How to get a max. normalized score

Hi,

(this is my first post in this forum).
I want to get a maximum normalized score. Normally I'm playing Monarch and my score is in the 8000 region (Iwan the Terrible) but I want to reach higher levels.

1. What are your normalized scores (when greater than 8000)?
2. Which difficulty level is the best to get a max. score?
3. What is giving how much score points?

Please gimme some tips to improve my score!
Regards,
Spaghetti

Most good players normalized scores on Noble or higher hover around 30000-60000 upon victory. Better players will score up to 100000. In games where players go specifically for score, normalized scores at victory of around 150000 or so are possible.

Generally, the difficulties less than Noble do not give much normalized scores at least in my experience. Monarch is the best for normalized score, but it varies person to person. As a general rule, just have fun!

Score points are calculated based on four things: population, land, technology, and wonders. The more of each you have, the better off you are. Welcome to the forums!!!

I dont know that there is a best difficulty level for maximizing your score. I've seen scores in the Hall of Fame of 500,000+ on Warlord difficulty. There does seem to be a pretty good correlation between amount of land and score. Maps without much water and easy movement (pangaea, great plains, oasis, lakes) seem to yield higher scores.

High scores almost always go to domination victories. The highest-weighted score component is population, and domination victories tend to give you a high population. So in general, conquering the world and keeping most cities in as short a time as possible will give you a good score.

If you really want to try to max out your score, you should build as many farms as possible and run a specialist economy (SE) rather than a cottage economy (CE). (In this case, the Pyramids is the must-have wonder for an early switch to Representation.) Once you have the military techs you need to finish your domination, beeline straight for Biology, which gives irrigated farms +1 food. Your population and score will start to shoot up. You'll have to focus on health/happiness resources and buildings in your biggest cities to keep them growing. And you can try to delay your domination victory by stopping your conquest when your land area is 5% points below the land area required for domination. Watch your normalized score each turn and when its starting to flatten out, capture all the big cities left on the map and expand your borders to trip the domination victory. For more info on how to run up the score, search the forums for "milking".

For a high score, win quickly. There is an element in the score formula that starts sharpening its teeth around 1800AD at Normal speed and really starts to bite in the later 1800s, gnawing lumps off your score even while you try to build it up by getting bigger (and more) cities, and more land, techs and wonders. My best score of 87000 or so was a Cultural win with only 10 cities, a compact empire, as many wonders as I could build and relatively few techs, but I won in about 1350 IIRC - with the assistance of "no barbarians" and "always peace" so that I needed just one unit in each city, to keep the citizens happy.

cairo140 said:

Most good players normalized scores on Noble or higher hover around 30000-60000 upon victory. Better players will score up to 100000. In games where players go specifically for score, normalized scores at victory of around 150000 or so are possible.

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I disagree with the "good" part of that statement. What you really mean I think are "warmonger players that win early".

Because the screwy way that the score is computed in CIV gives more bias to an early victory than anything else. You get a bigger score for killing the other civs lone warrior in 3800BC than you do for totally dominating the world from sheer land mass in 2050.

If you want to see a ridiculous score, make a huge pangea with max civs at highest possible level. Use worldbuilder to give yourself a modern armor or two right next to every other civs city in 3900BC and wipe them out.

I did that once before the 1.61 patch and the score was over 200k something.