Victory Conditions
Victory Conditions determine how a random campaign on the desktop version of Imperium Sine Fine can actually be won. Chosen when a new game is created, one or more of three conditions can be enabled for that campaign — and every empire on the map, player and AI alike, is checked against whichever conditions are active as the game progresses. The moment any empire fulfils any one of the enabled conditions, the game ends for them — there's no need to satisfy every active condition at once, just the first one anybody actually reaches.
Dominator
Crush all opposition and take control of all settlements.
The oldest, simplest, and most absolute path to victory: eliminate every rival empire entirely, until every settlement on the map answers to you alone. There's no threshold to sustain, no timer to wait out — the moment the last opposing settlement falls, the game ends immediately, right there, mid-cycle if need be.
Dominator is a war of total conquest, and it asks the most of any victory condition on this page. Every settlement matters, right down to the last one — an empire reduced to a single surviving city is still, technically, undefeated, and remains a live threat to anyone who hasn't finished the job.
Head of the Pack
Control three times the population of the 2nd most populous empire.
Where Dominator demands total conquest, Head of the Pack asks for something narrower but harder to fake: overwhelming demographic dominance. Your empire's total population must reach three times that of whichever rival empire currently holds second place — not the total of every other empire combined, just the single largest competitor.
This isn't a snapshot win, though — reaching that threshold once isn't enough. An empire must sustain it for a full 360 cycles (roughly 3 months) before victory is actually declared. If a rival's population catches up even briefly during that window — through conquest, migration, or their own growth outpacing yours — the clock resets, and you'll need to open that gap again and hold it for the full duration once more.
Because this condition is measured in population rather than territory or army strength, it rewards exactly the systems covered in Population Mechanics — high loyalty driving strong growth, efficient assimilation of conquered peoples, and careful migration management, all compound directly towards this goal without a single sword needing to be drawn.
Lord of the Realms
Control 65% of the total world population.
The broadest of the three conditions, measured against the entire world rather than any single rival. Your empire's population must make up 65% of every living soul across every empire on the map combined — a considerably higher bar in absolute terms than Head of the Pack, since it's measured against the sum of all opposition rather than just the nearest competitor.
Like Head of the Pack, this isn't an instant win the moment the threshold is crossed — it must be sustained for 360 cycles before the game actually ends. The same logic applies: fall below 65% at any point during that window, even briefly, and the countdown starts over.
Choosing Victory Conditions
Each condition rewards a genuinely different playstyle, and since more than one can be active in the same campaign, it's worth thinking about which combination suits how you want to play:
- Dominator suits a campaign built around military strength and conquest — the empire that out-fights everyone else, settlement by settlement, until nothing remains to oppose it.
- Head of the Pack suits an empire that out-grows its rivals — strong population growth, high loyalty, and efficient assimilation of conquered peoples can win the game with comparatively little fighting at all, provided one clear rival can be decisively outpaced.
- Lord of the Realms asks for the same demographic dominance as Head of the Pack, but against the whole world rather than a single rival — a genuinely difficult bar in a crowded game with many surviving empires, but one that doesn't require eliminating anyone outright.
With multiple conditions enabled, the game effectively races towards whichever finish line is crossed first — a campaign with all three active might be won by sheer conquest before any population threshold is ever reached, or by an empire quietly out-breeding its rivals while everyone else is still fighting over territory. Because AI empires are checked against the same active conditions too, a campaign is never purely peaceful even with only the population-based conditions enabled — a rival AI empire pursuing the same victory you are will actively work to keep its own numbers competitive, and may go to war specifically to prevent you from reaching a threshold it can see you approaching.
