Frogboy Frogboy

Scoring in 1.05 - we need your input

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Scoring in 1.05 - we need your input

from Stardock Forums

The scoring system in 1.05 works something like the following:

You start out with score X which is based on the difficulty level that is based on adding the intelligence levels of the major races. There is also a slight bonus for being of the opposite moral alignment than your opponents by a certain year (so you can't go evil and then go back to being good later on to mess with it).

Then it gives bonuses for how many trade goods you got, how much of the tech tree you got.

Then it goes through each turn, looks at your population and then adds it up BUT with each value getting progressively smaller. That is, Population P is dividied by the turn to the Nth power.  So eventually, your population won't add very much to your score. But the population bonus is relatively small.

It then looks at how much your economy produced by turn, similar to population.

Then it is multiplied by victory condition V. Where the max one is military conquest followed by alliance and cultural victory and then technology victory.

The bug in 1.044 is that the population wasn't properly adjusted and the scores got out of hand.

Staffa and a few others who have played 1.044 and have a really good scoring game, i could really use your saved game to test out the values.

We actually did test 1.044 over a period of days and the scores seemed relatively normal. It wa sjust under certain conditions that things got crazy. We want to avoid that in 1.05 so that we can focus on the Expansion pack after 1.05 is released.

The scores in 1.05 WILL BE HIGHER OVERALL than previous builds. This is partially to reward active players and partially to provide more room between players really challenging themselves and the rest of us. ;)

2,359 views 86 replies
Reply #76 from Stardock Forums Top
Hooray, hooray, hooray! Very nice fix to a system that had gotten a bit goofy lately (of course I may be a bit biased since I just landed over 7K for a small map on painful).

Other great addition: confirmation for submitting to the metaverse, big thumbs up for that!

Now, I figure the answer is 'no', but I'm going to ask again until you either answer me or delete my stardock.net account: will we see a recalc of the pre-1.05 scores?

I got about 1700 for the same sort of game 2 days ago with 1.044 that I just got well over 7K for under 1.05 (and this 2X higher than I was getting for these sorts of games under 1.04). With these sorts of widely different scores for essentially the same games, it makes our overall score a mess. If this score inflation ratio is the same across the board, we're essentially all being penalized for having lots of pre-1.05 games.

Of course this would be less of an issue if you just dropped scores out of the calculation after a certain amount of time instead of that 20% basement that I have issue with :)
Reply #77 from Stardock Forums Top
I found that quote I was thinking about:

"But eventually, we hope to integrate that sort of thing into the game where you can literally pick a player from the Metaverse to try to play and the AI will try to simulate their style. That’s a ways off but that’s the long term goal."

Is that a goal for an expansion pack, or is that more of a GalCiv 2 idea? Anyways, that new scoring idea looks allright, and with more time I'm sure it'll just keep getting better and better. Yeah, listen to ray, you deserve a break :)

Oh, and what's wrong with progress quest? It's very well balanced, there's no tricks to make your score go up faster :p
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Reply #78 from Stardock Forums Top
A lesser evil is the possibility of modifying score by total number (or maybe PQ) of the >15 PQ planets on any given map.
End of quote

Lots of people have subtly mised the point of the original proposal (Staffa's I think - I just restated it) - Two issues, I think (lets see if I can put them clearly...):

(1) Size of the galaxy is NOT a good modifier. It is the number of habital planets that identifies the "scale" of the universe you are playing in.(eg a medium with abundent is more planets than a large with rare). Hence a modifer for the size of the galaxy should reflect number of habital worlds, not just the "size" setting.

(2) If you want to reward people for how well they have done in the game, and you don't like measuring pop/eco/etc because it gets milked, then a harder-to-milk measurement (which is already rigoursly controlled inside the game) is PQ. It is a great shorthand for the quality of your empire - after all, even if you aren't at full pop/eco yet, PQ is THE measure of what pop/eco you can sustain (etc). The RP logic is 'the better quality planets you have, the better your civilization will fair in the future...'. Anyone who 'milks' for this is doing something I want to encourage. [BTW, adds a disincentive for people like me who otherwise are ecological vandals wrecking planets during invasions and destroying the colonies. In the real world, people wouldn't like me doing that to the universe...]

~SDC~
Reply #79 from Stardock Forums Top
Thanks Frogboy! Wow, it must of taken you a year to read this whole thread! :)

There are some long-winded people here! ;)
Reply #80 from Stardock Forums Top
I like your ideas Frogboy.

I don't give a hoot about my score but I was concerned about how changes to scoring might flow through to game changes via the Metaverse. I am glad that scoring system does not overly encourage/reward human aggression because that might lead you to increase AI aggression which I really don't want. I like a peaceful game.
Thank you. :)
Reply #81 from Stardock Forums Top
Actually, I think those fast games (however they're won) should be rewarded with higher scores, to encourage them to be posted, but that doesn't mean the changes have to be put through at all difficulty levels. Those games could be used to change the AI on the high levels, but it's already been said that lower difficulty levels don't use all the AI functions available.

