Victory Conditions

I am not a fan of victory points at all, but then again I am a fan of simple.

I am working on a war game & it is miss or kill, no points or partial damage. Balancing it is fun.
I guess mine is exterminate style. It is designed and meant to be played quickly. So if 3-4 are playing, and 1 gets knocked out, it would be probably about 5-10 minutes of waiting before a new game is started. In my game the play field is constantly changing as well in a simple way.

War games in general, to me, have become bloated and overly complicated; but are also designed to constantly suck money from players, and I am going in the opposite direction.

What if victory points are spendable instead? Or better yet, you don't have victory points. But you choose a victory reward instead.

When players conquer 1 territory, they can get a simple reward for doing so. eg. 1 round, extra production.
But if they choose a harder one, that has to be met within 1 or several rounds. Like 2 territories, the reward will be much better. A tank, that is rarely build. Or a card that allows you to plan the next attack and attain extra damage. etc.

The rewards should certainly be temporary, so that a snowball effect will less likely occur. Lets just say, that the reward should roughly accommodate half for the losses that the winning player has made. And it should be something special. I think that finding the balance in this, is very tricky.

I used shifting alliances and winning factions to let players group for a mutual win with 2/3 of total territory held to minimize player elimination in my The Singularity Trap game.

Does not apply with 2-3 players but allowed 2 player factions in a 4-5 player game and 3 player factions in 6 player games, with a player or faction declaring itself when it held 25 of 37 planets and then needing to keep at least 25 for 2 full turns for a win.

I can only speak from a Wargamng standpoint. The key to this is detailed Scenarios with plenty of explanation of the overall picture the troops in the game are part of.

For Example, I had a 1/285th 1:1 US ACR I used in my Fulda Gap campaign. It was the "speed bump." in that context. Sitting on the "Iron Curtain" as a trip wire in case of a surprise attack by WarPac. My ACR was a screen against a numerically superior force. It was the only unit on the table, but the scenario was in conjunction with a larger story. I was to hold for as long as possible and hand the battle over to the 3rd Armored division. They were deployed near Frankfurt and were racing to their pre-planed defensive positions forward. So, my conditions for victory were determined by that overall situation. As long as my force maintained enough power and cohesion to be a obstacle the Commies could not simply bypass, I was winning. When elements of the Third US made contact with me I was to pass through their defensive line the scenario ended. Victory was linking up with 3rd Div. Defeat was 3rd AD seeing Soviet elements at the Rendezvous point instead of whatever was left of my ACR.

Victory Points have their place in wargames. For instance it can give you the option of different routes, which masks your objectives and plans somewhat from the opponent. If there are many objectives on the map, and many ways to combine them to make a win, it becomes less linear with the attackers just always having to take the same route to the same objective. I think the Standard Combat Series games tend to do this well for instance, that usually have various small and large victory point locations scattered across the map. There might be on big one (like Amiens in Operation Michael) that gives you enough victory points to win almost by itself, and then many lower points locations that you can combine to win, so if the defenders just put everything into defending Amiens the attacker will just grab a lot of small locations instead and win anyway. That is historic and good for making games more interesting, and it avoids having to spell out complex victory conditions. You just look at the map and sum the points at game end and then one side wins.

I dislike having to count points for various tiny things like killing enemy units etc. I can see the point though, for instance if you want to discourage players from sacrificing units, so for some themes I think it is appropriate. The American side in a Vietnam War tactical game should probably be forced to conserve their units and not waste them in a last-turn offensive to their objectives for instance. But in general I think it is too tedious to have to do that kind of thing, even if players throwing away units in futile end-game attacks is annoying.