At around what year do you usually end a serious game?

[Hapchazzard]

Just curious as to when other people usually end their games, and their reasons for doing so. I usually find myself ending at around 2450, unless a crisis/awoken empire is still at large. My main reasons for ending are:

1) I've de facto won - even if everyone else united in a federation against me, they'd probably lose. Since there is practically no such thing as internal unrest in the current version, there's almost no chance that I'll ever have to deal with a serious revolt that would threaten my integrity, so I'm left without either external or internal threats. Hopefully 1.5 and it's faction changes will make it actually hard to properly keep a large, galactic-spanning empire from collapsing in on itself.

2) There's no more new technologies left to research - pretty self explanatory.

 

[Slarkon]

around the same. i have dreams of having a game thats difficult enough to reach the 3000's but nothing yet. Once game i consoled in unbidden and protheon as soon as the war in heaven started for a true cluster **** but i got bored after 2600 because of glitches ect

 

[Endless Rain]

Usually whenever I've conquered every other empire in the galaxy, including Fallen/Awakened Empires, Pre-Ftl planets and spacefaring aliens such as the Leviathans and Enclaves. (Basically anything that would show up in the communications tab in Observe mode.) Because I prefer to play on smaller galaxy sizes, this usually takes me until around the 2450s.

 

[Cannes]

Same for me, except I play in 2000 star galaxies, 2450'ies is usually end of the line. At that point I dominate the galaxy completely.

 

[gathomas88]

Usually somewhere around the 2400s or so. Not only is the game pretty much over by that point (crisises should really come in consecutive waves to keep things interesting longer, IMO, like in CK2), but the lag makes it more of a pain to play than it's worth anyway.

Given that I like to play on large maps, this basically means that I've never actually "won" a game, even though I've won on a de facto basis numerous times.

The lag has gotten better with 1.4, thankfully - the late game's just slow, not unplayable - but it's still obnoxious. It's also weirdly selective. The main interface doesn't lag too badly, but the game basically outright freezes whenever I select a science ship. I have no idea why.

 

[Oscot]

When all the following have happened:

• Crisis defeated
• Researched all non-repeatable techs
• Am top dog

I too live in hope of eventually seeing a CK2-style "You can be big or you can be stable but not both" faction system in 1.5 to make playing all the way to 4,000AD still be fresh, a cycle of galactic rise and fall that sees you driven back to a one-colony remnant.

Or even something that legitimately makes you become a Fallen Empire. Gradually diminishing industrial and energy capacity due to population decadance, making the outer colonies non economically viable to maintain?
A super-crisis of extragalactic powers who smack everyone down to their original homeworld?
A Halo's Flood style crisis which obliges you to basically purge all life from the galaxy, except a tiny colony of sleepers on the extreme galactic rim, who wake up in 100,000AD to find the stars the same but the polities completly different?
Your remaining enemies / dissidents invent time travel in the year 4,000, and send a hyper-tech fleet back to your year 2,500 to roflstomp you?

ONE DAY

 

[KopiG]

I am playing on hard ironman nowadays and my last 2 campaigns were pretty much over by 2340. Had around 500k+ fleet power, more than half of the galaxy on both campaigns. Crisis did not happen yet in either campaigns but seriously, but my 500k+ fleet would crush any crisis in a second.
My problem with impossible difficulty as it has been mentioned before in another thread that the AI bonuses are too significant at the start of the game and pretty much impossible to keep up with the AI unless you can luck out a few defensive pacts while you are expanding.