How do people like the current win conditions in AoW4?

[Pantagruel]

There are currently five victory conditions in AoW4 (military, expansion, magic, score, seals). How do people like them? My current thoughts:

Military Victory

This is the default win condition for any 4X -- kill everyone. It's fine, though I wouldn't mind a short-circuit mechanism where the game goes "You're obviously winning, do you want to just claim victory" like a diplomatic victory in MoO (which could be won without any diplomacy, just have twice the population of everyone else put together).

Expansion Victory

This was clearly intended to be the equivalent of a diplomatic victory, but because the moment you start it everyone declares war on you and you're forced to defend three locations at once, in practice if you can achieve an expansion victory you can also just go kill everyone and win the game, and it probably won't even take as long as it would take to achieve expansion victory.

Magic Victory

This was clearly intended to be a research victory, but in practice it's a worse form of the expansion victory, because unlike the expansion victory (where, depending on your city layout, you could just put all your beacons right next to each other), your gold ancient wonders are probably spread all over the map in inconvenient locations, so to do fast reinforcement of where-ever you're being attacked you either need multiple doomstacks, or teleporters and teleportation mastery (and against a human player, probably more than one teleporter or they'll just block you by razing the teleporter).

Score

As far as I can tell, score victory just exists to put a time limit on the game, it's not really something you can treat as a strategy.

Seals

Like the expansion and magic victory, requires you to hold on to multiple separate locations (and for a very long time), but unlike the others, your seals points can't be reset by killing one of your seal camps. In practice, though, the neutral armies you have to deal with for a seals victory are nasty enough that if you can spare the military forces to babysit seals you could just take the same forces and win a military victory.

[fja12856]

I only play with military or military and score turned on. That is the same way I played AOWIII, just military victories.

[Midas]

Military Victory: The only victory I prefer, unless there's a scenario-specific victory besides that.

Expansion Victory: Expansion victory is just the worst parts of score and military victory put together.

Magic Victory: Not as good as Planetfall's research victory. I don't see a reason to 'build' for this. Either you go for it straight away and win prematurely, or you don't go for it at all, and the opportunity cost is too high to switch to it in the late game.

Score: Score is just a tie-breaker if none of the better win conditions trigger in time. Winning by score victory just feels like a technicality.

Seals: Haven't tried it enough to have a strong opinion, but personally I loathe all the win conditions that involve an arbitrary stack that has nothing to do with the map or the rulers on it suddenly popping up out of nowhere to give artificial difficulty to the scenario. Seal victory feels like it needed this least of all, since the AI actually goes for the seals early and could be competing with you for score. Could have been a strong contender for favorite or second favorite if not for that.

[PlutonArioch]

Military Victory: The only one I play with. Sure, it can become tedious towards the end. On the other hand, at least it actually feels like you have won when you do it.

Expansion Victory: In the previous game (Planetfall), there was a "Domination" Victory, which made some sense, as you would win by owning a percentage of all habitable provinces on a planet. This seems somewhat equivalent of MoO's diplomatic victory you mentioned.
I hated it, especially in empire mode where I could not disable it, because it would always trigger too early, and I had to stop expanding before I felt like the game was concluded. This is almost the same again, but now you have to build and defend some arbitrary beacons on top of it... I do like that it is no longer automatically triggered, so you can just choose not to do it, if you want the game to go on for longer, but it still does not make sense to me to actually do it.

Magic Victory: Has nothing to do with magic. It used to be just like expansion victory, but depended on research instead of land owned. Now it just feels arbitrary. Planetfalls doomsday victory, at least was related to your chosen secret tech, and you got benefits from preparing the doomsday weapons even if you did not want to go for that victory, or were still undecided.
I would like something like that here. Some expensive spells you have to cast, and by all means you might have to build some beacons to channel it through, and then the world is affected by the big spell (which would be flavored depending on your tier V tome) for like 15 turns until either your beacons get destroyed or you win.
If it was like that, I might actually play with it.

Score: Its just a time limit. Nothing more to it. I guess its good for if you don't want the game to go on for too long, but also don't want to rush for military victory. Its the opposite of how I like to play 4x games.
I like to take my time, and may even continue playing for the roleplay after I know that I could just crush everyone left and win.

