Cheer Frogboy! That's a great thing about this forum. It's easy to be patient with problems when there's always a developer on here saying, "we see the problem too, we'll get to it."

Thanks Again.

Its all good news today.

Alrighty. I've played two 1.044 games and both times I went for speed to completion.

Tiny Maso, 10 year military victory, 824 points
Small Maso, 8 year military vicotry, 706 points

Good as reference cases to see how their scores turn out post-recalc under the new scoring on Monday.

RayChua, maybe I'm mistaking something in what Brad said, but I'd say that your scores above are going to be the same. The current 1.04062 games once they post are, as I've understood things, using the new algorithm. Brad's comments were that they would get around to recalculating scores from pre-10406x since so many of them are much lower than they would be with the latest scoring tweak.

No worries, CM. Those two games could still be useful to Brad for testing purposes if he wishes to use them. I believe he is looking to get tiny/small Maso games into the region of 4000 points.

I actually have no problem with tiny/small games being
on a 2-1 ratio with large+ games.

It is currently more of a 3-2 ratio with is perhaps a tad
to close, but Frog mentioned he wants a 5-1 ratio which
I think is just way to far apart.

Considering the algorathim for summing games does
not reward, and in fact punishes people for low
scoring games, they shouldnt be that far apart.

I dont want to stop submitting tiny/small games just
because they would hurt my score again.

2-1 is a great ratio imo.


[Message Edited]

Just so we're clear, the current 1.04.6x have their score modified by going to the .75 power.

But there's another adjustment that needs to be made.

The pop variable needs to be subtracted. That value is NX^.75.

Where N is the size of the galaxy.

In Ray's last game, he would have 0 points removed from his score when the calculation is done because it was on tiny.

Whereas Sergey's game will be readjusted to around 6600 because it was on a huge galaxy (N=4).

 

 

You need a 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 ratio on scores (And there are other factors involved like how much tech you accumulated and how fast you got it, what wonders you built, what trade goods you built, and so forth).

The reason you need them is that a large or huge or above galaxy can take days to play. Whereas during testing I can crank out 3 tiny galaxies per day. It takes a lot more effort to win on a gigantic galaxy than on a tiny one.

Maybe I'm being incredibly dense, but if the new scores are as is (like Ray's 800 for Tiny-Maso), that seems to leave no room for score differentiation. What it honestly looks like to me is that the .75 power is being applied twice with the latest build, once in game and once in the metaverse.

If I consider my most recent game (Tiny / Rare / Crippling), the in game score came up as 1900 and change, which is very much in line with what I understand your intention to be, as well as with my other 1.04 games. A little low since I took the faster alliance rather than take out my friends, and that I only got one planet at the start while Drengins and Altairians got 2, but certainly reasonable.

Anyway, is it possible that the typo fix is now being fixed twice? In any case, thanks for the new build. I really like the new leasing system and generally am having a lot of fun again.

Assuming I'm understanding the above additional info by Brad to mean that the formula is:

((Displayed Score)^0.75) - ((Population in Billions * MapSize)^0.75) = Final Score

This is a nice improvement. Before this new difficulty tweak was announced I started up a Gigantic Map on Cakewalk to demonstrate/study some of the goofiness of the previous difficulty adjustments.

With the new version it wound up getting 64125 displayed score with a pop of 1946.9. That should, if I've got this new fangled pop correction right, work out to 2564 points. Not nearly enough points for the time it took to justify trying to boost your score by playing on the lower difficulties like it was before.

Good job.

Babcom: Ray said he *rushed* those games. By rushing to military victory on a tiny map you have few of the other things that count towards the score. Consider Ray's victories to be the bottom end of where Maso scores are, not what their most common point will be. EDIT: As further examples of this phenomena, I've had rush games that if I'd submitted them I would have only gotten about 100 points on Painful for a Large map. That's why I don't rush. It's no fun and it doesn't score worth a damn anyhow. Besides, it's one thing to punish people for sitting around and hitting end turn 500X when they've taken everything but one planet and are just running up the pop, it's another thing entirely to turning score into a race. If it came down to finishing fastest for the highest points I'd lose interest in the game instantly. Your score should be a nice balance of factors, not just winning as some seem to want.
[Message Edited]

Hmmm, I'm hoping that fast games won't be heavily penalized. That is, I'd like to think that speed of victory should be able to make up for some of those other factors. Taking a tiny game much past the dreadnought era seems an exercise in either inefficiency or tedium.

As alternative extrapolation to what happened to Ray's score, and what happened to mine, could be that a non-zero population factor WAS subtracted. That is, instead of (NX)^.75, perhaps it's currently coded as (5X)^.75 (or some other fixed N).

Perhaps yet another way of putting it is that my last game is qualitatively similar to some of my other 1.04 games, yet scored very much less (292 vs. 2000 or so). If this is as it "should" be, that seems to be off from the stated objectives of generally increasing scores and differentiating more strongly between difficulty levels.

They're not *penalized*, they've just done nothing to actually earn a score beyond the military part. You are scored on economy, trade goods, military, influence, popularity, etc. If the goal was having Maso Tiny to be around 3-4K on average, a rush game that has only something like 1/5th of the scoring factors developed and takes 1/3rd of that intended score looks pretty good to me.

The goal here should not be to think that your playstyle is the one that should be scoring well, but to see that the difficulties are balanced assuming similar playstyles and strats. For instance, that Gigantic Cakewalk I describe above would have easily gotten in excess of 10K just 2 days ago, it now appears to be scoring well under 3K.
[Message Edited]

It takes me about 4-5 times longer to complete
a gigantic game then it does to complete a tiny game.

