DOMINATION/LIMITLESS TURN COUNT NEEDED.

[hollow island]

As the title suggests. This game REALLY needs a domination game mode or the ability to stop the game ending prematurely.

Honestly it’s such a deal breaker for me; I had the game set to the slowest possibly transition between ages and, antiquity and exploration, was ok. However, one of the AI must have been cracked in the modern age because the game ended so so quickly.

I’d spent ages, building up my armies and moving them over seas, for a huge assault. Just for the game to then come to an end out of nowhere. It’s so deflating and genuinely I don’t think I’m gunna bother playing again until this is sorted. Players should also be able to directly control age transition in my opinion; once you research future tech you then get 10 turns to progress to the next age or something to that effect.

There is so much to like and enjoy about this game but the fun factor is being killed by games ending before the player is ready or happy for the game to end. What’s the point in me spending a whole day on it, building my civ, just for it to end out or the blue before I’ve achieved my personal goals such as to be the last civ standing? Boring.

[fair laurel]

Playing to an end point where the whole map is your colour certainly satisfies the Bond villain and tech billionaire urge for total world domination. So I agree. I get the sense from the chats, broadcasts and posts in the run up to launch and since, that they plan to add more ages (e.g. Information age) that will stretch the game and allow more progress towards that domination outcome. There are other signs, for example the lack of any modern sprites for aircraft and land units - leaving scope for enrichment in future updates over the next 2 years.

That said, there will have to be some big changes to game features as well. An obvious one: settlement limits cap at something like 22 settlements (that's what I hit in my first game where I had most of the wonders buily and, while it is possible there was a wonder or some other aspect that could have boosted the cap by one or two, I didn't see any of the other leaders with a higher settlement cap so it seems unlikely). If I look at that game, I had 22/22 settlements and there were a further 52 settlements across other leaders. During play I was able to tolerate going above my settlement cap in the Modern Age and teetered on the edge of unrest in a few settlements so I made peace with two leaders and gifted them back two settlements each. [[Two observations on this. First is that I was able to give one of the leaders a settlement founded by the other leader but not vice versa. So there's a minor bug there. Plus it would have been nice to cause Diplo stress between them because each now owned the other's settlement. Second is I didn't see a Civ6-type Diplo amelioration for gifting back a captured city. Quite the opposite, one of the leaders added an additional -15 penalty for an 'Uneven Peace' despite the genoristy by me forced by the settlement limit constraint.]]

I might try playing forward from a late saved game to see how far I can push the capture of settlements before my own settlements plunge into dire unhappiness

[fair laurel]

To make a specific suggestion: knocking another leader out of the game should provide a settlement cap boost of, say, +5 or +10 so the domination show can continue its global tour.

One final piece of feedback - I agree with many other posts that the current victory paths allow the game to end too early. My first playthrough ended at Turn 124 in 1883CE. Crazy. I could probably have ended 15 turns earlier with a Culture Victory because I stopped building Museums and slotting artefacts to slow down the win rate. The challenge then is preventing the other leaders from advancing their own paths to force the counter up to 100 or allow them to complete a path first. The tactic I used for that was to make alliances and pull them all into wars with one another, make peace selectively after 10 turns with the weakest leaders (who I'd left with 4 or 5 towns/cities each in constrained archipelagos or the arctice areas) then watch them all continue to focus on military production and slow attritional wars. Again, shall play forward from a late saved game to see how far I can stretch that out.

[hollow island]

That bug you mentioned is jokes haha. For me, personally, I also don’t like the fact that I don’t seem able to get rid of settlements. For example when I’m offered peace and a settlement, if I accept, and then discover it’s in the 💩 end of nowhere useful, I don’t seem able to then demolish it to improve my settlement count.

I do believe that they’ll increase the number of ages by a minimum of 1. Personally I would like to see them branch even further and go into the future age. It’s something we haven’t seen from Civ yet and I think that would be exciting.

All in all though, whilst there’s a lot to like about this game, I just can’t get over how pointless my games feel when they just end prematurely without me being ready. It’s killed the vibe for me completely and I’ve fiddled with the settings to improve the outcome but the only way to fix the issue seems to be having the game speeds set to marathon and the age length set to long. Which just doesn’t do it for me; I don’t want to have to wait 15 turns to produce my first settler ffs.

So yeah. Until they add domination or something that stops the game just ending, I think I might be done with it for now sadly.

[hollow island]

I like that idea for sure. The game has a lot of promise it just isn’t fleshed out fully I don’t think.

The games definitely end too early. The longest I got was similar to you. I don’t know if it’s a bug or not but my modern age had a progression of 70% and then come the end of that turn the game ended and the modern age had been completed.

I just think the game needs some balancing because right now it’s not been designed for players like myself in mind. I think the current format is great for those seeking to achieve cultural, scientific, economic victory’s etc etc and who like quicker paced games.

But for people like me, who just want to do all of that but achieve world domination in the process; it’s not currently set up with that in mind. Which is a shame. I hope they address this because I’ve been waiting in civ 7 for years and I’d hate to have to go back to civ 6 over something so easily fixable.