Was playing a game last night with a couple of friends and finally managed to finish a multiplayer game, only to discover that we could not all win together through conquest. This was pretty annoying. Has anyone else experimented with other victory types to see if they work in an alliance? For instance everyone building wonders spread across multiple civilizations, or an expansion victory that incorporates everyone in an alliance.



The other big problem I have with multiplayer is the lack of teams. We three really want to play the game as essentially a 3 on 3 match, but since the AI will never work together the best we can do is 3 on 1 on 1 on 1. It would be much more fun if we could actually set teams at the start of the game. I guess there is really no way around this. We can play at increased difficulty levels to try and offset the obvious benefits of us working together, but it is not quite the same.



Here is a picture of the diplomacy screen after all the AI were conquered. It really looks to me like that should be a victory!

Well as much as I'm sure it would be nice for them to put it in the game, since you 3 are the only ones playing, and because winning only gives a you a victory pop up, I'm pretty sure you could all just agree that you won and its pretty much a win.

And that is exactly what we did. It's just sort of...awkward. In a turn based game like this it's not hard to see a victory coming as many as 20-30 turns away. You kind of run into that situation where without a real goal to pursue, why bother continuing? You have taken half of all your opponent's planets and they are blockaded in their own sections of the map, so might as well just stop and make a new game or call it a day and go do something else. It's not a game breaking problem and it wont stop us from playing, but it feels so strange to just get up and walk away (so to speak) because there is no trigger for an allied victory. We were just left sitting there burning through turns after everyone else was dead trying to see if something would finally click and say "Oh my bad, you won! Sorry for the delay!"

Well it's not as if the game is the high point of your day. It's pretty much outsmarting your opponent. After you beat the AIs I bet it would've been waaay more fun to try and beat each other. I would say ES games are like bridge hands - you do the best with what you are given in the beginning, in the middle of the hand you almost know what's going to happen and then you just wait for the next hand.

The devs have said that there can only be one winner, alliances do not change that. I agree with Tony, after you build up and clean out the aliens try to race each other to one of the other victory conditions if you don't want to fight.

Kareal wrote:
The devs have said that there can only be one winner, alliances do not change that. I agree with Tony, after you build up and clean out the aliens try to race each other to one of the other victory conditions if you don't want to fight.

That could be fun for a bit, and I will bring the idea up. I mostly wanted to see locked teams so I could force the AI to cooperate against us. Ah well, thanks for the replies.

I'm pretty sure the diplomatic victory is aqquired by doing stuff to increase reputation with other empires i.e. gifting, helping with battles.

And, as has been said, only one can win.