CM, you're right about the fact that alliance victory is only possible if you're the dominating power or equally sharing it. But at that point it is a lot less tedious just to ally yourself with everyone than wiping them out bit by bit. Of course, if you have cultural victory enabled, that is another option...

~SDC~

I had enough medals to post here I would echo RayChua and say thanks for making the game better and better - it was great at 1.02!

Vridian, I guess the question is: should your score reflect your skillfully winning the game, or manipulating the system through "tedium"?

The way the game is designed (and I have no problems with this aspect) is the AI behaves rationally - generally speaking, even far more rationally than yourself. So, when you find yourself in a 2 or 3 way friendly scenario with trade going on there is simply no way that you can lose from that point out because barring you switching alignments or becoming an ass and demanding tribute from your "friends", the AIs aren't going to go psycho and stab you in the back.

As it stands now, though, you've got a choice, avoid the tedium and and take the early win but only get 1/4 to 1/2 of the score you will get by taking the 2nd choice. The 2nd choice is just keep playing until you control a significant majority of the map and then either attack the few remaining planets for the military or take the much later alliance win.

Regardless of which choice you make, your victory is assured, so why does the "illegitimate" choice score so much better? Your real victory was when you made the alliance win possible in the first place, not when you then waited things out for a bigger score. By finding a sweet spot for letting territory, population, and such of your allies count towards your score, you have a win-win situation in my book.

I did take my medium/common/crippling to its absurd extreme, researching all techs through Beyoyd Human, getting the vast majority of wonders and trade goods, and, oh yeah, wasting 20 years of game time. Result: more than 4 times the score. Blech.

For the curious, even though Beyond Human and Final Frontier now take much longer to research, the tech win is still much less valuable (basically, final score * (1/3)).

Hopefully, this post will be grossly obsolete by this time tomorrow.

"Um, pop exploiting on 1.044 is very effective, thats a
known issue with 1.044.

Its been demonstrated by both sergey and myself in this
thread several times." Staffa

Staffa, I saw my experiment as dealing with the society/tech milking rather than pop per say. But you are right to say that the obviously larger pop also contributed to the higher score.

Couldn't resist joining in the fun on making scoring suggestions.

I would like to suggest that military victories be made highly dependent on the speed to victory. Afterall, the military victory path is meant to be brutal campaigns aimed at reducing enemies to space dust as soon as one can.

For peaceful victory paths like Alliance, Cultural and Tech, I have no issues with using pop, societal and technological development as the yardsticks for success.

The trick is of course how to balance the scorings between victory conditions such as neither the aggressive rusher nor the peaceful builder is overly rewarded or penalised. Currently, builders get the edge.

OK, RayChua, how about this weakness in your plan:

Things are extremely balanced, you slog it out militarily because the AIs are going to take forever to flip culturally. You finally get things down to where you are close to the military win but you're 200 turns past where you would get your prime score, so you make peace and win culturally.

I'll say it yet again: other than figuring out ways to balance certain things that need to be done (early alliance win being my pet one), victory condtion should have as absolutely little to do with the calculation as possible.

Because if for some reason you think my weakness example as being absurd, it's exactly where we already are with cultural. There's no point to actually finishing a game culturally because of the "corrections" (that were largely implemented because of the whining about how it was too easy and scored too much). Now, you just use culture to take most of the galaxy without the micromanagement of a military campaign before declaring war in the last stages and getting the fat military victory score.

You're right about the victory condition sometimes having nothing to do with the way the game is actually won. Many a tech and military victories are actually cultural ones (mass culture flipping) in disguise.

This is a tough one to solve and one which ultimately may lead nowhere.

I actually like the balance on larger masochistic maps.

i tend to win via combo of cultural flipping and
military conquest. I rather enjoy this.

Smaller maps are almost pure military.

I think the balance for cultural flipping(at least on
masochistic) is much better. its still not hard,
but its not the mindless joke it was before.


