Design: Victory Conditions in Civilization

Today – and every Friday for the foreseeable future – I’m going to talk a little bit about game design. Specifically, I’m going to talk about what I see as flaws in the design of various games.

Why? Because starting on Sunday I’m going to be designing and developing a game I’ve been thinking about for a long while, and this is a good way to start putting down things on paper. And I enjoy it, so maybe you will, as well.

My first critique goes out to one of the greatest game series of all time – Sid Meier’s Civilization. It’s one of the pillars of the 4X turn-based strategy genre, and a large majority of the games in said genre borrow many design aspects from Civilization.

This one would be far, far too long for a single post, so I’m going to split it up. Probably into three segments, maybe into more. For now, though, we’re just going to discuss one thing: victory conditions.

Victory Conditions in Civilization

For those of you who have never played or heard of Civilization, it’s a game in which you, as the name might suggest, build a civilization. You start with a single city and attempt to build a civilization to ‘stand the test of time,’ as the game will inform you right at the beginning.

But, really, as in all games, what you usually want to do is attempt to win, and to enjoy yourself along the way. This isn’t, after all, an experiential game – it’s one in which your primary goal is to beat your opponents to the ultimate prize.

So, how do you do that?

Well, you (generally) need more cities. You (generally) need to defend those cities. And you (definitely) need to research new technologies so you can build more stuff.

But that’s not really how you win. Victory in Civilization is, instead, predicated entirely on an optimal strategy of min/maxing your civilization towards a single goal.

What’s Min/Maxing?

Min/maxing is an attempt to absolutely maximize one aspect of something while reducing all others to the bare minimum necessary to support that singular aspect.

Say, for instance, you’re an avid gamer. You do only the bare necessities to keep yourself alive – you sleep only as much as you have to, eat rarely, and hardly ever move from your computer. You probably drink a lot of coffee. You probably look and act like a vampire when exposed to the sun. You may even have installed a toilet in your computer chair.

After you’ve achieved all of that, one could say you have min/maxed for spending the greatest possible time in front of your computer, playing games. It’s not pretty, and Civilization’s victory conditions are crafted in such a way as to ensure that it is the only viable strategy at high levels of play.

Why Civilization Encourages Min/Maxing

So, how does Civilization achieve this?

Well, you can only win one way. You pick a victory condition and your game is now all-or-nothing – you either achieve the condition or you do not win.

For instance, the science victory. To achieve victory via this method, you have to build and launch a spaceship before any other player wins the game. Generally speaking, this means you have to be ahead of the curve on science and have to be able to produce spaceship parts pretty quickly at the end of the game.

Do you need a military to do this? Not really. Do you need culture or money to do this? Nope. Do you need a lot of cities? Nope. Does anything other than science or production really help you achieve this victory? Not even a little bit.

Every other victory condition is like this, as well. While there are reasons to produce other things, they ultimately all lead back to producing more of what you need to achieve your chosen victory condition, which can be achieved in one and only one way.

What’s Wrong With That?

A lot of people are probably sitting here, reading this, going ‘so what?’ ‘Why is this a bad thing?’

Well, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, at least in my opinion, Civilization is about crafting a civilization in the way you choose and the victor should be chosen by the civilization that is most well-crafted. Simply min/maxing for a specific output – be it science, culture, or military production – doesn’t generally lead to anything resembling a well-crafted civilization, but rather something like a giant machine designed to fill buckets faster than other, similarly-designed machines.

For me, it destroys the connection between attempting to build a real, balanced civilization – the reason the game is enjoyable outside of simply attempting to beat the other players – and attempting to achieve victory in the game.

Solutions

What can be done about it, then?

Well, Civilization itself does a good job of showcasing two possibilities.

Victory via points in Civilization rewards the player that has produced the most ‘points,’ which can be earned in a wide number of ways, from researching technologies to having people to founding religions and building wonders. It is the ‘default’ victory condition in that, when time in the game runs out, the victor is decided by point total

Similarly, the diplomatic victory method in Civilization V can be achieved in a myriad of ways. To achieve the victory you essentially need to convince a large number of minor states to support you as the world’s leader. Befriending said states and earning their votes can be achieved in many ways, including gifting them money or units, bullying them, and partaking in tasks that they give to you.

Civilization’s point system is an example of what I would call a ‘hybrid’ victory condition – you can achieve it through scoring opportunities in many areas, everyone scores in the same way, and it generally encourages balance instead of min/maxing, as the opportunity cost of min/maxing usually decreases overall point totals.

The diplomatic victory is a similar sort of victory, except the points are not scored in a directly hybrid manner. Instead, you gain the stepping stones of points in a hybrid manner but points themselves are one step removed from the manner in which you attempt to gain them. This method of point totaling is usually more open to the problem of min/maxing.

Exclusive/Hybrid Victory Conditions

In my mind, the best possible solution to victory conditions in a 4x strategy game akin to Civilization is the exclusive/hybrid victory condition. Under these sorts of rules, points towards a victory can be gained in a myriad of ways but not every method of achieving points is available to all players.

This solution ensures that min/maxing is not a problem while also preventing complete homogenization of strategies between players, an issue that occurs when everyone has both the same goals and the same methods by which those goals can be achieved.

So, yeah, this is what I'm going to be doing every Friday. Be warned. Or something.