Concepts of Creation: Ironhawk Suddenly Wins!

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I suppose Xox has some point although I think Ironhawk managed to easily exceed any plausible VP threshold. I haven't counted exactly but you would have needed a 60-65% threshold to prevent this, of course, if things were that tight he might not have launched the attack. Expecting a player to control more than 40% of the game map before winning is too high, but, apparently, 40% of VP provinces does not correlate to 40% of the map. I assumed when I was laying out the game that VP provinces would be heavily defended and not likely to be at risk from a raid.

What really happened is Ironhawk looked closely at the victory conditions and realized he could satisfy them and no one else did this, either because they were too busy with warfighting to build the necessary raiding parties, or because they lacked resources or magic to build the necessary raiding parties, or because they just didn't see it. Simultaneously no one defended their VP provinces! If just one of the two 3-VP provinces, and a couple of 2-VPs, or both of the 3-VPs, had been castled, the attack would have been thwarted. Yet no one castled these extremely valuable provinces!

I suppose to some degree that was also my fault as the original war between Caelum and Oceania, back on, like, turn 4, was touched off due to a battle over building a castle on one of those 3-VP provinces. The other one - Pangaea's IIRC - wasn't contested and could have easily been castled. For shame.

I intentionally created a handful of multi-VP provinces to encourage combat. Which it did. I would never have attacked Oceania so early in the game over a 1-VP province. And he might not have come out of the water to get it. However this also made it possible for Ironhawk to win by raid.

Of course, one problem in dom3 is that castles cost a king's ransom. No one WANTS to build a castle on a VP province unless it's also a good economic province. I know the southeastern 3VP province was in crappy terrain. I don't remember about the northwestern one.

Cumulative VPs prevent this particular problem, but introduce their own issues.

When I laid out the game I specifically avoided making capitals VP provinces thinking capitals were valuable enough, and not requiring a potential winner to fight a zillion capital sieges would make the game more interesting.

There's also perhaps something of a "tragedy of the commons" going on. It might be possible for some players to realize the world's VPs are underdefended, but no one really wants to sound the alarm because they will be wanting to attack those VPs later.

So, in summary, I only partly agree with Xox. The victory conditions weren't perfect, although I think the flaw is with the nature and geography of the VPs rather than the number of them. However, the actions of the players are really what made this possible. No one defended their VP provinces, and one of the game's economically and magically strongest nations was left in peace to build a force capable of launching this attack.

I'll leave the server up for a day or two with turn generation off.