There's nothing on it in the Wiki. There has been quite a bit written about it in these forums but it would probably be hard to find the relevant posts. I'd even have difficulty finding most of it and I've contributed to pretty much every discussion that there's ever been on the subject. This can be a very long discussion and I'm not going to be able to give all of it to you in a single reply but I will try to hit the high points.

Basically your score is determined by four things. Your population, income, military rating and research spending. The best thing to do is to look at these four graphs as displayed under the Stats & Graphs tab of your Civilization Manager. Your score is essentially the sum of the "area under the curve" (i.e. the integral) of each of these four components of score. Also your total score is "front end weighted" which means that even modest values of each of the four components of score that are achieved early in the came can be worth as much or even more than high values achieved much later in the game.

I'm pretty sure the mechanics of score are realtively well understood but getting into the details usually adds more confusion than it clears up. Suffice to say that the earlier you can essentially win the game the higher your score will be but winning the game early doesn't mean ending it early. This is because you need to achieve high values of the four components of score and hold them for long periods of time to maximize "the area under curve". That's not to say that any arbitrarily high score can be achieved by "milking" the game because you do hit diminishing returns relatively quickly but the highest scores are accomplished by games that are essentially won in about 2 years with income, pop, military and tech spending maximized and then holding those values for another 3 to 4 game years.

One of the simplest score maximizations is your military component which can be accomplished by building a military starbase array consisting of 24 military SB's whose area of influence (AOI) overlaps onto two parsecs and then building literally thousands (I personally usually build about 17,000) of ships and placing them in the military SB array's AOI to gain the 1500 point per ship bonus. That's the easy part and it's something that everyone does. The hard part is really doing everything faster, better and most importantly *earlier* in the game and that is something that takes a long time to master.

One other point is that games are reported in years and so any game ended on or before Dec 22nd counts as the same length. So most folks always end the game on Dec 22nd. Usually people will get themselves to a winning position with only one AI left with usually a single planet and then build out the galaxy with stockmarkets allowing your population and income to reach it's max while researching tech and building ships for their SB array. Once your pop stops growing then you pretty much reach the limit of pop and income and you'll find that your score growth will slow considerably and eventually stop.

As an example I will set myself up so that I can end the game by the end of the 2nd year and then I'll save it and as a test end the game and see what score I'd get. For me this is usually around 300K or so. I then wait out another year and do another test and generally my score will be 600K so that 1st "extra" year is worth an extra 300K points. Waiting another year beyond that nets about 150K, and the year beyond that 75K and each year the extra points will essentially halve. You can see that after a few years of this the point becomes moot and it's time to end it. Anyway it will take quite some time to get to these levels but the halving of each years point increase is pretty consistent no matter what your current scoring ability.

Hope this helps.

Are these tips equally as true for ToA? What is a high score for ToA?

My scoremonster friend Mumble forgot to mention that the *type* of victory is a major factor in your score.

The game is inherently biased towards war wins. I forget the exact modifiers and which one goes with what type, but if climbing ranks in the official Metaverse is your top goal, a war win is a must. The AltMeta addresses this problem by providing six ranking ladders, three of which exclude military victories.

TA added a new win type, Ascension, which is more or less a 'soft' military win. It scores better than anything besides complete conquest, and it counts on the war ladders on the AltMeta. But you don't have to do all the scut work of grinding through all those helpless neighbors after you achieve overwhelming firepower superiority--just take those crystals and keep both them and your main territory defended.

I don't know if this holds for all games, or if mine glitched, but a terror star victory gave about 0.15. I finished a 7 or 8 year abundant all with a terror star and got less than 19k out of it.

On the final turn, there were 6 planets left. Three got invaded, the other three got blown up -> 18.5k

Reloaded, on same turn blew up three, then invaded -> 250k

Sound's like there's not much checking into that's required here. Certainly verification from a second source is helpful, but ending the same game on the same turn two different ways is the best that anyone can do. I'm convinced.

Defeat = 0.15 [edited]
Tech = 1.0
Alliance = 1.2
Influence = 1.4
Military = 2.0
Ascension = 2.0

Mumblefratz is best to answer this, but I seem to recall that each Difficulty was a slight modifier to score- that is Tough is equal to 1.0, Painful 1.1, Cripplin 1.2, Maso 1.3, Obscene 1.4, Suicidal 1.5 and vice versa in the oppoiste direction.  Though, obviously I can't say that with any certainity, just experience and earlier discussions back in the day

I'm not totally sure but this was also discussed in the Relative scores of different victory types thread.

Basically the score modifer was assumed to be difficulty to the 1.1 power but there is a question as to what numeric representation of difficulty was used. One assumption is that it's the AI intelligence level shown in the following list that's taken to the 1.1 power.

* Cakewalk = 15 (Fool)
* Easy = 20 (Dunce)
* Simple = 30 (Beginner)
* Beginner = 40 (Sub-Normal)
* Normal = 50 (Normal)
* Challenging = 65 (Bright)
* Tough = 80 (Intelligent) *Full AI capability from here on*
* Painful = 85 (Gifted)
* Crippling = 95 Genius)
* Masochistic = 100 (Incredible)
* Obscene = 120 (Godlike)
* Suicidal = 150 (Ultimate)

This would result in ratio of about 12 between suicidal and cakewalk since (150^1.1)/(15^1.1)=12.6. However this seems a lot larger than I would expect. IIRC I would expect the ratio between suicidal and cakewalk to be 2 or 3 at most. But I don't think anyone has really investigated this aspect of scoring in a whole lot of detail.

