September 18th, 2016, 01:22
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While reading about Civ6, the idea that war becomes less and less likely to be the way conflict is resolved as the civilizations advance (which sounds like marketing speak for "we barely improved the AI") spurred this thought.
How do you realistically "win" in the real world?
1) Domination:
Um, no. This idea is ludicrous. Let's look at Chechnya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Ukraine, Northern Ireland.... just no, no one is happily occupying China or the US even if the entire world dedicated all their resources to military. Also Rome and Mongolia and a few other civs have already won this way, and Italy and Mongolia aren't exactly super powers today. After the game ended they completely collapsed due to reality. The only way this works is extremely liberal use of genocide which I suppose leads us to...
2) Conquest:
If you slaughter roughly 7 billion people and replace them with your own colonies this could work, but the ramifications are rather large.
3) Space:
This isn't a victory so much as just fleeing earth. And we all saw what a disaster SMAC was (philosophically speaking, obviously the game was like top 10 of all time.)
4) Cultural(/religious):
The US has perhaps won via culture. I think you need complete saturation for this to work though, the entire globe needs to be your own culture to dramatically cut down on cultural/religious conflicts.
5) Diplomatic:
I suppose this is the Star Trek answer. If you can unify the earth peacefully, that's a pretty Utopian win.
September 25th, 2016, 20:08
(This post was last modified: September 25th, 2016, 20:09 by NobleHelium.)
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I believe the canon Star Trek answer now is that the Vulcans came and gave humans tech to satisfy everyone's needs which brought about utopia on Earth.
September 25th, 2016, 21:38
Bobchillingworth
Unregistered
Domination actually makes sense when you take into account revolt mechanics. A large city may spend several turns in revolt, and even in the extremely late game each turn represents no less than a year. It's not beyond the bounds of reason to expect that any large city could be controlled after having its infrastructure pulverized, thousands or even millions of its inhabitants killed (remember that all cities lose a pop point after being captured, and these points come to represent increasingly large values of people), its military defenses wiped out, and any resistance crushed over the course of a decade. Military conquest in Civ IV is pretty rough, if you scrape through the abstractions!
I seem to recall either the Civ III or vanilla Civ IV manual describing a cultural victory as possessing a nation so vibrant that the rulers of all other nations voluntarily abdicate their power in order to emigrate. By this standard, it's probably the most preposterous win condition of all, even compared with everyone voluntarily electing a single nation to rule the world as a political hegemon.
September 26th, 2016, 09:33
(This post was last modified: September 26th, 2016, 09:33 by antisocialmunky.)
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China already won but the player keeps pressing "Just One More Turn..."
You also forgot Time Victory.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
September 26th, 2016, 18:06
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(September 26th, 2016, 09:33)antisocialmunky Wrote: You also forgot Time Victory.
Pretty weird if the world ends in 2050.
It was Sid's fault!
"We are open to all opinions as long as they are the same as ours."
September 27th, 2016, 23:52
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In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
September 28th, 2016, 09:14
(This post was last modified: September 28th, 2016, 09:17 by Epoxy.)
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Interesting idea, to consider how Civ's victory conditions could be transposed to actual history. I think of victory in Civ's sense meaning the nation has the ability to exactly and reliably determine global events independent of anyone else (ignoring the space and time victories). This encompasses the nation having a global coercive monopoly, to becoming everyone's metropole, to being able to dictate the norms of other cultures for assimilation.
Military victory: the only decisive military technology for exercising global effect (fission bombs, and later, hydrogen bombs) only existed in a monopoly capability (held by the United States) for a brief time—not enough time for that monopoly to be accumulated and exercised in such a blanket way (whether by warring or by threat). Once more than one nation had a nuclear weapon there was no clear superior power. So that disqualifies that form of victory for the foreseeable future.
Victory by our everyday world would mean that the future has already been written. Victory is supposed to be the end after all.
September 28th, 2016, 09:26
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I think the most realistic (as in, most likely to happen) 'victory' condition might be the one exemplified by The Pinkest Dot - OCC Conquest. That's the end result of slightly-ineffective Mutually Assured Destruction - 'we may only have one city/bunker left, but we successfully wiped out The Enemy!'.
Failing that (or, uh, succeeding at avoiding that), I'd plug for Diplo. It really is the utopian answer, because (particularly given the relative populations of the world's nations) you can't do it without the support of others...
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What about historical victories? 
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