Need help understanding difference in my game scores

from Stardock Forums
I just finished my first painful game last night, and was rather dissapointed with the Metaverse score it got, especially relative to my previous game. If you have any insight as to what's up with this, please comment.

OK, here's some of the relavent stats, I'll call them game5 (last night's game) and game4 (last week's game):

Game4: Medium, standard AI alignments, all "Bright" (Challenging)
Game5: Medium, standard AI alignments, all "Intelligent" (Painful)

In-game scores:
Game4: Won in March, 2188 (Chaotic evil), Military victory, Society 808pts., Tech 520pts, Econ 703pts, Mil 210pts, Overall 2241 (Metaverse adjusted 7370 points)

Game5: Won in July, 2196 (Neutral), Culture victory, Society 2900pts, Tech 1179pts, Econ 2183pts, Mil 1007pts, Overall 7269pts (Metaverse adjusted 6686 points)

Now, as you can see, in game5 I was MUCH further along in every aspect, more techs, bigger economy, pop, fleet (got to avatars vs. not even battelships in game4). I had built 24 wonders, achievements, and trade goods in game 5, vs. just a few in game 4. And the raw scores reflect that, game4's raw score was 2241, while game5's was 7269.

Yet, the metaverse score for game4 was higher, even though I played with each AI a level higher in game5 (Intelligent vs. Bright), and we've been told AI difficulty and map size are the two biggest factors in scoring. Since both maps were medium, I can't figure out how in the world game4 scored higher. Both games were played start-to-finish with 1.05.071, no mods or add-ins of any kind.

If the answer comes down to Military vs. Cultural win, then WOW are they ever nerfing cultural victories!!

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas or tips for me, or needs further clarification on game setup/stats/etc, please post. I want to find out why the game scored so poorly vs. the previous game.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
If the answer comes down to Military vs. Cultural win, then WOW are they ever nerfing cultural victories!!
End of quote


That is the answer. Military win is worth full value. Other victory types are worth less. From the Book of Ray:

"Victory Condition:
Then the victory condition is looked at. The score is multiplied by it. Conquest = 10. Alliance =9. Culture = 8. Technology Victory = 7 (bear in mind that this is partially made up for by having a higher percent of the tech tree completed bonus)."

If you would have won that culture game with conquest, the score would have been like 8358 points. Higher than the shorter game, so infrastructure does pay.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Yeah, I had read that before, but even at 8358, that's not much extra score given the extra AI difficulty and better pre-modified score.

I have a feeling that the difference between military and cultural is bigger than they're letting on.

Thanks for the reply.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
I found that I got a 50% increase in metaverse score just by turning off the "cultural victory" option. As soon as you qualify for a cultural victory, you will soon get a military victory as all the planets flip to you. Plus, you can drag things out for a year or two with max research so you can get The Terraformer and the Guidebook and other late-game wonders.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
It's not the military versus culture that's your beef here (although that's one problem with the scoring), the other is the very, um, strange effect of the lack of difficulty bonus balancing.

The catch-22 of the higher difficulty issues is that a large chunk of your score comes from things like wonders, dominating in tech, economy, culture, etc, and these things are much easier to achieve on lower difficulties. So, although you are given a bonus for increasing the difficulty, the gains from doing so are largely offset by lowering of your base score due to the fact that the game is harder.

This is why you can have such strange things the 11+K cakewalk game that's on my list. I played it just to see what could happen and it's my second highest score. If you had the patience, you could easily take over the metaverse just by playing bottom level difficulty games and mashing the buttons.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I just tested. The bonus is indead around 50% from cultural to military conquest

~SDC~
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Like Code Monkey said.

If you need further proof, check out this calkwalk score http://www.galciv.com/info.asp?accountID=677742
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
The catch-22 of the higher difficulty issues is that a large chunk of your score comes from things like wonders, dominating in tech, economy, culture, etc, and these things are much easier to achieve on lower difficulties. So, although you are given a bonus for increasing the difficulty, the gains from doing so are largely offset by lowering of your base score due to the fact that the game is harder.
End of quote


Except, as I had stated in the original post, I had LOTS more techs and wonders, etc, in the harder (higher difficulty) game. That's because with the easier game I was able to win much sooner, so had relatively few techs, etc.

