How does enlightenment work now in regard to all the recent changes? It's a feature I have pretty much not played with at all since many many versions ago.
Same as always. It's super useful, actually, if you can get it working between two economically-focused towns. Then you have these strongholds that simply can't be torn down.
Incidentally... somehow this never crossed my mind before... once we took out the score stuff, enlightenment became a "you automatically win" condition because those TCs can't be destroyed. That's still the case when the score requirement is turned off.
Wait, isnt this a bad thing though? As I understand it, in a non-score-gated game, once you hit enlightenment.... the game is basically over, you've won, and the remaining turns become pointless. Even in a score-gated game you could then take actions without much risk, spamming units and tokens everywhere for points.
That's how it seems to me at least, based on my understanding of it. Though I've not messed with this mechanic at all.
Yes, that is basically an accurate summation. And I do agree that's bad. However:
1. I view the non-score-gated games as being a bit of a sandbox mode at this point. To SOME extent.
2. Enlightenment is hard to reach. Really REALLY hard. So if you can pull it off, you probably deserve the victory. Even there, how well you win is a challenge. Reasons diplomacy is hard:
- Diplomats are expensive, and have to walk through the war zone to do their work.
- When diplomats die in general, or buildings die in that town, enlightenment drops.
- For every embassy on the map, the bandit spawn rate goes up by 1x the number of embassies. And you need a minimum of two embassies to do diplomacy at all. That's a 3x bandit spawn rate right there.
- You can only have one diplomat per embassy, so if you want to hurry the process along you're going to be flooded with bandits.
3. Yay, you reached enlightenment! Let's say. Woes can still affect the towns in question, even destroying them.
So while I agree the "you 'automatically' win with enlightenment" thing is less than ideal, I am not too fussed about it in the short term because I think it's super hard to do on any difficulty of substance. So I don't think it's too exploitable, and in my opinion really is almost like an alternate victory condition. A really, really hard one. If someone figures out how to exploit it, then obviously changes will be made. But I've not had anyone do that yet, not even remotely.
