Score

Thalassicus · Mar 20, 2012

I'd like to bring cultural victory scores closer to conquest victories. Each number below is the points we get if we have all of that category. For example, if we control all the population on the map we'd get 7000 points from population score. These values are modified by world size, speed, and difficulty factors I don't plan to change.

v130 (also vanilla)

5000 Population
2000 Land
1000 Wonders
2000 Tech

v131.31

6000 Population
0000 Land
1000 Wonders
3000 Tech

My thinking is when we own more land, we typically have more population, so wide empires get a double benefit in vanilla. Shifting that to focus on population and tech should be more accurate. Do these seem like good values? Is there anything you would adjust?

Jaybe · Mar 20, 2012

1000 Wonders

How about zero for Wonders? I firmly believe that the appeal of wonders should be solely their benefits, which are often (though not always) powerful enough.

There are also 60 :c5culture:

policies. If there were some way to get points for each of them ....

--
I finally discovered your Civ V Forum Icons link in your sig.

Txurce · Mar 20, 2012

Jaybe said:
How about zero for Wonders? I firmly believe that the appeal of wonders should be solely their benefits, which are often (though not always) powerful enough

Wouldn't the same be true of population? And techs?

Jaybe · Mar 20, 2012

Txurce said:
Wouldn't the same be true of population? And techs?

But, what WOULD you base score on, then??

Yes, I know you are just disagreeing with me.

albie_123 · Mar 20, 2012

Land should be a part of score, so that a true conquest victory lands more points than a 'rush the capitals' victory.

Seek · Mar 21, 2012

@Jaybe - Score is an abstraction for "how well a civ is doing" and getting Wonders is an important part of that for a small/tall empire. I agree we should be able to assign points from SPs, but since we can't I don't see a better way to award that type of empire. As it is now, even if I'm killing every other civ in every metric, my score is always behind the wide civs. If you decide you want to buff your score by trying to acquire cities with wonders that's your choice, but I don't think that is a common practice amongst most players. I think that the score modifier from turns should be raised, but I can appreciate that many players would find it less fun. But score matters very little to me (aside from being annoyed when I win fantastically and the game tries to insult me by calling me some also-ran leader

) and the changes are fine imo.

Txurce · Mar 21, 2012

Seek said:
But score matters very little to me (aside from being annoyed when I win fantastically and the game tries to insult me by calling me some also-ran leader).

I'm always surprised when this happens. It's like, "what game were you watching, Mr. Scorekeeper?"

Jaybe · Mar 21, 2012

@Seek - Yes, I am just currently frustrated with my own greed factor at targeting wonders when trying to improve my score before my win. SP greed I currently have less of a problem with because I emphasize their accumulation (since they ALSO can be quite powerful).

Personally, I am quite happy with civ5's not awarding points for quick wins (civ4 was quite aggravating for me in that way). That's probably because I am sort of a slacker/plodder kind of guy.

Thalassicus · Mar 21, 2012

@albie
Land and population are basically the same thing - a traditional domination victory will have a very high population score from all those cities we capture.

@Jaybe
As Seek pointed out, wonders are one of the few things which specifically favor tall empires, and the goal is to increase their score. This is why I considered raising the score for wonders, but kept it the same in deference to your request to lower them. I do wish we could add points for social policies. Sadly, in this area of the game we can only modify those variables listed above.

albie_123 · Mar 21, 2012

@Thal, not when on the roll with conquest. I often raze plenty of cities I take, lowering my population in comparison to the land I own.

Thalassicus · Mar 21, 2012

Based on the notes by firaxis I've read in the files, the population score does not depend on our population alone. It depends on what proportion of the world's total population is ours. By conquering the entire map, we control 100% of the population and therefore get the maximum score, regardless of what our actual population is or how many cities we razed.

albie_123 · Mar 21, 2012

Oh, dang. I had no idea. Sorry.

(Shows how much attention I pay to the score

)

Thalassicus · Mar 21, 2012

Yeah, I don't pay attention to it much either, but it's easy to change so I figured I'd adjust things.

Torvald · Mar 27, 2012

Hi,

I finished a game of v135 last night and noticed the game scores were awfully low.

At turn 277, (when the darn Incas won a cultural victory) my game score was only 197 points, even though I'd conquered everyone else on my fairly large continent and had fourteen full fledged cities up and running.

I realize that game scores don't win the game, but I'm used to using them as a rule of thumb indicator to measure my progress agaisnt other players.

If possible, could we please have the game scoring calculation tweaked to be more in line with how it used to be?

Txurce · Mar 28, 2012

I had the same thought: that in-game scores weren't as entertaining on a comparative basis. I realized that I often look at these, even though my final one is usually meaningless to me.

mitsho · Mar 28, 2012

Yes, the scores seemed to low as well in my last game. I don't care much about them regarding victory, but they should portray the strength of the civ at the moment, if possible

Txurce · Mar 28, 2012

mitsho said:
Yes, the scores seemed to low as well in my last game. I don't care much about them regarding victory, but they should portray the strength of the civ at the moment, if possible

It could be argued that the current system does portray relative strengths - just differently than before, and possibly more accurately. I don't know whether this is the case, but the recent change is more of a negative than a positive in my eyes because the spread between civs isn't as easy to see, and less sense of progress is "felt."

rhammer640 · Mar 28, 2012

Txurce said:
It could be argued that the current system does portray relative strengths - just differently than before, and possibly more accurately. I don't know whether this is the case, but the recent change is more of a negative than a positive in my eyes because the spread between civs isn't as easy to see, and less sense of progress is "felt."

I agree, the lower the value of score the harder it is to differentiate, when i meet a bunch of civs early/mid game and their scores are 27, 27, 27, 28, 26, 27 its really hard to get a grasp on who is doing well, etc.

Zaldron · Mar 28, 2012

rhammer640 said:
I agree, the lower the value of score the harder it is to differentiate, when i meet a bunch of civs early/mid game and their scores are 27, 27, 27, 28, 26, 27 its really hard to get a grasp on who is doing well, etc.

Is that harder to differentiate than 270, 270, 270, 280, 260, 270? I'm apparently the only one that *likes* the new scores. I only use score to show relative power between civs and it always seemed so arbitrary that you started with a seemingly random number of points. Having a rebalanced score actually seems to give me a better picture of each civ's relative power.

Txurce · Mar 28, 2012

Zaldron said:
Is that harder to differentiate than 270, 270, 270, 280, 260, 270? I'm apparently the only one that *likes* the new scores. I only use score to show relative power between civs and it always seemed so arbitrary that you started with a seemingly random number of points. Having a rebalanced score actually seems to give me a better picture of each civ's relative power.

It wouldn't be harder to differentiate than 270, 270, 280, except that's not what generally happened. Instead the spreads in the old system were wider. You saw the differences more easily, and had more of a sense of upward movement or plateauing.

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