Metaverse scoring shock

Your score isn't that far out of line. I played on huge/tight/intelligent (Painful), and only eeked out the low 3000's. Games tend to reward more for higher difficulty, efficiency of wins, etc. I find that getting an alliance victory early can nab you some big points from the "efficiency bonus"

But scores are based in the culmination of map size (smaller factor in score after 1.04), difficulty, population (perhaps less of a factor), victory type, and turns to win.

Hope this helps out some
SeanB

The scores for tiny/small maps were raised quite a bit
but I dont think you can call difficulty the major
basis for determing the score.

Beginner games are still scoring higher then
masochistic games.

And the difference between crippling and masochistic
score wise is almost non existence even though maso
is at least 10 times harder.

Would you call 2199 fast? Heck, if I hadn't waited for the computer to start the resource grab first, it might have come sooner. Fortunately, I had built up a sizable treasury and bought starbases on the only two influence resources, which pretty much sealed things. I found it a bit surprising that the Torians (who didn't like me much) relinquished theirs so easily. I'm guessing a more intelligent AI level might not have been so helpful...

Slightly off the subject, but I see the new ranks are in Congrats Fleet Captain Staffa.

I think Alliance victories and military conquests score quite a bit more than cultural and tech victories these days.

2199 on a medium with a cultural victory? It sounds
like a respectable speed, not lightning fast but then
I doubt a cultural victory is ever lightning fast.

Thanks for the input all.

One of the ironies of the way the metaverse is scored is that it is better score wise to play a "finesse" game on a lower difficulty where you have most of the techs, superior economy, large and happy pop, etc. than it is to fight it out tooth and toenail on a much harder difficulty and win, but have none of the knob polishing elements in place.

I don't think there's any solution that's going to keep everyone happy so better to play wherever you personally have fun and not think too hard about it.

I can have a large happy pop on the higher levels with
a superior economy and all of the techs(unless you mean
actually researched urself). Thats really not the issue.

But your right, the current scoring method is much better
then what it was, I just think difficulty level should
still be a larger factor, but I will live.

I think scores should be weighted more depending on the type of victory. The way I see it:

1. Cultural Victory is the easiest.
2. Alliance Victory is next.
3. Military Victory is harder still (an Alliance of 1).
4. Technological Victory is the hardest.

Some people may quibble about whether Technological Victory is hardest or not; on larger maps it may be easier than a pure Military Victory. But it is certainly extremely time consuming.

Bruce

Time consuming != hard

Tech victory is the easiest simply because its
inevitable so long as you dont die, the other
victory conditions require you to actually master
the galaxy.

And as I have championed again and again in other threads, making the score victory condition dependent (which it is now) is assinine because you can't design any formula which knows that a particular condition in any given game was harder or easier.

I've been in a position of getting ready to win by cultural but declared war to prevent that and militarily took the last couple of planets - that trivial conquest multiplied the score by more than 20X over the cultural victory.

Scoring should be based on quantitative factors: percent of the map under your influence, percentage of systems under your control, total PQ under your control (to eliminate the imbalance/tedium of population boosting), percent of techs you own with some correction, etc. What it should not be based on is the arbitrary assignment of what is supposedly an easier or harder victory.

Time consuming != hard

I think they all should score the same. Because the easiest path to each is indeed the same.

The only thing about the tech victory is all I have to do is carve my corner of the world, keep my military bar above the other civs military bar, and just hold station for the rest of the game, having never fired a single shot. By far the easiest victory type in my opinion.

The culture victory involves quite a bit more work as you need to create a bunch of SB's all over the place and then pick off planets one at a time.

Alliance victory can be the next easiest. Pick your friends, attack just your enemies. Game Over

Military Conquest by far involves the most work as you need to literally wipe out every single enemy planet in existence. Not the easist to do.

SeanB

Right, that is one way of getting it. Unfortunately because they've penalized tech victory scores assuming that everyone plays like this, the guy who spent the whole game fighting for survival and squeaks by Final Frontier after a long and heart pounding game finds his score decreased because of that assumption.

The imperfection in the existing system is the condition adjustments are based upon the idea that everyone is "manipulating" the system. So, the result is that I just never bother with any victory conditions other than military or alliance even if tech or culture would have been the more logical choice to take.

Just incase you were curious, I went and hit turn some
300 times to see what a tiny tech victory was worth,

2100 or so, which is less then half what I got for a
military victory, so size doesnt help tech victories
at all.

56 turns(almost 5 years) to research beyond human, 55
to research final frontier. I kid you not

Really? Man, that frightens me... I was going to try it, but now I have to rethink the idea...

~SDC~

3,598 for Cakewalk: http://www.galciv.com/info.asp?accountID=663165

LOL
Same as Masochistic

~SDC~

I'm messing around with a tiny game right now. I started with the carinoids in my own sector and have captured the planet. Military victory is hard! I didn't want to trash the planet and I'm low on cash, so it took me 3 transports to take it out.

