Hm, it seems like individual units and buildings actually fall pretty easily.... but as the game goes on, the sheer numbers of each keep going up. The more buildings there are, the harder it is to destroy the other guys completely... but the more UNITS there are, the more of a crowded mess the map gets, and the less building destruction is possible.
Overall then, I do agree with you on that one; it's part of the reason why I love the score gate idea so much. I get that the idea of the game is that if one side gets too strong, they'll start snowballing over the other side, eventually leading to destruction, but this is actually a pretty slow process and so far, not too hard to stop. It's actually pretty easy to bolster the unit count of a given side, as military buildings (and heck, new cities entirely) are pretty easy to make. You can also use mythological units of course, but not really in big numbers.... it's easy to get big numbers of human units to add to a side though. And of course it's not JUST these.... you've got things like the big god powers that can fix things fast. Heimdall's "kill everything" horn for instance can do this.
EDIT: And there's also bandits! Logically bandits should add to the danger, but I find that they tend to instead add to the DISTRACTION: Units fighting bandits are NOT attacking the other side and thus not throwing off the balance at all.
I have to wonder if a different condition other than the "total destruction" one is necessary (and the score gate would be left in place). Because you're right, it seems like it just doesnt quite work that way. Not from my experience so far anyway. I dont have any suggestions on what such a condition might be though.
The score one though is the one that interests me the most anyway.
I agree with a lot of this, and I think you stated well my feelings on why survival is just not a very motivating mechanic.
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AI-War analogy time (I know it's a different game, but it's easy to use as a metaphor). Take AI-War how it is now, but change the victory condition to: Survive for 10 hours.
Is that difficult? No, not in the slightest, and if you were playing as smart as possible, it would be the most boring 10 hours of gaming in your life. The smartest move would be to not leave your system.
Now, you could say "Well, you're playing cheese, actually go out and take systems and then things get a lot more interesting," but that wouldn't really be fixing the problem.
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I think ideally, score and survival would work against each other. Things that drive up score make survival more difficult, and doing things that
only help survival should not contribute much at all to score. I think that's meant to be the general goal.
Survival is trivial as long as you can build faster than the units on the map can destroy. The amount you can build in a turn on average is a bit less than 3, because sometimes you have to plop terrain just to get a new center. For the sake of argument, let's just call it 3.
So to put things in a bit of perspective, to have any risk of destruction to a faction, you need to have one side killing more than 3 buildings on average every turn, and they have to
sustain that rate for along period of time.
Things that get in the way of this happening:
* High health buildings.
* Units getting blocked by 1-unit-per-tile-restrictions (carpet-of-doom, like Civ 5).
* Restrictions to number of attacks per tile (even with multiple attacks, it appears units are forced to 'spread' those attacks instead of being allowed to focus, like arsonists)
* Bandits (huge distraction for units)
* Armies killing each other
* Some woes like vanity (to be fair, some woes will harm towns too, but that's an uncommon factor)
* And last but not least: A player who isn't asleep at the keyboard.
How to fix? I dunno, as I've said before, it's a lot easier to point to things and say "this is unbalanced" than it is to balance and make things fun. This is why Armchair Game Designer is not a valid occupation.
Here is a crazy idea. If the problem can essentially be boiled down to "the units can't do stuff faster than you (the player) can do stuff", maybe the solution is to simply strike at the heart of that. You can do this in two ways (or a combination of both):
1) Give the player less AP per turn.
2) Give the units more "rounds" between turns.
I like (2) better, because having 3 actions just *feels* bettter than only getting say.. 1. Maybe you should balance that out by giving the AI 3 "actions" as well. Basically, the equivalent of running two extra turns before the player can interact again. Each unit basically has 3AP of their own, where each AP represents a whole turn of action. They don't use all AP at once though, they take turns between themselves. You could even have units with special abilities (or ruin effects) that give them a boost to their AP (letting them take more actions in the round).
