How do you get a high score?

from Stardock Forums
I keep getting scores in the 300 range. I once got 630, but I have no idea what I did different that time.

My latest game was on painful difficulty(all races set to Genius), Medium size galaxy. Really fun game, I had several wars, once in the starfighter era, out of pure necessity, because the Arceans dominated from the very beginning(They had LOTS of good planets. Nobody else had a chance. I wouldn't either if I hadn't taken a class 31 planet before he could develop it much.)

I took a few important planets every time, then fortified all my planets with defense ships until they thought they were losing and were willing to give me most of their tech/money for peace, heh heh heh.(they got some military resources early. I couldn't stand up to their whole fleet in a fair fight.)

And then, after a supreme effort I get 367 points. I check the metaverse, and there's people with 5000 points! 5000!!!

What am I doing wrong?
179 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
You're not playing on the largest galaxy setting. ;)

This is my only gripe with Metaverse, is that it's too heavily weighted in favor of galaxy size. I definately didn't deserve all the points I've gotten for the two games on huge and gigantic I've played.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Joeaverage,
the current scoring mechanism strongly favours gigantic galaxies with the highest tech / population possible. This means that you get a higher score for a low difficulty large galaxy which you take ages to win because you're a beginner than for a medium galaxy on hardest settings where you kick the computers butt.
An extra problem is that the metaverse score is a summation of all your scores divided by the square root of the number of games played. This means that 1 single gigantic game on dumb setting giving a score of 2000 points is equivalent to 100 hundred tiny games on incredible AI setting (200 points each).
Hopefully Stardock will change this to better reflect the difficulty level and allow people who play smaller universes to have a chance of gettng a decent score.

Paul.

~SDC~
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Just my opinion.

I think it would be the best thing to forget population and tech and money and such. I think that the only way to value different games better or worse is to count the number of turns it took to win. That's the objective of the game, isn't it? No matter how many planets you have if you won.

From that it follows, that a different top score table would be needed for different galaxy sizes, and possibly even for different difficulty levels ( though it might be possible to take diff. level reasonably into account when calculating score).

I don't think it is possible to devise a meaningful scoring scheme that is really able to compare gigantic and medium games. Gigantic and small galaxies are a different game.