What does it mean to win in an empire-builder 4X game such as Almanach? More broadly speaking, when is the game over and, as a game designer, how do you determine when that should happen, and under which conditions? While the early game of 4X games tends to be exciting and brimming with possibility, and the mid-game sees the player starting to realize their goals (or struggle to do so, bringing a great tension).. what about the end of the game? In many cases, empire-builder games fail to deliver a satisfying end to an otherwise great ensemble. In essence, the Ambition system (where an Ambition is here defined as a player-picked objective for their game) is our take on how we can improve victory conditions in 4X single- and multi-player games.
Let’s start with going around a couple tropes of the genre by examining specific examples.
In Civilization, the game ends whenever a player completes any of the enabled victory conditions, which goes from establishing cultural to diplomatic to military supremacy over the world. Playing against AI opponents, the player has a wide range of choices available to them. However, it often ends up being pretty clear around the mid-game whether the player has any chance to win (e.g. when some other factions are far ahead of the player) or whether the player has any chance to lose (when the player outperforms all opposition). Both of these situations tend to sap the fun out of the game. Why bother playing on when victory or defeat is all but certain?
Furthermore, in multiplayer settings many of the victory conditions become moot : should you have a scientific advantage in a game, other players about to lose will build nuclear weapons and blast you to oblivion. Most multiplayer games of civilization end through military domination, sapping the game of the variety it in principle offers.
Another interesting example are the various 4X games made by Amplitude studios (Endless Legends, Endless Space 1-2, Humankind, etc.) that implement victory conditions that are very similar to those in Civilization. Any player completing one ends the game for everyone else. These games tend to have an economic and technological progression that is prone to snowballing, exacerbating the feeling of powerlessness a player can feel when behind. I recall my first game of Endless Space 2 where I randomly got a message late in a game informing me a faction I had never met was expected to win the game within 10 turns. 5 turns later, the game was over and a disgruntled me moved on to something else.
In both of these cases, the fact that only a single player can ‘win’ and the game-ending nature of said victory often make ending games anticlimactic. They also make any emergent cooperation between players temporary at best, since any player that is headed for victory will see their allies turn against them if they have any hope of winning themselves.
We are not the first to come to this realization and to try to tackle this. An excellent example would be the game Stellaris which innovated by having a series of dramatic crises happen to spice up the mid and end game : various situations can happen that need to be addressed by all players together to prevent the game from ending in defeat for everyone. This creates a very interesting story arc and a moment of mostly forced cooperation between players. While this system works very well, it tends to work very well in only a single way, all games thus following a very similar dramatic arc. Worse: it can even shape the whole diplomatic and strategic landscape for players, as it can often become more important to prepare for the crisis than to strive for other player fantasies.
Finally, another inspiration for us was the Crusader Kings series, and how the asymmetric nature of the game creates great opportunities for interesting player stories to emerge. Not every faction starts equal and the power discrepancies can be huge. This leads to a wide range of experiences even if you have the same goal for two games. Pillaging the city of Venice plays completely differently if you’re at the head of a Norwegian viking clan or the leader of the Ottoman empire. Many experienced players will simply look at the list of achievements, pick one and try to achieve it in a game, making this their own personal victory condition.
Thinking about all of this brought us to define a number of goals we want to achieve with Ambitions, which are the following.
1- Winning should be non-exclusive
We want a player that completes their stated Ambitions to not (in most cases) prevent another player from doing so. For example, if my goal as a player is to explore the world and uncover its secrets, why should I care if another player’s goal is to build the greatest city of all time? Those goals are essentially orthogonal: one of us succeeding in no way prevents the success of the other (unless for some reason that great city is in the way of reaching some part of the map, maybe!) If a third player seeks to exterminate all others and rule over a scourged land, odds are we will disagree and I may feel inclined to do something about it. The key factor here is that ambitions need not inherently be competitive.
Making winning non-exclusive is a simple statement that has deep repercussions. It means that a system outside of a player’s direct control will need to end the game. In Almanach, we designed this outside system as a cycle of repeating cataclysms that ‘reset’ the world every game. The player takes the control of a faction for the entirety of a cycle and must achieve whatever ambitions they take on before the end of the cycle comes and wipes everything. The question becomes : What can you manage to do in the time that you have?
This setup will hopefully allow us to grant players more opportunities to cooperate and meaningfully help each other. We want pacifist playstyles and factions to be able to coexist and thrive in both a singleplayer and multiplayer setting.
Another significant change that comes from making victory non exclusive is that the game will go on even if you achieve all you’ve set out to do, leaving the player in a limbo. On the other hand, the game will also not wait for you if you fall behind, so that succeeding at the goals you set out for yourself may become unrealistic. This brings us to a second goal of ours :
2- Ambitions should be adjustable over the course of a game
Since the players have no control over the length of the game, we want them to be able to adapt to how things are going : games where victory is assured often become boring, whereas feeling powerless in the face of overwhelming odds is no fun either. Thus, players should be offered the opportunity to redeem a game going badly or to take on even more ambitious objectives when things are going well.
