I almost never finish off games of GC2 (or most strategy games) that I'm winning. There's no fun in beating up on opponents once I know that I can.

I love austinvn's idea of the conquest-style master quest. The idea option of a final massive confrontation to settle the game is exactly what I want to play for. 

Ocie1's 'nothing left to loose' gambits is also pretty appealing. Making the mop-up more unpredictable and potentially challenging is all good. I've been thinking for a while about a sovereign being pushed into a corner and doing something drastic:

- Unleashing a plague that devastates both their own population and their opponents, but would result in a huge diplomatic penalty with every other faction who's people were killed in the plague.

- Casting a spell that turns all of their population into an undead legion. They get an instant army that requires no upkeep but lose _all_ income, trade, growth, research, resource harvesting etc.

A chance of something like that (or a vortex / Deamon being unleashed) might have big empires thinkng twice about picking off the little fish as well.

Just to refine the idea of 'nothing left to loose' gambits -

Making the mop up more interesting and unpredictable is great; however, from a design point of view, the gambit should be a bid by a realm that is getting marginalized to propel itself back into competitiveness or self distruct and thus shortening the mop up. Essentially, these realms would mop themselves up if the gambit fails.

However, the more I ponder, the more I think there are better solutions than 'the ancient powerful unit' approach ala Precursor Ranger.  Flipping a weak realm into a force with a simple roll of chance probably isn't very 'fair'.  My preference would be for these gambits to inject more variance into the world - making things a bit more wild - possibly affecting all realms and the land itself in some small or large ways.  I'd almost prefer if no direct benefit to the weak realm happened except maybe defensively.

BTW, like all the other comments in the thread.

Actually, that's one of the victory conditions.  "The spell of making" roughly defined as the "I.W.I.N." spell.

Who knows, maybe that's exactly what this 'Spell of Making' is, making all the enemies dissapear...

Am I the only one who will disable that victory condition?

I plan on playing with it at first just to see what it's like. When I sit down to play a really long game I'll probably turn it off then. Along with any other Win Conditions that make my game shorter.

In point of fact, Aragorn actually did spend then first several decades of his rule leading a campaign to mop up the Orcs and Human nations who had been loyal to Sauron. It's just not important to the story, so it gets tucked away into the appendix at the end of the book.

Whether it's a story or a game, you focus on the parts that are interesting and fun, and the stuff that comes before or after can be compressed and summarized. If every Sovereign but yours is dead, then there's nobody really capable of opposing you. Victory is inevitable, it's just a matter of time. It's not that you don't still have to defeat what's left of their armies, or that every city instantly becomes loyal to you - it's that those events are inevitable and there's no question of your ultimate victory.

Some people might like the option to watch that phase of the game, just for closure or whatever, but nobody should be forced to play it out. What I can imagine is, in a game like Civilization, you'll get a screen saying 'You Won! Do you want to keep playing?' So you can mop up after you've met the victory conditions. I can also imagine having the whole process happen automatiaclly - let the player watch an accelerated version of events as you take one city after another, but without manually sending out armies to do it.