Is it just me or are the victory conditions for Civ3 really weird?
I have an overall problem with them and specific problems with a couple. First, the specific things about each.
Spaceship
Okay, this one actually works. You can monitor your own progress, the AI’s progress, you only trigger it deliberately. But I don’t like the fact that you can’t delay the launch—once you finish the last part you trigger the end game sequence whether you want it or not (which is at the heart of my real problem with the victory conditions: lack of choice). That’s bad but I can live with it, just means I have to time the completion of that last part.
Domination
This one works fine but the problem is that I can’t find any way to measure my progress and the AI’s progress against the 66% of the landmass threshold. And that’s a problem mainly because I could (and did) trigger this one even if I intended to accomplish another win. I can live with it, but its an oversight that shouldn’t have happened.
Conquest
As far as I can tell, this one only works if you turn off the domination victory because you’ll trigger a domination victory before you ever conquer everyone. Something they forgot to tell us and since you can’t refuse the domination victory you have to turn domination victory off at the start to be able to have the option for a conquest. It seems to me that these two conditions should be “choose one but not both” at game setup time.
Diplomatic
The diplomatic (UN) victory condition isn't, in my opinion, viable. There' s nothing in the game or docs that I can find that provides guidance to the player about it--an explanation of when the vote occurs, how voting takes place or how to influence/predict the outcome. I have no idea what its purpose is except to annoy me
. In the game I tried to use it I found that if I triggered the vote, I would lose the game even tho' I was near a dominance victory and a culture victory. There were 5 other small civs still in the game, everyone's friendly and 4 of 5 are "in awe" of me. My score is 3 times the next guy in order. But if I trigger the vote, 4 of the 5 will vote for the guy in second place so I lose. Maybe I missed something but it's a mystery to me how I could get their votes. I'd thought it would work something like SMAC with numbers of votes based on score or something similar but that's not it. This feels like it got tacked on at the end without any real thought or playtest.
Culture
This one looks like it works fine--defined parameters and a way to measure progress. Personally, I’ve not actually finished a game with a culture victory but I don’t see any major problems with it.
Histograph
As the “all other” default, I guess this one would work fine although I’ve not had a game end this way. At least I can monitor everyone’s progress so I know how well I’m doing.
The Real Problem 
Yes, I did say “Lack of choice”? Yep, there are six of them, but for various reasons I don’t feel like I control when and how I win. I can’t delay the spaceship win. I can’t bypass the domination win to play for a conquest win (or any other win for that matter). I haven’t a clue how to actually win with the diplomatic approach. I could prematurely trigger a culture win while actually playing for something else.
Then there’s the disappointing fact that when you do win with anything except the spaceship you get a simple dialog box – no video sequence at all.
Anyway – anyone else feel like this is (another) area of the game that didn’t get thought out very well?
