I usually use sandbox games as test sessions for my meta games, so no they don't often get finished. Playing mostly meta though, you kind of have to finish them to get your just rewards .

Oddly, this game was originally advertised as having a substantially shorter cleanup phase than other similar titles. Unfortunately, that was never born out in the actual game.

It's funny. The game has 4 ways of winning, but only 2 of them are basically the same. An influence victory almost always requires military dominance unless you're on a very tiny map.



While it would be nice if there was a way to short-circuit the cleanup phase of the game, a simple majority isn't the way to do it. I've taken out civilizations that dwarfed my planet and population count.

Further, this game is already terrible at estimating the effectiveness of your military (I can take out someone with only 1/3rd to 1/2 their military rating). I'd hate to see it try to have some overall civilization effectiveness that actually determines victory.



As someone who plays primarily on medium-sized maps, the problem there is that the game is either pot-luck or just like Large+ map sizes. What I mean is this.

In order for any civilization to have a reasonable chance, you need a base number of tiles. Which means you need to have enough planets near you that you can reasonably colonize before others. I'd estimate that number to be 70-100 tiles. You also need at least one planet that can support large populations reasonably, as a money planet.

If you are playing with relatively few habitable worlds, on a Medium-sized map, whether you get this minimum level is sheer luck. Any civilization that doesn't reach this minimum level basically has lost. So if you're playing 5 civilizations and few worlds, then you're looking at maybe 2 of them are reasonably viable.

If you increase the number of planets so that a medium-sized map can support 5 civilizations, then you're basically playing on a large map except with less space, so speed and range aren't as important.

Is there any way to change difficulty levels during a game? I have a really good game going right now, but I should have played on a harder setting.

I think there was a suggestion to give the dominant civ a diplo penalty making it more likley the smaller civs will band together and fight the leading civ, this I think would make the end game more interesting because clean up would become more difficult. I also think there should be an added diplo hit for completly destroying another civ,(this usually happens with minor civs since major ones will defect to another civ before being destroyed), this would make the player think twice about being overly aggresive because this would draw the ire of the remaining civs.I thik Brad liked the idea when someone posted it originally so we'll see if he adds this idea to the final version of TA.