Alternate ways to lose?

He can win culturally - at least he did with me on saturday.

~SDC~

Excellent, that's one for culture. Do you recall how long he was over the 90% threshold? Was it 'only' 2 years? I sure thought the A.I. had it for longer than that in my game, but maybe I'm mistaken.

i don't think the AI can win culturally in the 90% sense, but it can in the "all your planets defect" sense. AFAIK the only way you can lose is if all your planets are conquered.

i'm not sure why the cultural victory was taken out, but apparently some beta testers didn't like the AI having the option of tech victory, so they took it out.

cheers

h

For a player to win via culture, they have to be at peace with all the other major races for a year and have the necessary cultural domination. Was the AI race at war with you? If so, presumably it would not be able to win via culture, either.

Pyrkaige,
Yep, he certainly was at war with me. That could explain it. Now that you mention it, I seem to remember the not-at-war thing being a requirement also.
Horatio,
But you're saying they took out the 'dominate 90% of the sectors' win for the A.I. completely.
Doesn't this kinda suck? Frogboy has patiently explained to us over and over again that the A.I. plays by the same rules as we do, and that his goal is to have an A.I. that simulates humnan multiplayer--except for the fact that they can't utilize any of the victory conditions but one? Why should they ever pursue culture, or research that doesn't let them build better ships? That's really odd and kind of a let down, if true. How is it not fun to play against an A.I. that might win in a number of ways? Including stealing an 'asymetric' tech victory when it looked completely like you were going to win.
I'm a little bummed if this proves to be true. Is it possible to make this a startup option the same way we set our own victory conditions?

Yikes, if that is true. One of the reasons I am enjoying this title is that I understood that I would be playing against AIs that could win under conditions other than the routine military conquest. If that is not the case, I have to agree with Mr. Lucky in that it makes then for a fairly one-dimensional approach to defending against the AIs. It also puts a burden on the player to always realize that the final outcome is going to be a military victory that the AI pursues, so building a defense is almost mandatory, unless you can race the AIs to a cultural victory before they build too many nasty ships.

Perhaps someone here could challenge this assumption?
-Anxiety

Does it really matter? If an enemy AI has over 90% culture rating, your last few planets WILL defect sooner or later, ensuring a de facto cultural victory for the AI. I've had a game where I was hanging on until one of the other majors starting building up starbases, and all my systems started flipping... falling like dominoes from the outside in.

That counts as a cultural victory for the AI in my book.

Hey, Anx.... You're writing exactly what I'm thinking mate... Scary.

~SDC~

I too would like to see the AI be able to go after alternative win conditions.

To let people choose, along with the possibility we now have a the start up screen to turn win conditions on or off for the humans, let us set them to available or unavailable for the AI as well!

That way, those who get frustrated by the AI winning a sudden tech victory when they had almost conquered the AI can turn it off if they don't want it to happen... but those of us who want the AI to play by the same rules as the human can do so!

/unic

well, I would expect 'evil' AI's to attempt military victory first, and so, on. depends on what galaxy setup you are playing, my guess. granted, I haven't been defeated any other way than military yet (8 completed games, or so, all on 'beginner' ), like in most of my games the Drengin are evil so the first thing they do is declare war on everyone, and then proceed to spank everyone and demand chocolates.

I'm getting different personalities from the different AIs so far, though. the Anceans (sp) seem to be more benevolent so far, like the other day I was doing pretty bad on a medium map, they couldve just steam rolled over my only 2 planets, but instead they went around and started expanding the other way by building starbases... (not sure what would've happened if they'd ran out of space) PERHAPS going for a cultural victory (not sure).

but, I agree though, the 7/8 rule of cultural dominance should apply to the AIs as well. and they should strive for that as well. game over, shouldn't wait for them to conqure all your planets.

i'm sure the folks at SD will at least add the option of AI tech and cultural victories in one of their updates (at least i hope so). there's been quite a few threads on this topic and most people seem disappointed with the "bludgeon only" AI victory conditions.

i think the player and AI victory conditions should be tied together, so that if you choose to have tech victory available, the AI should be able to do it as well.

the corollary to this is that a significant amount of warning would have to be built into the tech victory.

i think the cultural victory is rather secondary, since if you're in a position where the AI has 90%+ influence, you're going to lose anyway.

cheers

h

Yog Sloth, Vridian,
You're right of course of about the culture side of things, but what about tech/diplomacy wins? It seems that the A.I. can't win in those ways either.
Getting off topic: To your point about having 90% culture means you're going to win one way or the other, is 90% to high a threshold? The beauty of a tech or alliance win is you can win in those ways without being dominant militarily. In order to have 90% of the sectors in your culture you really have to have close to 90% of the planets, certainly way more than half, which means you have a dominant tax and production base and you've essentially won by military conquest--you just don't have to finish them off. Wouldn't it be cool if you could win by culture without having the dominant economy, say if the setting was 75% or even 67%? If one current nation had 67% percent of the worlds population thinking it was the greatest, they would pretty much rule the world, no?
Could this percentage also be a startup setting?