How did I get this Metaverse score?

And what I don't understand is that my first game I got over 1500 points, gigantic galaxy, normal difficulty. So how did I get a lower score on a higher difficulty - I won the same way both times, with a cultural victory. When I saw the score before submission, I almost didn't send it - I said surely that couldn't be right. Fifty two lousy points - sorry, I'm a bit hacked at this.

PS, I love the game LOL

wow not bad I really am not very good at this game (though I do love it and play it quite a bit) I never get very high scores. Id be happy with a 52... Thiugh what I was wonderig is some of my games I submitt are say 150 but I cehck my proflile and there maybe 98.

~SDC~

Please - keep posting.
We have to keep the pressure on Stardock to fix this - if we quietly go away and don't post our scores, nothing will change. (Remember - Stardock wants us to post so they get info for improving the AI...)
MAINTAIN YOUR RAGE

(BTW, my Tiny/Masochistic/Military - it was a SMALL, not a tiny - for 368 was a much harder and longer game than Medium/Challenging/Cultural for 1085.)

~SDC~

Or, I suppose, refuse to post scores, but publically voice the reason - say on this thread? - to influence them to fix it....

~SDC~

Grifman,

Noticed you posted a 1.04 beta game. Cultural victories do tend to score lower but 54 points for a gigantic game is quite unheard of.

Brad did say that the scoring would be tweaked in 1.04 to take more into account difficulty and less map size but I must say yours is a surprising score.

He stated in his post that he started with one version then finished with another, that is almost certainly what caused the incorrect score.

A good rule of thumb is to never update your version until you've finished any games in progress. And that goes for all games, not just GalCiv.

Yes, that should be the reason. Maybe beta games aren't supposed to be submitted, the build is still in beta afterall.

Vorlin: I don't think it's an issue with starting the game in one version and then finishing it in another.

I started a new game under 1.04 and for a cultural win with the AI races on normal intelligence, tiny galaxy, I got a score of 26.

Previous games, under the same win conditions resulted in scores of between 300 - 500 points.

Something is wrong somewhere.
Cheers

In the game I just finished (Gigantic/Crippling), I had the opportunity to win two ways on the same turn. Basically, I reached a cultural and tech victory on the same turn and I ended up with the tech victory. I went back to an autosave and played through, but adjusted my research to delay the tech victory by one turn, thereby getting a cultural victory. Here are my Metaverse scores for the two virtually identical games:

Tech win: 3662
Cultural: 1840

With all else being equal on these two games, it was a little shocking to see the difference in score. This was played on 1.035 BTW. I wonder how my score would have differed had I won with a military conquest.

My second game was a "gigantic" galaxy, and I think it said the difficulty was "suicidal". After a few days I got my victory and tried over and over again to submit the score (somewhere around 600). At one point it said the score had been submitted, and it was 580 or so. However, that was last night and I still have a score of 0 on the Metaverse. Am I doing something wrong?

I've noticed that my scores go down with each newer version so im not surprised that the beta 1.4 has even lower scores. I copied my posted scores and as you can see as I get better I get less points since im using the later versions of the game.

Case in point tiny painful version 1.031 3285 points and my last game tiny masochistic 864 points version 1.035.

I think i read somewhere that they were going to rerun all the meta universe scores at some point so they are all scored the same way. Maybe after version 1.04 is out of beta.


Date Played (Game Version) Score
4/30/2003 (1.031000) Morality: Pure Good Galaxy Size: Tiny 3285
Difficulty: Painful Win / Lost: Win: Beyond Human

5/1/2003 (1.031000) Morality: Chaotic Good Galaxy Size: Tiny 1404
Difficulty: Crippling Win / Lost: Win: Alliance Victory

5/4/2003 (1.035000) Morality: Chaotic Good Galaxy Size: Huge 736
Difficulty: Painful Win / Lost: Win: Alliance Victory

5/9/2003 (1.035000) Morality: Chaotic Evil Galaxy Size: Huge 2804
Difficulty: Crippling Win / Lost: Win: Beyond Human

5/12/2003 (1.035000) Morality: Chaotic Good Galaxy Size: Tiny 864
Difficulty: Masochistic Win / Lost: Win: Military Conquest

Man, I wish they would re-run all the scores. My climb up the metaverse ladder is hitting the glass ceiling of people who are still sitting fat on cotton-candy scores from v. 1.31 and earlier. :notsure:


And yeah, I do play for the metaverse. I would've lost interest in the end-game repetition weeks ago if it weren't for the metaverse goading me to keep pushing the AI up. As it is now, Tropico 2 and The Guild are gathering dust on my desk. Hm... pirates. . .

"Tech win: 3662
Cultural: 1840

With all else being equal on these two games, it was a little shocking to see the difference in score. This was played on 1.035 BTW. I wonder how my score would have differed had I won with a military conquest."

There seems to be a score multiplier associated with the different types of wins. I once rigged it so that on the last turn I could either win militarily, through alliance, or by Beyond Human. The tech win gave almost exactly twice the points of either the alliance or military wins. It looks like the same is true for cultural.

Lesson: If you're anywhere near the tech victory and you're interested in score, finish out the tech victory.

There definitely seems to be something out-of-whack with the scoring algorithm in 1.04.

