The "Diplomatic Planets" win condition has been running for the past couple of months and the first couple of games have come to a conclusion. Overall, the feedback has been good and this has been a very good step to creating a clear cut win condition which is achievable. In games where there are strong players with weak, the games end quickly as you would expect and some of these games where an even match is developing will rage on for a long while yet. With the planets based win conditions we expect to see very few (if any) games end by vote rather than by achieving the win condition. Which is a much better and cleaner way to end a game.
There has been a great discussion started by
rbos about some games ending just a little bit too soon when large alliances are involved and we see very few cases where players are going for Total Victory and trying to win it all on their own. To resolve these issues the win conditions are going to be slightly tweaked so that alliances need more planets to win and individuals can win with less.
The new numbers will apply to games in progress which have the planet based win condition and are as follows:
Winner is individual with 40% of planets or alliance with 40% + 10% for each alliance member. This means in a standard 500 planet game the following goals must be achieved:
1 player total victory : 200 planets
2 player alliance : 250 planets
3 player alliance : 300 planets
Remember, players who achieve Total Victory receive the bonus achievement of: 5 x # of planets they own instead of 4 x # of planets for the top alliance member and 3 x # of planets for secondary alliance members.