Let’s start with an example of things going badly. Say that as a player, I have a respectable number of cities, a stable economy and a clear path toward my goal of erecting wonders to the everlasting glory of my people. Then comes another player intent on conquering everything that falls under his gaze. 20 turns later, large parts of my kingdom are in ruins and my game feels lost. This is the kind of situation where we want to offer the player an alternative to their initial ambition.
In this example, the player would be offered the choice to delay or abandon their initial ambition and to take on another. This new ambition could come with a military bonus against the specific faction that wrecked their plans and give them a new goal to keep them invested in the game. Intriguingly, this will also have the side effect of making the game of the invading faction more interesting, throwing them a surprising curveball to take into account on their path toward world domination.
On the other side of the spectrum, players that are doing great should also feel like there are things they can undertake that will challenge them. We are planning to allow players to take on multiple ambitions at once, splitting their attention and their resources. For example, a player that is charting the world might stumble on a mysterious flight of gigantic stairs spiraling underground and be offered the ambition to find out what lies at the bottom. Some ambitions will also offer extra steps to players completing them. An example of this would be a player encountering a great sea serpent, a creature of myth, would be offered the ambition to hunt it down. Doing so could let said player pick a follow-up ambition to locate and hunt other beasts of legend that roam the land. Completing this second ambition would cement the player’s faction as a nation of dauntless hunters and explorers, which brings us to our third goal.
3- Ambitions should help define each faction’s identity
Each faction can be defined by a set of traits that represents their identity. We want these traits to be dynamic and to gradually change over time as a faction completes (or fails to complete) ambitions from one game to the next. If we go back to the previous example of a faction abandoning their ambition in order to start a vendetta, their hatred of the invading faction could become a lasting part of their identity. For subsequent games, that faction would be more efficient when fighting their favored enemy, possibly whilst also being unable to diplomatically negotiate with them.
Faction traits are also meant as a way to determine which ambitions a faction will be offered when starting a game or when encountering special events or features in the midst of a game. A faction of renowned explorers might feel wonder at encountering a dragon but no compulsion at testing their mettle against the mighty beast. A militaristic faction that sees itself as boasting the greatest warriors of the world could however deem such a creature a worthy foe to prove their worth.
As such, Ambitions then become a way for players to create their own stories within the game, even with the same faction. For a given player, a vampiric oligarchy might evolve to be a brutal land where the strong thrive and prey on the weak; for another, that same vampiric society might take advantage of the lifespan of their subjects to create artworks to surpass any others. In that sense, Ambitions even become a vessel for players to customize their faction over the course of one or more games.
This idea that we want all factions’ identities to evolve over games as they undertake various ambitious quests is just one way in which
4- Ambitions should tie into the legacy system
The legacy system is meant as a bridge between your past, present and your future games. In simple words, if you achieve something great through an Ambition (or otherwise, but that is not the topic of this article), that thing should not be forgotten as soon as the game finishes: it should be felt across multiple games. If a player discovers the sealed Gates to Hel and proceeds to open them to receive the assistance of Daemons… it will also unleash upon the world fiendish creatures and a creeping hellscape. Subsequent games will see terrifying creatures roaming the blighted land that now surrounds the Gates to Hel up until a brave (or foolish) player undertakes the daunting task of sealing Hel back.
If some of you have played the excellent Fall from Heaven II mod for the game Civilization 4, you might remember a very similar moment when the various factions had engaged in a predefined number of evil acts, as Hyborem and a faction of demons would appear in the world and cause hell itself to start spreading and corrupting the world. This event was extremely cool to see happen as the demons it brought would often turn the game on its head, creating a crisis akin to those found in Stellaris’ endgame. However, the fact that it happened when the sum of ‘evil’ player actions crossed an arbitrary threshold meant that no player action or moment felt climatic. The event itself was insanely cool, but it mostly felt like no single player really had any control over its outcome over the game.
Our final goal with Ambitions is to guide players into being the instigators of such world changing events, and really be in control of the Legacy they leave into their world, game after game. The most significant changes that happen to the world will be a result of a player’s actions in completing one of their selected Ambitions. As such, not only will your faction be molded by the choices you make and the quests you undertake, but we also want the world to respond to them and remind you of them. If an Ambition led you to plant the Tree of Life in one game, further games might have the option of protecting its growth… or despoil it. From one player to the next, each world will have its own history, its own quirks, its own legends.
That is about all we had to say about Ambitions today! Hope you made it all the way down here, and if you did, please consider supporting us by joining our newsletter below, wishlisting Almanach on Steam, or even joining our community Discord, where we post smaller but much more frequent updates! Make sure to let us know what you think of our ideas for the late game, and we will see you all next time!