[Message Edited]

From recent expierence with one sector games I found that it is not so easy to get tech win just defending your small empire. Because of it takes a lot of time to research Final Frontier with resources of small empire, you should during all this time keep the balance between majors. If one major dominates other you can just get cultural defeat. I think that all above shows that in existing scoring system tech victory has too large penalty.

Sergey, I agree. I've played some single system games as well (not submitted) and found basically what you did. We had way too much "correcting" going on in response to the whining from people who had, in my opinion, no understanding whatsoever why Beyond Humans were the highest scoring games. They, and even Brad to a lesser degree, looked at the Metaverse and decided that since 7/10 of the top scoring games were BHuman, there must be something "flawed" with that victory path.

Never mind that 7/10 of the top scoring games were on Gigantic maps where anything but a tech victory is almost always pure agonistic tedium to achieve and that on top of that it scored higher because in a longer game you had higher pop, tech, influence, etc.

Similar things happened with cultural victory.

What they need to do imo is study the metaverse data to see how long the various victory types take under different map sizes and densities as well as difficulties. Then, with a large margin for error because we don't want to be punishing people for individual play styles, you set up a three (or more) turn time ranges for each victory path on each of the map/difficulty settings: {0 < X: get 25% bonus to score for "finishing early"}, {X < Y < Z: get no bonus because you've finished within normal ranges}, {Z < Infinity: lose 25% for taking too long and milking things}.

Now, odds are my bonus/penalties need some more thinking, and we might need more than three brackets, but the above type system allows people to win with each of victory paths and see good scores because other than time to victory relative to that path, the victory type itself has no direct effect on your score.

Um, CM, Sergey, your taking an absurd posistion, one
where you artifically limit yourself to one sector, and
drawing conclusions on how this will effect gameplay
for tech victories across normal games. You can of course
but you have to keep in mind the reality that your starting
from.

So winning by tech is difficult when you only control
one system, well duh, winning is difficult period.

If you can achieve an alliance victory, a tech victory
is just a matter of time(granted ALOT of time, but
thats just tedium, not equiviliant to challange).

There are situtations where you can win by tech, but not
alliance, maybe not many, but there are, hence
tech is easier then alliance.

Of course, in your artifically limited situtation
cultural and military victories are not merely
difficult, but impossible, so tech is the easiest of all 4
cases. So long as you do not confuse tedium
with challange of course. And the very unlikely possibility
that a minor race wipes out all the majors, which has happened

Now that said, I actually favor a flat or nearly flat
scoring system across victory types, relying on
relative domination of galaxy/speed being the actual
determining factors. I find the current valuation
of tech victories to be uneccesarly low. I do object
strenously to them being worth the most, as they were
in 1.039, it is still the easist path to victory.

Edit: forgot to consider using terror stars to destroy all
non sector systems, that would also be a military victory. But
still harder.
[Message Edited]

Oh, come on, Staffa, you know better than to call the above absurd. I've observed the exact same phenomena regarding the tech penalty in *every* game I've played to where it was possible. Somewhere on this board is even where I've documented how much worse the score was in perfectly normal scenarios (e.g. take tech, look at score, reload and take an alliance victory 1 turn before, get double the points).

And I take offense to the ignorant statement that tech victories were ever worth more. There was an artifact in people's play styles for maximizing metaverse scores that made them appear inflated. So Brad hosed them. Now, nobody should ever try for a tech victory unless there simply is no other alternative. The problem never was with tech victories, it was with the utter lack of play balance on gigantic maps and the over valuing of pop (which has largely been fixed, but we're still not revisiting lifting the tech and cultural *penalties*).

CM, you should actually read what I wrote.

I called the posistion of limiting yourself to one
sector absurd. Not the conclusions that you drew from
it, which were just wrong. Nor your suggestion for
how games should be scored, which I did have not read
close enough to actually understand, math hates me.

Btw. in 1.039 tech victories were worth the most by a
longshot. Your statement that "I take offense to the
ignorant statement that tech victories were ever worth
more. There was an artifact in people's play style
for maximizing metaverse scores that made them appear
inflated"

is very ignorant

You think your the only one to try to submit the same
game at the same turn with different victories conditions
met?