So, far in the future, normal games would be pretty similar to now, and you'll be able to play peaceful there if you want, but the maso AI will rely less on bonuses and more on brutal tactics. Choosing maso implies you want a tough game where the AI pulls every dirty military, cultural, and tech trick in the book to win any way they can as fast as they can. If you want to play peaceful on maso... um... good luck :)
Reply #82 from Stardock Forums Top
Thanks Frogboy!!! :CONGRAT: :CONGRAT:

I think the scoring system reflects exactly what the devs were aiming for...a diverse system that lets the players play the way they want to. :) I seriously doubt it was intentional, but I think the decision reflects my personal biases wonderfully! :D

Thanks for all your hard work and energy, and actually taking the time to base decisions on the fickle postings of your loyal fan-base! And, although some may complain that the new scores punish those of us who have lots of Metaverse posts, I will not be one to voice such complaints. It just means I'll have to redouble my efforts and make up for my lower scores with several higher ones now with v1.05! LOL
Reply #83 from Stardock Forums Top
I was going to say exactly that on this thread, Quack before I realised that the feedback session is over.



Maso games are hellishly brutal games. I'm not managed to play any peaceful ones unless I have purposely set all races to Good and play good myself. This is partly due to the fast pace of tech (BS by 6yrs, dreads by 8, avatars by 10, excaliburs by 12) so the AI's military rating just keeps shooting up and the threats just keep coming.



In addition, the AIs' massive bonuses to PQ and other factors results in a virtuous cycle for their economy. They build industry faster, their pop grows faster, they get TGs/wonders faster which results in better and better planets. You simply cannot sit back and outproduce or outtech them. The only way I have learnt to beat Maso so far is to blitz and hopefully take over sufficient AI planets so as to gather the critical mass needed to win.



So in short, yes its v hard to play peacefully and smell the alien roses on Maso. What I could do to win and get a good score is to basically conquer all till the last AI planet, keep that planet as a zoo so that Terran children can know what an alien looks like, then spend the next 20-30 years building up pop/economy/tech. But's that no fun.



But well, I guess it has been said that fun and scores could be oxymoron in Galciv.



I have no complaints on the chosen system though. I will take it and play by it. The above are some further thoughts on this issue.
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Reply #84 from Stardock Forums Top
The one thing I've had a VERY hard time with is getting culturally absorbed by the AI on Maso. I've yet to figure my way out of that one. Painful/Crippling seems to be near my limit
Reply #85 from Stardock Forums Top
I will NEVER win a game of Gal Civ as quickly as anyof those guys...I have no desire to even try it wouldn't be fun for me to disect the game to the level required to become a true master. So, should I be doomed to inferior scores forever? That depends.
End of quote

And some people aren't interested in growing pop the way top players currently had to do in order to get good scores. Currently, if you like to play fast, you get a bad score. That penalizes also casual gamers who don't want to spend all their nights on a game but want it finished (sio you have to finish it fast because one-more-turn means the sun will shine before you know it).

Frogboy, the tech victory multiplier is very bad IMHO because it will just incite people to have a military victory when they should have had a tech victory. Alliance and culture I can stand with.

About the population formula, here is the best population you should have: If you go for a non military victory (obviously, unless minor races are factored in total population, in which case it applies for military victory too): On turn before win, give several of your planets to an (allied) civ (or minor). This will boost your score, since your score, at constant total population and a given turn, is based on (your pop * other races pop), which is maximum when pop = other races pop. So you should always try to get 50% of the population of the galaxy in order to get a good score. Weird. Only the 1/N2 factor for pop sounds good.
Reply #86 from Stardock Forums Top
After reading most of the posts I find that there are many different opinions and I also have a few of my own.

First, how does civs score in Real Life? I don't see why a huge pop. should be a factor at all. Does China get several bonus UN votes compared to the UK or France since it has a huge pop. No. In fact a vastly overpopulated galaxy should get a penalty! Basically average moral vs. average intial PQ should count more as it is difficult to have an average moral > 75 per turn if you have a bunch of PQ15 planets. It is NOT difficult to get a high pop period.

Secondly total scores should be based on 2 parts. Basic game score and Difficlty multiplier.
I think discussions should be split into these 2 groups. BASIC Score is how skillfully we played against all opponents on average throughout the game. We already have this more or less based on the stats screens. Calculating the DIFFICULTY multiplier is more complex and there are many opinions.

I think BASIC SCORE points should get added up per TURN, depending if you are the leading Civ in that area (except pop!!). Eg. leader econ gets +3 points, leader Military +3 points, leader influence +3....etc. If you are second you get 2 points, 3rd 1 point, 4th or lower 0 points. This gets added up each turn. At the end the total is divided by the square root (or similar) of the number of turns taken. Eg 100 turns * aveage of eg. 15 points per turn = 1500. Divide this by the root of 100 (turns taken)to get a total of 150 points.

This method does not give a bonus to longer or shorter games directly but awards skill points per turn. If you can finish a game quicky you probably are the leader in most areas for most of the game so you will get a slight bonus but not much. IMHO quick games should not get much of a bonus: since it means you submit scores more often! Players who take a long time to win can't submit scores every day so are effectively penalized already. QED!


The BASIC skill score is then adjusted by Difficuly multiplier, whichever way it is calculated.
In general I agree that difficulty multiplier should be based primarily on AI rating, followed by total number of PQ15 and higher planets, your initial starting position etc.

Now back to the serious business of playing the game and having fun...



~SDC~