stars into something more narrative.