They are going to normalize all the scores on the metaverse, this has been said many times by Brad, my guess is that they are waiting for a 'final' scoring algo before doing so.

I agree that something seems wrong, at first I thought it was just game version compatibility problems, but it appears that that's not the issue. And if I recall right (I'm not positive on this) Brad posted somewhere that scores should be -higher- in 1.04, so I'm thinking there is something wrong somewhere in the new scoring code.

I don't know if there's anything wrong or if they've just changed it for the "better". I pointed out in another thread that the current code appears to count when you could have won by *any* method as the point to start decaying your final score. So, if you have been close with the last race or two while for years while you go for a cultural win and therefore could have won by an alliance victory, you're going to get a score that reflects that.

My example was a game that I went for cultural and only got 68 points (could have allied with the races I chewed up culturally). I then went back to an older save before alliance was possible and played through until I could win by alliance - got 624 points.

The moral is if you're trying for score, go for the win asap. If you're trying to play for custom goals, you may not get a metaverse worthy score.

The number 2 player(RayChua) has scores over 10k
using the 1.035 version. I seriously doubt he got that
by playing a game quickly. I cant seem to break 4k.
Wonder how he did it, which is why im browsing the
website, looking for how the game is scored to see
what element im missing.

My latest game I went straight for a very fast tech
win on massocistic(highest level). I had to go fast
as the computer was teching at an insane rate. It took
me 3 hours to finish, and I finished in a very short
number of turns(Feb 2193). I guess myy pop was too
low(~720B) and my score reflected that.

But then again my alliance victory I owned 85% of the
pop through military and cultural conquest, but it took
FOREVER. Like 30 hours compared to my 3 hour tech game
win. I dont have the exact numbers, but it was around
Year 2230 and 5 trillion people(This game was only
a few months from a cultural win as well)

From a previous poster, apparently a tech win scores
twice as much as a cultural win, which seems backwards
unless you consider the neccisity of pop.

So I think to get high scores, I have to, take over
most of the galaxy and then win by tech. In my alliance victory, I turned off tech victory condition, else that game would have ended way earlier, as it
took me forever to take over most of the galaxy. Hence,
I have to quickly take most of the galaxy over before
winning by tech.

Im not good enough to do that yet, guess thats why
he is number 2 and im not

You've got it, Staffa

I almost always play with cultural and alliance win off and my objective (unless thwarted by the AI) is to conquer the whole map. And I always play abundant BTW.

When I've finished with my cultural bombing, my tech path would have been completed and it is a matter for me to choose the military or tech victory.

Like others, I've noticed that tech victories earn more than military so why choose the lower score for the same achievement of universal domination?

Grrrr - reference CodeMonkey's post (16), I've never heard of scores decaying before. Does it count if you have a victory condition off (like no cultural victories)? Just because I'm close with a race doesn't mean I want to ally with them, especially if they're caught in one of those never-ending ally-wars.

I don't get too hung up on the scoring in general, but I do wish the basic guidelines were posted somewhere in a sticky. (If there is one, someone please correct me and thanks.)

Feargus, I'm not sure where it was mentioned (one of the endless metaverse bitching threads that are on here), but Brad said that one of the new things that was added as of 1.03.057 and tweaked further in the 1.04b is that the game takes into account how long it took you to win and penalises you for behavior that is regarded as running up the score.

I suspect based upon my experiences with the game since this change that you will find that the only thing that gets a good score is playing to win - that's not a bad thing. When they get around to retroactively processing older scores I expect to see that my 7413 will drop to about 70 points because I know I held back on the last planet and built up my pop until I had to take it or see it flip culturally. I hated feeling like I had to do stuff like that to score well, and now my best scores are the games when I just go for the kill.

Well, I started this and want to add some more info. At no point in the game was I "close" to any alien race. I was "friendly" with two, but never close. Therefore "decay" of my score could not have started. I still don't understand why I scored 1500 points lower winning the same way at a higher difficulty level

Grifman

Well, I take back my defending of the new algortithm in regard to cultural victory: it's totally and completely buggered.

I finished a game culturally tonight: got 28 points, said WTF and went back to an autosave, started up a war and spent a couple of years smashing aliens until I could win by alliance with the Drengin. This was a few years later, completely a "manipulation" of the game, and it scored 548 points.

Might as well turn off cultural victory altogether until this is addressed (and then run everyone's metaverse scores through the new algorithm - of course that would require they get around to doing that for all the multi-thousand point scores that are completely skewing the ranking all out of whack already).

CM - you're getting a little cranky!

Not cranky exactly , just a little peeved to see how skewed their "fix" of scoring was. When the only difference between those two games of any merit was the victory method (my overall pop, tech, influence, etc. were all more or less the same) and there's a 20 fold difference in score, something is very wrong with the algorithm.

The failure to recalculate old metaverse scores is just my personal pet peeve with the game. No harder than it should be to implement, leaving it in the state it is currently bothers me because it's very unfriendly to new players, and even older players who keep submitting and watching our rankings go farther and farther down while the number 1 position is virtually locked with old scores that would only merit a fraction of that if recalculated.

CM, I object to you laying exclusive claim on this peeve as "personal"; I am peeved a lot about this, too.