Right now, I'm hearing more votes for graphs off, than graphs on, so I'm going with graphs off (at least for the moment). As posters have noted, there is a dependency w/ victory conditions, so I could imagine changing this if we end up going w/ VPs.
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Teraswaerto said:
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I prefer games without victory conditions since they end naturally, and you can't use the mechanics to win before you've actually beat all your enemies. A player may lose practically all their provinces to raids and still come back, just as someone may attack 50 provinces in one turn with Cloud Trapeze or some such and not be in a position to win if there are no victory conditions.
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I agree with this, and overall this is my intent regarding how this game should be won. I would suggest then that the primary way of ascertaining victory is simply by consensus of the players still alive.
However, as you have stated this map is in fact huge, and I think this means that the end game could become rather tedious and painful for those that stick it out. In general I suspect that barring raiding tricks, the outcome of most Dom3 games becomes inevitable once one player controls 40%+ of the resources (maybe gem income [including item hoards] is more important than # of provinces? The value (imo), then of either using VPs or province totals is that they can serve to estimate who will become the inevitable winner, and save time in playing out a tedious endgame.
In any case, I think that if we set a victory condition of 70% control of provinces, this would at least give an "out" to a dominant player, playing against someone too stubborn to concede. Now, I would say the value of 70% is in fact tremendously conservative, most especially on this huge map. I would hope that if I am the victorious player, I can win with never having to manage a 200+ province empire.
Also, while I do believe that we want to avoid the raid type of victory that happened in
this game, I just don't see myself losing sleep over a raid involving cloud trapeze into 50 provinces.
So, at this point I see myself leaning towards a game that I would hope will end by consensus, but that still has some kind of province count condition in it (maybe 50%?). But, in my admittedly limited experience on seeing these games go through to completion, I'm flexible on setting the number.
To put it more pedantically, 70% is very, very safe that no one will "steal" a victory, but at the same time holds little value in enforcing victory against a stubborn player(s). While perhaps 40% still holds some risk of the stolen victory, it has more value of forcing the question.