Seals: Have not tried it, but it feels arbitrary yet again. I dislike it on principle. Hold random points on the map against forces that spawn out of nowhere? No thank you. I play a strategy game, which means I want to play against knowable enemies I can learn about and use strategy to fight, with planning, scouting, army movements, faint attacks, ambushes and other traps, and taking out their infrastructure. I don't like just standing in a place and waiting for preset hordes to spawn to fight me.
I also, as I said about the score victory, don't like time limits. And this is effectively that. Albeit a time limit that only ticks down as long as someone else sits on a seal. I prefer to play with the knowledge that as long as no one defeats me, or I until win, the game does not end. To prevent the game from ending before I want it to, I would have to secure all the seals on the map, and prevent others from taking them, especially as the progress does not reset. So in that sense it is even worse than the other conditions where I can just plan a deep strike type invasion to destroy beacons and reset the timer.
In order for me to play with this regularly, it would need to get rid of the spawning armies, and let me set the target points much much higher (or let the progress reset when not holding any seals), as well as give me more control over how many seals there are on the map independent of player count.

[mk11]

I played one expansion victory on a very large map with 8 opponents. 2 of the opponents allied with me after I lit the beacons. Defending against the waves of attacks and the minor annoyances of partisans was far easier than what would have been needed for a military victory

Magic victory I think the spell you cast to win should have more powerful bonuses, possibly increasing the longer it is cast, to balance against the difficulty of holding many dispersed locations.

[TirAsleen]

Originally posted by Pantagruel:

Expansion Victory
This was clearly intended to be the equivalent of a diplomatic victory, but because the moment you start it everyone declares war on you and you're forced to defend three locations at once, in practice if you can achieve an expansion victory you can also just go kill everyone and win the game, and it probably won't even take as long as it would take to achieve expansion victory.

Except for Grexolis. I only used the Expansion Victory in Grexolis on the highest difficulty and high world threat. You wouldn't believe how useful that was to get out of the low FPS trap in the late game and the map was designed in a way that logistics were a nightmare.

There is magic victory, too, but i looked for an opportunity to use expansion victory, magic victory was too easy in the unpatched version of AoW4, and its now rather in a weird place.

Else Military Victory of course, its satisfying to defeat every other ruler just by military might.

[GrandMajora]

I think Magic Victory went from being one of the most common victories, to one of the least common. Needing to capture 3 Golden Wonders seems excessive to me. I have been playing this game since day one, and have never beaten a Golden Wonder without cheats.

Capturing 3 of them in a single playthrough seems nearly impossible to me.

[mk11]

Once you have a team that can take a Golden Wonder it is easy enough to clear all of them in your territory. One hero of about 8-10th level and 5 knights should be enough. The number you need depends upon map size - 5 on a very large 9 player map.

[Pantagruel]

Originally posted by TirAsleen:

Except for Grexolis. I only used the Expansion Victory in Grexolis on the highest difficulty and high world threat. You wouldn't believe how useful that was to get out of the low FPS trap in the late game and the map was designed in a way that logistics were a nightmare.

I killed all enemies on Grexolis. Not sure I ever even qualified for expansion victory, since none of my allies died.

Originally posted by GrandMajora:

I think Magic Victory went from being one of the most common victories, to one of the least common. Needing to capture 3 Golden Wonders seems excessive to me. I have been playing this game since day one, and have never beaten a Golden Wonder without cheats.

Capturing 3 of them in a single playthrough seems nearly impossible to me.

A hero and five tier 3s can generally clear a gold ancient wonder (I think I cleared four on my last game... and then won an expansion victory because there's an achievement for it). However, by the time I did it I also only had two foes, one of whom was mostly broken, so it would not have been hard to just march in and kill them both.

[Alexander]

Military victory.
Never tried it actively. I usually choose the biggest map size and maximum number of opponents, so defeating them all is just tedious.

Expansion victory.
The easiest victory to achieve. Beacons can be placed side by side in the center of your territory, and a single 3 stack army of assorted rally of lieges trash can auto-win all the partisan encounters easily. Other armies just need to keep opponents away for 15 turns which is entirely doable.

Magic victory.
I play against AI, and I'm not sure it is even a viable goal in MP. Against AI, it is just the Expansion victory - extra hard edition. Naturally, I go for it if I can Also: cool Age of [affinity] spell mechanics.
It requires, first and foremost, a very specific way of scouting and expansion. It also depends on map generation: you may not have enough gold ancient wonders around you. Good thing is that the wonders have very distinct silhouettes, so you may estimate your chances on turn one.