The problem is that you can't play a single game and end it at different difficulty levels and so it's tough to get an "apples to apples" comparison. However the ratio between suicidal and obscene that is implied by the above is (150^1.1)/(120^1.1)=1.28. I suppose a 28% scoring bonus to suicidal from obscene is possible but that still seems quite a bit larger than I would expect from my experience.

Ah, this does make more sense, 0.15 for a defeat seems reasonable.

Gross income, not net.  If I make 100BC/wk and my expenses are 95BC/wk, all other things being equal, my score is going to be identical to making 100BC/wk with 5BC/wk expenses.

However, all other things are not equal, and the empire with more expenses will generally have made more progress in other areas that score depends on.

You don't receive score for techs, or money.  You receive score for research and income.  If an AI gives you 3000BC, your score won't increase at all just because of it.  If an AI gives you 5 techs, your research score won't increase, either.  Your research score is essentially how much you spend on research-so creativity doesn't actually help your score, either.

That said, it doesn't really hurt it, it's just a marginal difference assuming you "turn off" research sooner because of it.  Furthmore, research is by far the lowest of the contributors to score, so apart from actually researching the techs you need, it can essentially be safely ignored.

{blink} {blink}

Maybe I can just take a course in this?

On the otherhand, never mind - I refuse to play to maximize my score in any game where the words "Score" and "Integral" are mentioned in the same sentence.

In fact, the heck with it - I'm playing my next game on cakewalk, just so I can beat the AI up and feel better about my intelligence - {G}. Because of you Mumblefratz, the Tor are going to die a meaningless, painful death.

See what you did?

Jonnan

I understand the feeling and you hadn't even yet read the succeeding post which is where the real complexity lies.

As I said earlier many people could care less about score and there is nothing wrong with that. Play the way you enjoy and you'll keep playing. Play the way you think others want you to play and you'll get bored or annoyed and quit.

But if a high score is part of what you enjoy and the tedium of creating a perfect galaxy is part of your fun then surprisingly this *can* increase your enjoyment of the game.

Yes I have but Mag's game made me rethink this. Of course part of it involved geting a 65% bonus *per mining resource* that was achieveable only in ToA as 39% per mining resource is the best you can do in DL (and DA right?). Add in an extra one or two mining resources of each type in the ToA immense galaxy and you can easily exceed double the bonus levels (income, research and military of course the critical ones for score) that can be achieved in DL or DA.

But yeah the actual tech's have no bearing nor do techs traded or stolen.

Certianly there are tradeoffs in every game and which is best is probably version dependent. It all depends on things like how much are ship maintenance costs in one version versus another and many other subtle differences. Ships for instance have a far lower support cost in DA versus DL. I think this is discussed in detail somewhere in that million point thread that I mentioned. For example Livonya had 50,000 ships in one of his DA games and was still able to purchase/build more. In DL with only 17,000 1/1 fighters my ship support approched 200K per turn and once these were upgraded the ship support was about 3 million bc per turn. Clearly there was no way I could ever get that many ships in a DL game, support costs would choke off my income long before I reached those totals. This is a huge difference in what can be done in different versions.

In any case it is very difficult and most likely wrong to make any significant cross version comparisons because of these subtle but far reaching differences. For even though I could never get 50K ships in DL, my 17K fully upgraded ships achieved a military rating of over 14 million and was done far earlier in the game than Livonya maxed out his military, plus his 50,000 ships gave him a military rating of only 10 million. This further highlights the version differences.

In any case the point I was trying to make was that yes I *used* to assume that it was best in all cases to just take the "low hanging fruit" when it came to research and spend your resources in other areas. However, now I'm saying that is no longer so obviously true to me, at least not particularly in ToA versus DL/DA.

I think the bottom line is never say never.

I don't know about prove a point but I do know that he looked for ways to avoid the grind of ship building. I know in that game his military score came from about 5K maxed out huge hulls (along with the aforementioned huge 65% per military resource bonus times 8 or 9 military resources) that were bought on long term lease much, much earlier in the game then the bulk of Livonya's ships and even earlier than my 17K ship upgraded during year 2 of the game. The end result is that he exceeded a 5 million military rating very early and then overbuilt stockmarkets with discovery spheres until his income balanced his research spending. So he then ended up the game with another 3-4 years of 1 million bc per turn income and with all the research bonus that he had the 400K bc's that he spent on research probably netted close to 800K RP's per turn to directly add to his tech score.

Could he have reached 1.2 million if he gave up some of his tech score for ship building. Perhaps, but who really knows? Not me, at least not yet.

I was planning to milk points this last game of mine.  I turned of all victory modes but conquest, disallowed surrenders, and yet when I got the last civ down to two planets it told me that I was "culturally dominating the galaxy" and that the game would end in ten turns. 

How do I turn that off?