And while it might seen sensible that a gigantic
should be worth 4-5 times as much, the way the scores
are currently accumulated, being worth 5 times as much
will mean that tiny games will not be able to complete with
gigantic games.

Points/Game: # of games: resultant score:

5000_______: 5_________: 11180.34 -- Gigantic base line
1000_______: 20________: 4472.136 -- tiny games at 5-1
1000_______: 40________: 6324.555 -- tiny games at 5-1
1000_______: 100_______: 10000.00 -- tiny games at 5-1
1000_______: 125_______: 11180.34 -- tiny games at 5-1
2500_______: 20________: 11180.34 -- tiny games at 2-1

This means that at a 5-1 ratio between tiny and
gigantic, there is no realistic number of games that
will allow a tiny to compete with a gigantic. At
a 2-1 ratio, a tiny player would have to play 4 times
as many games to get the same score as a gigantic player.
This seems more reasonable then having to play 25 times
as many games. A gigantic does not take 25 times as
long to play. For me, its 3 hours for a tiny and
12 hours for a gigantic, 4-1.

In fact, the 5-1 score ratio will in some cases actually hurt
the score of a gigantic player.

I am a gigantic game player, I currently have the top gigantic
overall score by quite a large margin. I am not out to see the
gigantic map marginalized.

Edit - Dang white space eating BB's
[Message Edited]

Well, I'm probably on crack again, but I think the chances of long term dominance of Gigantic even with Brad's proposed ratio is probably a long shot. That cakewalk Gigantic I just played was my first Gigantic game, and I guarantee it will be my last. I know it's an "to each his own" deal, but Gigantic maps (and even Huge) are painfully tedious to play on next to Large and smaller for me.

I think we'll see the same handful of people currently dominating the metaverse with Gigantic maps still dominating, they'll just be further ahead of the rest of the pack but the relative positions won't be changed much.

Code Monkey, I certainly don't view my play method as being the right way in any sense. In fact, I'm in general going to be helped if these games score little, because I can go back to my more traditional methods. I've been training myself to be a military dictator on Tiny, which tends to go against my usual inclinations. That said, I don't believe it should be worth 80% LESS than someone else who takes much longer to win by letting the Drengin live, building their infrastructure, and researching through Evolution Control (which must take at least 50 turns by itself on Tiny rare with ~half the galaxy in one's possession) and beyond. Winning faster should be a scoring plus in and of itself. Note: I'm not saying that it should even be a big enough plus to make up for the long build (though that is arguable), but it seems reasonable that it should not be a big minus.

To add to that, if my 292 is "right" for Tiny crippling, then a qualitatively similar game on Painful should score less, and on Tough should score less, then challenging, ..., and cakewalk. This doesn't seem to leave anywhere near enough room for difficulty differentiation. Oh well, off to revert to old habits and see what happens.

Babcom, last repeat of the same thing: the game cannot award score except based on some set of arbitrary factors. Speed is only one part of that set of factors. Whether you personally think it should be the case, it is worth more to build your infrastructure and allow the aliens to build their before offing them.

Sure, hypothetically, the human warlord who clears the galaxy in 2188 then has all the time in the world to build those things now that the hard times are past, but they designed the scoring system based on what you did in the context of the flavor of the game, not what your blazingly fast victory potentially allows in the hypothetical future of the Terran Alliance.

"Fast" victories don't look as "penalized" on larger maps because you wind up developing an infrastructure by default, it's only on something as tiny as, well, Tiny, that you can end the game militarily shortly after getting Impulse Drive.

[screams in agony]

Noooo! Once this happens I'll have to start playing on harder than normal difficulty (and given that I'm really not that good, I'll be back down to #50-75 or something if I'm lucky)... Oh well, being in the top 10 was fun while it lasted I guess I'll leave it to people who actually deserve it..

~SDC~
[Message Edited]

Staffa -- that's a good point. The metaverse dividing by sqrt of the # of games is something I hadn't concsidered.

 

Tiny/Rare/Masochistic - 1,5 hours. Perhaps 1 hour with some luck.

By the way, who owns Draginol account on Apolyton forums? I sent my strat there in private several days ago - maybe you'll do something to make ai better.

~SDC~

So you play faster then me Ellestar, but its a ratio and
without the 2nd half, your data is meaningless.

If it takes you 1.5 hours to do a tiny rare, how long
does it take you to do a gigantic rare with the same
speedy finish goal.

I have completed gigantics in 6 hours, but the way
I currently play, it takes more like 12 hours now, its
also more fun.

One danger in the data being presented by some of the people in this thread is the notion that the speed it takes one particular top 25 player to finish a map means anything in terms of how we should be considering ratios/differences for metaverse scoring.

Through some quirk of a balanced play style and reasonably frequent submissions, I'm sitting pretty in the top 25 (at least until Monday, we'll see how things shake out then), but I can't finish a Tiny map on Painful in anywhere near either of the times posted in this thread. Granted, I play abundant on Tiny, but still, I'm coming in 4-6X slower.

We, the ever present loud mouths and people who play this game way too much do have a lot great insights, but when it comes to a lot of the metaverse balancing, we might not be the most objective or representative people to be judging the system by

To Staffa
I don't tried to play for *real-time* speed (i mean not in-game time).

~SDC~

Man, you guys are stiff!

Frogboy, thanks for your effort! Hope you get it all sorted out soon!

Just a question: Why the heck do you go through so much trouble to calculate these scores through such a complicated formula? Just seems so darn complicated... LOL