But thanks for all the replies! It seems my suspicion was correct that the game seriously nerfs cultural victories, much more so than has been officially stated. The problem was, in my previous 2 games, it was too early for a cultural victory (pre-2191), so even though I had every sector under my influence, the "countdown" never started, and the planets all flipped before the countdown could ever start. In this more recent game, I didn't achieve cultural dominance until after 2191, so the countdown started right away, and there were still 7 AI systems left when I won.

The really ironic thing is that I suspect many of the "military" victories we see in the Metaverse are really mostly cultural in nature (it's WAY easier to build lots of Party Palaces than invasion fleets =), so it's rather strange that the scores should be treated so differently.

My final lesson in all this: Every game I play now will have cultural turned off, since military will only be a few months away anyway.

Thanks for all the replies!
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
No need to turn it off, I just use that month 0 left til cultural as my deadline to declare war if I haven't already. Otherwise you're really just milking things.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Oh, so starting a war stops the countdown? That's good to know.

Thanks!
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Yep, for some reason they decided that it was counter intuitive to have a culture so in love with you that they become assimilated while you're mass driving their planets ;)
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
CM: Your milking things either way.

Declaring war to avoid winning so you can get a higher
score is no different then turning cultural victory off.

Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
If my games were cultural in nature I might agree with you for once, but since they are 80% military aided by cultural elements, you're quite wrong. The culture countdown is just a deadline for me to get my military forces in place for the final countdown if it occurs. Since when you're winning militarily, you're also winning culturally, I wind up having to declare war whether I'm ready or not about 40% of the time.
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
True, but you're milking it for an extra, what, 3-6 turns, for a 50% higher score? I don't really call that milking. Now, 20-60 extra turns, THAT would be milking.
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

when you're winning militarily, you're also winning culturally
End of quote


The above quote and crushbones conclusion are absolutely correct. Therefore imo this really needs to be addressed. Cultural victory should (no... Must) have the same value as military - period. This situation is badly skewing the scoring on the MV as well as the way most people now play.

The other the big problem is 'easy' AI levels getting large scores compared to 'painful' and harder. If the devs sort out these two score imbalances the MV scoring I think will be fine and any other scoring changes are trivial in comparison.

For the moment I have played several games of most sizes mostly on painful. My MV score is lower than many players who have played only 1 or just 2 games at Simple. How can the MV scoring be so unbalanced when the game itself is well balanced?

But...Just for fun, here are my suggested reasons for such a poor score balance:
-Lack of development time after GC,
-dev had a hangover that day.
-different developer(s) or team for MV score hired from microsoft.
-developers felt sorry for incompetent 'cake walk' players so gave them a good score to make them feel better.
- Being american and also avid Bush administartion supporters they much value military domination over other approaches. (Maybe I should not have said that one!!)

Any other reasons??



~SDC~
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
CM - You can live in what ever fantasy you want, but
the fact remains that declaring war to avoid a cultural
victory is the same as turning cultural victory off
from the perspective of someone who is progressing in
a primarily military fashion.

What ever military inadequacies that someone
progressing from a cultural attack possesses is not
really relevant to your case.

Though, if it matters to you, you can keep feeling
morally superior by declaring war on a deadline
to avoid an early victory rather then just turning
it off, whatever floats your boat.

As for the scoring issues noted in this thread, do
a forum search on the word scoring. Everything has pretty
much been suggested and either incorperated or rejected.
[Message Edited]
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
The metaverse is still the biggest joke ever (with or without Frogboy's explanation).

As long as a 'small/beginner' ( http://www.galciv.com/info.asp?accountID=648027 ) will give twice as much reward than a 'small/crippling', I don't think we need to worry about how games are being scored...