Victory Points

[Chicago Ted]

I hear you on the Civilization 5 thing. I once tried to disable all the victory conditions, but when I launched the game it still forced the Conquest (kill-everyone) victory condition. It made all the AIs extremely hostile and warlike. Sadness.

Also, one game in early pre-alpha development of note: http://projectzomboid.com/blog/
In Project Zomboid, the goal is your death. There's no avoiding it. All you can do is see how long you can postpone the inevitable; how you spend your final days in a zombie apocalypse.

This. Game. Is. Awesome.

Seriously, thanks for posting it up here. Been playing it for a while now and am loving it. Am annoyed by the bugs though in it but I'm tempted to buy the alpha version now and keep up with it. Seriously though, annoying bug is what caused me to quit the demo. When your wife called you upstairs while making soup, I was sure to turn the oven off, then went back up to listen, came back down to finish cooking, and the moment I turned the oven on, everything caught on fire. I wasn't too happy about that.

Aside from that though, I can see a future version of this being great fun. I actually got really engaged by it, something a lot of other games have failed to do for me recently.

 

[Vulpis]

Now this is an article I found very interested in...and agree witha great deal.

Dastardly made a good point about tabletop RPGs not having this problem--this is due to them having the singular advantage of the players and GM as a group choosing what sort of 'victory condition' they want, and letting it shape how things play, instead of a computer game that gets railroaded into a set of fixed conditions chosen by the programmer.

Someone else mentioned a 'No victory' mode. Personally, I'd rather see a slight variant on that--rather than no victory conditions at all, keep the conditions in (especially in games like Civ, where the AI apparently picks a condition to work for, and runs a strategy based on meeting that condition), but edit it so that the part of the code that checks if any of these conditions have actually been *met* is bypassed. I wonder if Civ5 could be hacked that way, actually--that way you could have one AI working for a cultural victory, another working towards technology, and what have you, instead of the 'Everyone gets hostile toward everyone else' that results from having nothing but the 'default' last-survivor victory.

 

[MammothBlade]

Great and insightful article, I agree mostly. "Official" victory goals don't have to matter if you don't want them to, especially with sandbox-level player freedom. However, playing to win and playing for fun can be the same thing.

I've been exactly where you are, my admiration for the Civilization series being in the ability to simulate a nation itself, not in the numerically valued, competitive aspect of it. I always worried myself more over creating a nation I would like to live in as opposed to a nation that would win the game. Some components of the game were in juxtaposition to my own personal goal.

I find Civilisation isn't a very good nation sim, really. I have too much of an eye for detail to be satisfied with the nation-building aspect. Rather, the strategy is what keeps me interested. It's a stimulating challenge to play on each successive difficulty.