Score victory:
Since the score calculation is obscure, there's no way to really plan it, so, yeah, there's no strategy for it. The only time I had the highest score on Brutal difficulty was when I played Perfectionist builders: they have insane economy bonuses in the late game. Still, I won Magic victory that time.

Seals victory:
The most boring victory if you go for it yourself: towards the end of the game random armies become too strong to auto-win, and beating random spawning armies with an army that just stands still turn after turn is not my idea of fun.
However, if you are not planning to go for this victory, then Seals may be a lot of fun. You see, "attack the leader" AI script triggers much earlier and much more often on maps that have Seals, so you can participate in a number of crusades against opponents that have captured too many Seals for their own good. I plan to play Chosen Destroyers on a Seal map one day (targeting military victory, of course).

[Griever]

I agree with pretty much everything Alexander said. I like big maps with many opponents, but it does make finishing military victory tedious, and score victory even more so.

I'm not sure expansion victory can really be called satisfying from an overall gameplay point of view, but I like having it as an option for one reason. Usually at some point while I'm going for a military or score victory, I'll lose interest in that particular map. In any other game I would probably just end up abandoning it and moving on to the next map, but here I can buy out three beacons and light them immediately. One easy fifteen turn defence later and the game is over. Expansion victory, for me, is the emergency exit for a map that's no longer interesting.

Whether magic victory is even a viable option is largely dependant on map gen RNG. I've seen maps that barely even have the required five gold wonders necessary, and I've seen maps where I have five gold wonders in my corner of the map alone, each in their own little pocket cave. It can be the easiest victory ever or nearly impossible. Magic victory did need to be changed from what it was for certain, but I'm not sure the way it is now is much better.

Seals just feel weird to play with. On one hand, it's the only victory condition a computer player can provide a challenge on, and the focus on seal control instead of direct attacks makes for a different sort of game. On the other, the sheer number and power of the spawned stacks is rather obnoxious. I also noticed that, as I approached the end, the computer players all declared war on me and allied each other automatically, despite the fact that two of them were right beside me in seal points. I won with 150 and they had 145 and 143, but everyone focused on me till the end.

[Smugass Braixen-Chan]

Expansion and Magic Victories are just Military Victories with extra steps.

I've beaten two campaigns now. One military victory, one expansion victory.

In the military victory, I was able to declare war on each faction one at a time. And stomp on their Throne City once I beat their army.

-

In the Expansion Victory, not only did it take much longer to reach the point of being able to start the win-condition than a Military Victory; but once I got all three beacons up and lit, everybody other than my ally declared war on me. Even the guy who I had a massive amount of Grievance against declared an unjust war.

When ever I stomped on their army, I had to deliberately hold back to AVOID getting a military victory. So they were all able to throw multiple triple-doom-stacks at me. This is in addition to the triple stacks of trash the game kept spawning on top of the Beacons.

In the end, not only did the Expansion Victory involve more fighting than the Military Victory, it was all back-loaded. Meaning I had to do NUMEROUS Triple-Stack vs. Triple-Stack battles within the last 15 Turns of the game, while barely any battles against other Godirs occurred before then.

I also had 6 Full-Stacks (Tier III, IV, and V) at this point, with enough economic power to just replace any Golden Golems I was losing to Auto-Battles. Meaning a military victory would have been very easy to achieve at this point if I wasn't specifically going for an Expansion Victory.

[~ Fabulous ~]

I always like military victory the most in any 4x games because the other victory type are just too easy.

[GrandMajora]

Originally posted by ~ Fabulous ~:

I always like military victory the most in any 4x games because the other victory type are just too easy.

Military victory is very easy, if you go for a full on rush strategy. If it's still early enough in game, you can take the enemy's capital with just a hero and two armies, instead of multiple heroes and 3 armies.

[Alexander]

Originally posted by GrandMajora:

Originally posted by ~ Fabulous ~:

I always like military victory the most in any 4x games because the other victory type are just too easy.

Military victory is very easy, if you go for a full on rush strategy. If it's still early enough in game, you can take the enemy's capital with just a hero and two armies, instead of multiple heroes and 3 armies.

Depends on the size of the map and on the difficulty.