I did a google search about victory conditions and game goals in strategy games, but it returns mostly strategy guides, design strategies and mmo games. I also read up on mmo strategies, but it seems most of them have no victory conditions - just endless curve of power.


Let's day there's a browser based strategy game where player controls a squad of units (possibly 10-25). Units have different classes (builder, scout, soldier, engineer) and can gather experience to unlock additional skills allowing them to extend their capabilities (faster building, producing more advanced items) and perform tasks outside their class (for example a soldier with repair abilities). Each unit will have a daily quota of action points to use (maybe replenishing one point every hour or so). The players will fight for control over terrain and resources so they can achieve an endgame goal(s), and after that winners are remembered forever and ever and the game resets.

So far I've found two types of goals:

1. World dominance
This would require players to join one of three or more factions, and the faction that controls more than n% of the game world wins the game. What is good here is that it encourages socializing and cooperation (you can share information and resources with your faction). It also makes for a simple goal - you just need to attack the enemy factions. On the other hand there may be a problem with choosing the faction (player may want to join a more powerful side rather than a beat-down one, there was a topic about it here) and more complicated victory conditions can require more complicated strategies and diplomacy to achieve.

2. Achieving a costly economic goal like building a special structure.
The possibility to build a structure can open up after a certain amount of time has passed (like in Travian) or after reaching a power cap (in a strategy game Red Dragon you could build an Apocalypse Palace when controlling enough terrain) or the sheer cost can ensure you won't be building it from the start. I personally like this goal more (still requires an alliance to achieve, but puts a lot more strain on endgame - you're not the only guys trying to win). It's also possible that not only military superiority is needed, but also a strong economy. Although it does separate more casual gamers from hardcore - in 'world dominance' scenario everyone contributes to victory, so everyone can take credit for winning, while here it's the winning alliance and everyone else can try harder next time.

What other goals can there be/have you encountered?
Is there a resource that discusses this matter (or a similar one?)

Eliminating a specific NPC or PVP opponent would be a sub-victory, and possibly those victories could be counted to gain either faction rank or pvp winnerboard rank, then reaching the top rank for either of those could be considered an overall victory for one player.

What about a victory point system?

The game ends when a player reach X points. He is the winner. Other players are ranked, which is good because everybody 'gets something'. An interesting aspect is that the game will be self-balanced because everybody tries to put down the player that leads the score. The more victory points you have, the more difficult it becomes.

Victory points can be earned by defeating opponent, creating certain structures, exploring the world, helping an NPC, gathering X resources, etc... This open the door to many different play styles and a feeling of freedom because everybody can choose is own objectives.

Thanks for the replies - I didn't really consider the point system. However this will need some clever way of explaining why the player with most kills/lots of resources wins (creating structures can be explained easily). Anyway this can be done or I'll take it to the Writing forums.

Will there be any time limit or will the game continue until someone reaches the desired objective/score?

Well, you got seasonal PvP in MMOs. While not content-wise similar to your idea, it's principly the same thing. You start off at a given date and do your best to rank among the top people. Then, at the end of the season, one players remains at the top and he's essentially the World Champion of the season. Then it resets.

So I don't really see how these things couldn't be done, but you'd have to playtest it thoroughly for base fun mechanics and exploitability though, but I guess that's a given with any game feature anyways.

Thanks for the replies - I didn't really consider the point system. However this will need some clever way of explaining why the player with most kills/lots of resources wins (creating structures can be explained easily). Anyway this can be done or I'll take it to the Writing forums.

Maybe make it an in-game thing, e.g. they live in a feudal society, the person who takes control of x/y landmarks or has the most troops at the end of the in-game year is the ruler of the area.

Try the following game - Clash of Kingdoms. The game allows groups of players to achieve total server dominance over other teams, when that happens the game is over.

You can probably create a "history" for each server restart, show casing hour-by-hour or turn-by-turn changes in the game world. It will be quite interesting to see what is happening throughout the history before each server reset.

Try the following game - Clash of Kingdoms. The game allows groups of players to achieve total server dominance over other teams, when that happens the game is over.

You can probably create a "history" for each server restart, show casing hour-by-hour or turn-by-turn changes in the game world. It will be quite interesting to see what is happening throughout the history before each server reset.

Just one thought based on that... it would be quite cool if when that happens the server gets reset *to a point in the future* where the buildings etc the players made were gone or turned into ruins, plants were relocated or bigger or chopped down, etc. And the past winners could be figures of mythology in the new run. Perhaps old battlefields could have skeletons or ghosts or whatever of the vanquished.