Victory Conditions

Blue? Green? Red? Refuse? It's time to talk about rules for a new community edition of the VBAM rules!
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Tyrel Lohr
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Victory Conditions

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

With the focus of Galaxies pivoting towards the 4x "start from scratch" style scenarios, what kind of victory conditions do people think are good to make available or have defined in the rules?

I think my favorite set of victory conditions were from the old computer games Stars! (yes, the title has a ! in it). Here is a screenshot I just pulled from that game:

Image

In that game, you had these seven different victory conditions that you could turn on and off, with a requirement that a player had to meet X of them to win. And you could specify a minimum number of years (turns) that had to pass before victory could be declared.

Looking at these victory conditions:

Owns X% of all planets. This translates into VBAM pretty well. This would be owning a % of systems on the map. It doesn't work for floating maps, but that isn't really a concern. It would also be made a static value, like 10 x # of players.

Attains Tech X in Y fields. Stars! had (IIRC) 8 different fields of technology, ranging from 0 to 26 in each. VBAM doesn't have anything like that, so if this was a victory condition it would have to be a Tech Year target.

Exceeds a score of X. VBAM doesn't have a score system, but this would be something like Census.

Exceeds second player score by X%. This is basically a runaway winner test. If you're twice as strong as the next opponent, then you're probably cruising to victory anyway.

Has a production capacity of X thousand. This would be your total system output, definitely.

Owns X capital ships. In Stars!, ships over a certain combat point value were classed as capital ships. You could therefore make owning a certain number of them a victory condition. For VBAM, I'd say this would say a battleship would be battlecruiser (CB) or larger.

Has the highest score after X years. This is a time victory. If you have the highest "score" after the deadline, you have fulfilled the victory condition.

Now, I could see something like this applied to VBAM as the basic set of victory conditions, and then the players can choose which victory conditions apply and how many of them have to be met to win the game.

Anyone else have any good ideas or suggestions for victory conditions in the base game?
[i]"Touch not the pylons, for they are the messengers!"[/i]
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Tyrel Lohr
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Re: Victory Conditions

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

This topic came and went with no response. I'll take that to mean "we really don't play to victory conditions," which makes sense. I just play for the thrill of exploration and to see what happens; I never worry about fulfilling victory conditions.

I'll take the notes from here and just put them in the Galaxies doc then and call it good. :|
[i]"Touch not the pylons, for they are the messengers!"[/i]
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