For some reason, the Torians seem to like me, so I'm trying to butter them up into an alliance so they can help with the drengin and Yor. I took a bunch of military bonuses and am mining a military resource, so my ships are doing well. I'm quietly building up a starhawk fleet at the moment while working on a couple of social projects, but I'm not really sure what I should do now. I keep hoping for an event that will let me push my morality towards good, thus making the torians like me more.

Question: Does trading techs to other AI make people that don't like them unhappy? For example, if I give a tech to the torians, then immediately sell it to the Yor and Drengin, does that defeat the purpose of giving the tech away?

I don't object to getting nice scores on the smaller maps, but I am starting to wonder about the difficulty adjustments. I've seen more than a few of these simple diff games lately that are scoring much better than very experienced people completing identical map sizes on significantly harder levels.

I think their attempt to reach the "unwashed masses" may have gone too far down the road of favoring the cheese among us. I can say with some confidence that I almost think a trained chimp can beat this game on cakewalk mostly through random button mashing because the AI is so utterly passive. Yet, because it then becomes so easy if you've got a clue to get all the techs, have all the monopolies, keep all your people fat and happy, have the lead in every category, etc., it nearly offsets or even beats the difficulty bonuses.

Not that the metaverse should be their focus, and not that FB isn't entitled to his opinion that it's pretty much done at this point, but it seems funny that if someone wanted to be a supreme cheesemonger, that blasting through a heap of gigantic maps on cakewalk would probably catapult you straight to the top or nearly so.

I'll never play on the harder difficulty levels I assure you. I'm not good enough. But i agree with you CM that playing on those levels should be rewarded. Certainly, the maximum score achievable on the higher difficulty levels should be higher than when playing on a low difficulty. Maybe it is also unreasonable that barely winning a game on a hard difficulty should get a really big score, as that might be a sign to ramp things back a notch until you improve your tactics.

That's interesting...do you think a really good score should come simply from winning at a high difficulty level, or by winning handily?

Well, it's a question of what's being scored. As you move up in difficulty your ability to win, handily or at all, is dependent upon developing better research paths relative to the AIs. It's dependent on developing better fleet composition to maximise both your military power (graph and effective military) while minimising the drain to your economy. It's dependent upon paying attention to diplomacy. And so on...

In short, what it takes to win at all on even Normal versus Cakewalk is much more "brain dependent", and this trend continues with each increase in difficulty.

But the scoring algorithm as best I can tell uses none of these subjective elements, but only measures simpler things such as population, influence, relative military power, etc. Which is nice if there is then some sort of "balanced" bonus tacked onto this for playing on the higher diffs. In my opinion, you should get about the same or even somewhat higher score for winning well versus just winning if you're talking the difference between Challenging and Painful. But you shouldn't really be able to even approach the squeakingest win on Crippling with any win on Challenging (assuming similar map conditions), and you certainly shouldn't be nearing or surpassing wins of people playing on Painful and above with a Cakewalk game, ever.

The factors used to determine base score are probably as decent as they're going to get at this point, what needs to be looked at is the difficulty multipliers then applied to that base score.

Anyhoo, to test my theory, I'm going to play the bejesus out of a gigantic cakewalk map and see what I get.

As a point in my experiment if you observe my last two games, I apparently outscored myself on the same sized map but slightly lower difficulty. I find this kind of odd so I might run a couple experiments. I'll run one more, this time attempting a military conquest, and one more attempting a culture victory to see what happens. In reference to the last two, I might run it off the same saved game and try to time the wins so that they happen roughly the same year, that way I can get a decent idea on what the score would be one way or the other.

Somehow I think that difficulty doesn't figure in, or that I think the efficiency bonus is maybe a little too steep, to where the difficulty effect gets wiped out (ie, on cakewalk, you should overrun the AI in one serious hurry). I suppose that would be worth and experiment to see how that behaves.

SeanB

This isn't very scientific, but I had the option of winning alliance in a small, uncommon, painful game by allying with the Arceans and Yor. I saved, did the alliances and received a 1660 score. I then went and smashed the Arceans and allied with the Yor. Score was 1773. I quite the game there as the Yor had built up a huge fleet and I didn't want to take the time to kill them for the military victory.

I think there should be some kind of multiple for the difficulty level - a small, but noticible one.

On the other hand, much of a game's difficulty is dependent on the starting position, so I don't think the scoring will ever be perfect.

One solution may be categorize the scores in the Mverse by difficulty level. Each score for each game for each separate difficulty could be added, averaged then ranked with other metaverse player's scores in that difficulty level.

That number could then get a multiplier based on the difficulty to calculated a final, overall score. That way, people who frequently play at higher difficulties will probably migrate to the top of the overall score list, but those who generally play at the lower difficulties, or who have a favorite level, could master the respective difficulty they play and rise to the top of that category.

I hope that explanation is clear.