Victory conditions...wtf?!

I would like multiple victory conditions. It would help that slippery slope mentality, where if you lose your cap early, or have an inferior economy, you can still compete, as well as give the player more options, which should be a maxim for a game this size.

But seriously, what are the victory conditions? I can't tell.

There needs to be a decisive point, not just 'kill all their shit' because that's just busy work. The game is over but I still have to jump around killing units. Please take the 'busy work' out of this game. It's annoying.

Destroying all enemy planets is the victory condition. If you didn't win, that means you didn't get them all It is possible they recolonized them after you bombed them and left them empty. You don't need to destroy every single unit, just the colonies.

Actually, if they have a colony frig they stay in the game, I know this because I had an ally who lost all his planets but had a colony frig, and even though I left him a few empty planets (including one he had a bunch of structures he owned orbiting), he wouldn't colonize anything with them and therefore was useless.

Yep I can attest to that too, I've had allies lose all their planets before but as long as you have a unit that can colonize things you stay in the game.

I am glad that, unlike Civ 4, there is no option for a race to continue if all of its colonies are destroyed. It would be even more tedious if you had to chase down every last little scout, especially if you had a human player microing that scout to prolong the game.

I'm not sure what you mean. The ships don't disappear, but if you destroy all the AI's colonies you'll get the defeated message and its portrait will change to broken glass and at that point nothing that was left over will do anything. If he had a fleet flying around you can engage it and the basic combat ship AI will still get them to shoot you back, but they won't retreat or anything.

So, the player *is* defeated when all the colonies are destroyed, regardless of whether or not he has colony frigates left, but the remaining ships/structures don't magically poof into thin air.

Now, if the defeated AI can still do anything after you own 100% of the map and you're not getting a victory, then something is wrong..

I once scuttled all my planets and stayed in the game fine as long as I had colony frigates. This was SP though.

i agree that losing takes a long time...and is almost impossible to turn around in most cases. ive been reduced to 10pc of the map in other rts games...and still turned it around into a victory! id like to see that in this game

In team games, its not over untill its over. Just because your not doing so good doesn't mean that your allies aren't. Generaly I'll refer to the one guy getting ganged up on as the "Decoy." I don't think that comebacks are impossible in Sins, its more of just that the games take so long there is no huge push where you blow the enemy back across the map and send him crawling to his corner of the map; like in Company of Heroes. Comebacks are just going to be slower as you slowly begin getting the counter to the enemies fleet and killing ships quicker than you lose them.

No, at least in single player, an AI with a colony frig will stay in the game (as of 1.02) even if they have lost all their planets.

Are the teams locked?

If they are not locked... kill your friend, he may be the last obstacle between you and total victory.

Welcome to the war.

I'm just saying it would be nice to be able to set victory conditions besides "lol wtf blow up all their shit!!!"

Like, losing home planet = defeat. That'd be a nice option. Or losing your fleet = defeat. Something to tinker with besides just having to phase jump around trying to kill their planets- it's goofy.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Adding victory conditions would mean that not every MP game is as open-ended.

Some things that show up in other 4X game as win conditions:

-Galactic Conquest.
-Specific score.
-Highest score after a specified amount of turns/time.
-Exceeding the next best score in x,y, and/or z by a certain percentage.
-First to research a specified number of techs.
-Keeping the galaxy at peace for a specified number of years.
-Victory conditions can't take effect until a certain amount of turns/time has passed.

Also, varying victory conditions would create a variety of different strategies and style of play. Things such as exceeding in certain techs verses colonizing the enemy homeworld would create widely different strategies. Finding and protecting enough worlds to host as many research stations would be vastly different than amassing a fleet to assault/defend a single homeworld (you know when it came to *that* fight, it would be a total meat grinder).

Plus, you should be able to mix and match conditions that are compatible. You have to achieve a certain score *and* have x-amount of techs to win--obviously, if you commit to wholesale genocide that should be enough to always win.

And, of course, you should always have the option of no victory conditions.

I would suggest to the devs that they play Twilight Imperium the boardgame. Although I'm sure most of them have, since the similarities are striking. The victory conditions/missions/etc in that game could be a great source of inspiration.

i was playing sins and i was doing fine had a massive fleet and like a bazilion planets and a big chunk of the map in my culture then all of a sudden i got the message "  DIPLOMATIC DEFEAT " ive been looking through the manual but i cant find a list of victory conditions can somebody help me out???

cause that one pissed me off something aweful id been on that one game for like 4 hours

Diplomatic Victory is a little bit arbitrary.  You can disable it in the game options.

Basically how it works is that for every "friendly" faction you gain diplomacy points, and for every "hostile" faction you lose diplomacy points.  The more people like you, the more points you get, and the more a specific faction hates you, the more points you lose.  So if you just make peace with everyone and maintain that for long enough, you'll win.  You can see everyone's diplomacy score, and how close they are to winning, in the diplomatic screen.

Personally, I find this victory so easy to achieve that you'll almost never have a military victory while this setting is enabled.  However, it can be disabled, as I already mentioned.  Playing with locked teams is another way to do this.

 

Also, you can create your own threads rather than reviving a two-year-old discussion that predates this feature...

I just want to clarify that it does NOT take forever to play Sins in online multiplayer.  How is that?  Because unlike a single player game where you might play against 9 AIs and have to knock out each one, in multiplayer you will probably play locked team games where you have on ally for every opponent, meaning that you only have to kill one opponent yourself.  Also, when the players on the losing team see the writing on the wall, they almost always say "good games" and then quit or surrender, and the game ends when each of them have quit, allowing you to avoid having to suffer through a boring mop-up job.  So, your average 5v5 only lasts about 1.5 hours.

This is like Battlestar galactica, you have 1 ship left searching for a suitable planet.