quote: when you're in a scenario like WWII, how does the AI scoreboard calculate marginal victories and decisive victories? i don't understand the difference between the two, nor do i understand its system of scoring the total.

Any assistance muchly appreciated.

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As your elected chieftain, I pledge to expand our tribe's power and influence so that we may become rulers of the region, and I, your warlord.

This part is for you. Try Harlen's Mongol Scenario or Jesus's Alba de America scenario. I think you will find them every much as challanging as some of the multiplayer or single player deity games that you are used to. Or are you a MAC player? These are both PC versions.

This is for your friend.

The reason that you are having a difficult time figuring out the different level of victory or defeat is that it is determined by the Scenario designer and not the AI. When the scenario first starts and has reached the point where you have movable units press the scoring key (F9 on a PC) and it will tell you either an objectives based score of Decisive Victory/Defeat, etc or a regular Civ Score using pop, wonders, etc. If you get the objectives type scoring displayed then start either cycling through your cities or just start clicking on the AI cities. Assuming that the graphics have not obscured the city name information you should see something like the following: "Rome(OBJECTIVE, Carthegian City) Demands: Faith, Hope, Happiness" if the city is an objective city. If the city is not an objective city then the word "OBJECTIVE" will be left out of the discription displayed.

Some additional things that you need to know. If you are using either MGE or most like UCC in Australia then the game will not count your objective points correctly for any scenario that was created with FW scenario tools. If you are using FW then all should be well. Some cities may be worth more than one point and will be marked as "OBJECTIVEx3" in the city window if you have captured it. Some scenario designers also make wonders count as objectives. In those cases you must take every precaution not to let the wonder get "Lost". For Objective type scenarios you also need to make sure that you don't destroy an Objective city in the process of taking it from the AI, or as will often be the case, let an unwalled objective city be decimated by the AI killing the last defenders. It is far better to evacuate the city, rehome any defenders as needed, and let the population go down by one point. In most Objective Scenarios the AI will often put the walls back up and quickly boost the pop count. Then you can bribe it back and hopefully keep the walls the second time. Remember, a dead Objective City is gone for good. One held by the AI is available for your recapture.