I encountered a problem. I have not yet played the Cult of the Eternal End myself, but they have been in every of my two games.

But I need not experience, the see there is a problem with that faction. Since the cultitst have only one city, it is impossible for them to win an expansion or a supremecy victory. Play a game on a two player map, pick the cult as your enemy and deactivate all the victory types except for expansion and supremecy and there you got it. You broke the game, since the cutlitsts cannot win.



I thought a little about this. How about they do not raze a conquered city, but rather create a pupet, when conquering it? I am picuting Venice in Civilation 5 BNW. These pupet cities, can now be razed, but other than that are AI controlled. The player gets only the flat Tile bonus and the region itself. You cannot build in the cities and the AI will move the citizens arround. Mainly to create Dust, Science or Influnce for the Empire.



Gives them the ability to win a supremecy victory. But they still cannot win an expansion Victory.

Here comes the second idea I had: Once every minor faction in a province is appeased, this province belongs to the cultists. The only way for the AI to get it, is to exterminate all villages and founding a city within the region. Instead of the pupet city, cultists could also siege a city during war. But not fighting it, but converting it.



It would give the cultists this feel, to be a power that can drown an empire. A faith that can take you, by conversion, crusade, without hope. Not really an empire, but influnce that can bring the eternal end to all of aurigas children.

Actually, they are built for supremacy >.> It's their favored victory type.

Supremacy = Being the last person with a standing capital city.

In short, capital-sniping.

It's also possible to win elimination, wonder, and diplomatic victory on stock Cultists.



Cellulose Mutation + Endless Excavation + The Cultist Affinity (Tier 3 Districts) lends custom cultists viability when going after a science victory.

And Entrepreneurs (+1 Dust per population) in combination with the Cult being population based, Businessmen (+%Dust) and possibly Conversion + Mercenary Market makes an economic victory viable, though probably far from optimal.



Expansion victory just doesn't come with the territory of having only one city!



Another note is that, in general, the AI isn't really build to handle piloting the cult---Not yet at least!

The point I orginally had, was that you can trick the game to loose. By only allowing expansion. This way, you might even win on endless difficulty without much of an efford. Just keep them at peace as far as possible, play as nekrophage for a lot of units or broken lords for quick heals.

It should be somehow possible for every faction to win every type of victory...in theory

No, no, no. Expansion victory is just controlling x percent of settled regions. When the Cultists take a city it is automatically razed, making that region unsettled. So if the Cultists conquer every single region, they will control a high enough percent of the settled regions to win an Expansion victory.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
No, no, no. Expansion victory is just controlling x percent of settled regions. When the Cultists take a city it is automatically razed, making that region unsettled. So if the Cultists conquer every single region, they will control a high enough percent of the settled regions to win an Expansion victory.

Even if this was true (pretty sure it isn't) they will never control more than 50% of the settled regions as long as one other empire is in play. Even if the threshold was below 50% the other remaining Empire could claim this victory as well.



EDIT : Just confirmed in the XML:

($Count(./ClassEmpire/ClassCity,!CityStatusRazed) / $(NumberOfLandRegions)) ge $Property(ExpansionThreshold)

Translated to











I believe it's easy to mod/change this so that the Cultists could win if they had converted villages in 80% of the regions. Not sure if Nos/Amplitude ever considered this.

I think that the idea that every faction needs to be capable of every victory condition is poppycock. Sorry, but that limits yourself to a very narrow toolkit.



This is analogous to complaining that broken lords have an unfair advantage over other factions if you disabled all victory conditions besides economic. Or complaining how the Civ V Shoshone deity exploit (you can win a 1 turn victory on any difficulty in civ V by playing with a faction that has larger borders on founding a city) speaks to the fundamental game balance and needs to be addressed. The game is balanced for default settings and victory conditions. If you tweak game settings to favor/hinder one faction over the other, then of course it won't be balanced. The fact that you have this choice should be seen as empowering. Of course you won't play cultists and turn off every victory condition except expansion. Complaining that you can't is asinine.

there should be teh change, that allow you to pick at least 2 victory conditions.

Marking converted Provinces as "Conquered" including borders, VCs et all, maybe even traderoutes, does have it's merits, It basically solves most of their Problems.

However pineappledan has a good point there, some factions are more akin to certain victory conditions, the game is balanced for all VC turned on, changing the VC is already influencing the balance as it is, especially if you limit them to one. In any game a peacefull faction will have a hard time winning a "Kill the enemy"-Victory. There are always exploits you can use against the AI to make your game easier. A human opponent would not accept a game like that, you'd maybe fool a noob with it but where would be the fun in that? It's not like you get any E-Points for it