The four objectives, their exact thresholds, and how each one changes your play · Operator: Chenyjunny
한국어 (Korean) · All guides & articles
You choose an objective at the same time as your scenario and difficulty, and it changes the whole shape of the match. Two of the objectives reward taking territory, one rewards taking it quickly, and one lets you win without out-conquering anybody at all. Picking the right one is a real strategic choice, not a difficulty setting.
▶ Play nowWhatever you picked, two things always end the match immediately:
There is also a safety limit far out in the game so a hopelessly deadlocked match on a huge map cannot run forever; if it is ever reached, the largest power wins on territory.
The classic objective, and the default. There is no score condition and no clock: you win by being the last power alive. On a nation scenario this can take a very long time, because you have to physically reach and finish every rival, including ones on other continents that you would otherwise happily ignore.
Play it when you want the full map-painting campaign and do not mind a long match. Watch out for the late game: opponents you have driven down to two or three provinces still have to be chased down, and if they are across water each landing costs you part of the attacking force.
This is total conquest with the endless tail cut off. You never have to hunt down the last stragglers — you just have to build the biggest single bloc. In practice it rewards a compact, connected empire over a scattered one, because half the map is a lot of territory to defend while you are still taking more.
Play it when you want a decisive conquest game that ends at a sensible length. Watch out for the administrative penalty on size — around the point where you are approaching the threshold, each new province is giving you noticeably less than your first ones did. See the economy guide.
This is the shortest and, in some ways, the sharpest objective. Nothing you build after the clock runs out matters, which inverts the usual advice: long-term investments have to pay back inside thirty turns or they are wasted. Fortifying a border is often still worth it, because a province you keep is a province that counts at turn 30 — but raising an era, which pays out slowly, usually is not.
Play it when you want a game you can finish in one sitting, or when you want to practise opening play specifically. Watch out for over-fighting: a war you start on turn 26 will not have resolved by turn 30, and the troops you spent on it would have taken two neutral provinces instead.
This is the objective for players who do not want military strength to be the only answer. You win by building, not by conquering, and because the check ignores territory entirely, a small well-run nation can beat a sprawling military one to the finish.
It is deliberately paced so that the biggest economy cannot simply buy the win in the opening. On this objective only, each era has an earliest turn it can be entered: era 2 is locked until turn 18, and era 3 until turn 40. So the race is genuinely a mid-to-late game race, and being rich on turn 12 does not end it.
Eras are worth having even when you are not playing this objective, because each level gives you +1 defence in every province you own and +4 gold income per turn. The defence is flat across your whole realm, which favours the defender, and the income is per-nation rather than per-province, which means it helps a small nation proportionally far more than a large one.
Play it when you want a builder's game or you are boxed in by a much larger neighbour and need a way to win that is not "out-fight them". Watch out for the AI doing the same thing — the era race is open to everyone, and an AI sitting quietly behind a defended border may be closer to winning than the one attacking you.
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