How is normalized score calculated?

theimmortal1

Prince
Joined
Apr 25, 2006
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539
I understand the basics. Earlier victory, higher difficulty means higher normalized score. Also the higher your "basic" score means higher normalized score. And I know wonders/land/tech all contribute to your basic score.

My question goes a bit deeper than that. I want to achieve HOF type normalized scores.

Question 1:
Does the type of victory add to the normalized score? Many of my main big normalized scores were domination victories. But all these victories I could have achieved a conquest victory in 10 more turns if I had the domination box checked off. Would I have gotten a higher score for a conquest victory compared to domination?

Question 2:
Assuming I am going for dominaton/conquest victory. At what point should I decide to end the game compared to building more wonders and increasing population? In other words, say all I have to do is take one more city to win a domination victory in 1500AD. Would I be better off taking the victory then to get a high score or building Oxford Uni, Wall Street, Stat of Lib etc and getting the dom victory in say 1560? Obviously thats just a hypothetical, I just want to how it all relates together.
 
The score formulae were given by Dianthus in posts #82 and #99 in the thread "High Scores seem possibly easier than past Civ games" in the Civ4 Hall of Fame forum. They are highly complex, and depend upon knowing such things as how many techs you have discovered, how many Wonders you have built, the proportion of land tiles you own, your population and the maximum possible population. The type of victory does not affect the score, but the turns taken (as a proportion of turns from start to 2050) has a most powerful effect: winning early is the way to get a good score. Difficulty level also affects the score: there is a factor of 0.5 applied at Settler level, rising by steps to 2.0 at Deity.
I kept notes in one game. had I won in 1826, when my in-game score was 9200, my winning score would have been 82000, but when I did win in 1864 my in-game score had risen to 11700 and my winning score had fallen to 66000 (figures to nearest thousand). So go for victory as soon as possible rather than raising your in-game score. As you doubtless know, you can see the "win this turn" score by mousing over your score shown on screen on the map screen.
 
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see the highest possible score in CivIV. I played on Deity, Marathon, Conquest with 18 civs on duel sized map. I gave myself most early era techs & construction & 6 workers. I put together two elephant armies and quickly conquered all but 1 civ. Then I built wonder after wonder in two good cities I had. My score at 1500 BC was 1,360,891. After 1500 BC my score slowly started going down no matter how many new wonders I built. That seems to be a key number because I repeated it several times and the highest scores were always around 1500 BC. Found it an interesting experiment. This was just an experiment so don't whine about cheating. I've only beaten the game on Deity twice without cheating and both times involved a good bit of luck and didn't end until the modern era.
 
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