Is anyone getting a peaceful high score?

from Stardock Forums
I ask because since the new scoring system went into place, my trivial "tiny" map alliance victory on tough, where my ally did most of the fighting scored 7 times the points of my far from trivial but peaceful "huge" map cultural victory, also on tough, and in just about the same amount of time. I can't see any reason for the point difference, unless the new scoring system doesn't like peaceful wins. In the peaceful game, the only "war" I fought was with a minor power that was poisoning a planet, and that war involved one dreadnought and one combat transport sacking a single garrisoned ship and taking the planet.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I don't think it's that it doesn't like peaceful wins, but rather it looks like the algorithm punishes you *severely* for dicking around when you had an opportunity to win some other way.

Example: I had a game I wanted to win culturally, so I pushed through as fast as I could to build up culture "routes", flipped most everything and won in a timely fashion - got 68 points.

The catch was that the only races left alive were me, the Torians, and the Altarians - and I was Saintly so everybody had been close to me for years. I could have won via an alliance victory ages ago and the game knew it.

So I went back to a previous save before I was close with both races, and allied as soon as it was possible - got 624 points, nearly 10X as much. Neither win was any more or less peaceful.

Right now except for some very unusual circumstances (you're pure evil and only the Altarians are left and they hate you), cultural wins are going to be score losers extreme since there's usually an opportunity to take an alliance win somewhere along the way. The moral is: go for the killing blow when you can or don't worry about your metaverse score.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Trust me, I didn't pass up an earlier win on either of those games. I've only done that once, and that was on my highest score (wanted to see how well Excaliburs did in combat so I held up my tech victory).

I guess I'm playing far enough above my skill level that a quick victory just isn't going to happen.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Many people seem to feel that cultural victories get the lowest scores, period. This would seem to be supported by Code Monkey's experiment with cultural vs. alliance victory. With that said, it seems kind of silly that an alliance victory would score *so* much higher than cultural. Alliance win must be the easiest method after cultural. Heck, if you judge by my performance, it is the easiest way to win.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
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).
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Culture doesn't pay, but I still win with it anyway! Well, maybe not the latest game I am still working on. I have determined that I need to see another kind of victory, preferably conquest or tech, so I turned off culture wins in it. Maybe I am in a culture rut, or maybe it is the easiest way to win. Time to learn some new tricks.