A military victory was worth half of what a tech
victory was worth, with the exact same everything except
two things. Tech, military victory lacked beyond human
of course. And planets, military victory controlled one
more system.

Time, pop, wonders, economy, level of tech through
beyond human, all the same. Military was half the
score that tech was.

Well, I'll take your word for tech victories being worth more once upon a time for the sort of maps you play. I never experienced that phenomenon and found much the opposite in my testing (using some flavor of 1.03). Worse, of course, was when the recalc went through the last time, the few 'respectable' tech victories I'd submitted were just slaughtered by the needless penalties.

At least we agree on removing as much as humanly possible the effects of victory type from scoring. There's no good reason why if you have within a handful of turns of one another a choice of cultural, tech, or alliance that there should be any difference in their scores.

Agreed

This is true only if you have more or at least equal power with ally. In this case you can break alliance and go to tech victory. In my case after breeking alliance I'll be defeated very soon.



I had situation when I have won alliance, but can't win tech, just because cultural defeat.



This situation may be very unlikely with abundant planets, but when all majors have initially 2-3 systems, just after one major sucssed in capturing let say 2-3 extra systems from minor or other major, this major become dominant and eventually wipe out all others or may be go to alliance with some of them. I think that this is typical situation for rare planets with mapsizes medium and less.

Sergey, about the minors wiping out the majors, I think
you read me wrong

A minor can wipe out all the majors if a major dominates
the map and is evil when the fundementalist strike,
and/or the I-League gets lucky.

Even if minors own 90% of the systems, if all the
majors are dead, you win a military victory.

Ive heard stories of it happening.

As for losing a cultural victory, perhaps you have a
point, but then again im cheap, if i cant win a
cultural victory, I turn it off But I will concede
with cultural victory on, this would pose a problem.

As for alliance, once you can 'win' an alliance victory
by allying up with the remaining Ai that is now 'close'
to you, you just neglect to actually ally up and
proceed to a tech victory. The situtations where
you become close isnt apt to change baring some
of the random events that you can protect yourself
through espionage.

Yes, i read wrong I talk about one major wipe out all others.



I'm talking about cultural defeat, this is something new for me which I met for the first time during my last game. I lost game due to cultural defeat, when one major culturally dominate Galaxy



This is true only if you off alliance victory, otherwise you can't just neglect ally you should break alliance

Er Sergey, your relations can get 'close' with an Ai
without you actually allying up with them. If you
don't ally, no alliance victory. They still wont
attack you though while close, and that being close
isnt likely to change.

I realy never check this, but I think that it is very difficult to stay just close with absolutely dominant major, after this major wipe out others and minors it certainly will start demand tributes which I can't afford for a long time

The scores finally recalculated, but problem not solved my 1.044 game have score 10692 comparing to 6000-7000 in very similar 1.04 games. And it seems that Staffa maso large game also have heavily reduced score. Somewhere in this or other thread Frogboy told that my game will be scored about 6600 which is ok. The question is is this final (at least for some time) scoring ?

I still think the scoring thingy seems off. My last two submitted games have not scored above 1000. In one of those, I won on Painful difficulty with medium size, having completed virtually all the trades good and wonders in the galaxy, researching all available tech, and winning a tech victory. I understand tech victories aren't worth that much...but it would seem to me that game was worth more than the 344 points it was given!
[Message Edited]

My large maso game lost about 50% to drop to 4500
Which is 33% less then what I got prior to 1.044.
While your large crippling game droped 50% to 11000
which is still 50% more then what you got in 1.040 and over
twice what I got in my higher level game.

[Message Edited]

Of coruse, your game was played out to 2240, or 50
years beyond when you won it, while mine was played
to 2205. I still think we will need to agree not to
play out to 2210, it does not appear that the dev's
are willing to create a system that prevents this
abuse.