News: BOTM 83 Results and Congratulations

Well, maybe I made this one a little too hard for noble.
There were three losses submitted, two incomplete games submitted and an additional four abandoned games confessed in the final spoiler.
But not too hard for our new epathlete nocho. His 1640 culture win completed his Eptathlon.


hhhawk took the gold from the challenger save; htadus beat him to Domination by ten years for the silver; and Solyaris got the fastest Spaceship, the cow and the bronze.
Fourth place Jovan Kukic had the fastest Conquest. The-Hawk won fastest Domination by 100 years.
Fastest Diplomatic, c00per also won the bonus challenge: Conqueror award for a level 9 rifle. until someone posts a more promoted unit.


Summary of Medal Winners:

hhhawk: 1380 AD Domination Victory, 186,442 points.

htadus: 1370 AD Domination Victory, 151,578 points.

Solyaris: 1705 AD Spaceship Victory, 145,003 points.



Fastest Finish Award Winners:

Jovan Kukic: 1180 AD Conquest Victory, 143,154 points.

The-Hawk: 1270 AD Domination Victory, 124,952 points.

nocho: 1640 AD Cultural Victory, 58,855 points.

c00per: 1864 AD Diplomatic Victory, 32,110 points.



Other Award Winners:

Alamankarazieff: 1755 AD Domination Victory, 79,477 points.

georgjorge: 1842 AD Spaceship Victory, 54,109 points.

whb: 1814 AD Conquest Victory, 53,790 points.

greatbeyond: 1926 AD Diplomatic Victory, 19,642 points.

afker: 1991 AD Cultural Loss, 5,021 points.

karlis: 1120 AD Conquest Loss, 292 points.

Here's where everyone settled. There was a lot of migration looking for a better start location.



The Small Print:
The numbers by each player's name indicate the turn settled on (starting turn is 0). Players are colour coded by game class (challenger=red, adventurer=blue). Symbols indicate victory condition, if there's no symbol then the player either retired or was defeated. The yellow border indicates the land that was visible at the start of the game.

Challenger Save was taken by hhhawk and Dhoomstriker.
No one realized their need for the Adventurer save.

>> See the full results here.
>> See the updated global rankings here.
>> See the latest Pantheon of Heroes here.
>> Award symbols are listed here.

Yay!

Not a bad list of players to be among, though other than having fulfilled the prerequisites I can hardly claim to be among equals. But hey, who cares.

Something odd: My base score is higher and my finish date earlier than UB40, but my final score is lower. (for the same victory condition). How's that work? Is there some quirk to the scoring I don't know about yet?

Congrats, Nocho!!! I'm still not an eptathlete after so many years, but then I've only recently really tried for it after having mainly focused on medals with dom/conq. Plus, I suck balls at Space and dairy products

whb - doesn't surprise me much as there are a lot of factors that go into the final score, although base score I think is less/or not affected by date. Plus, I think part of it is "when" you conquered stuff as the sooner stuff is yours the sooner it applies to your score. I'm sure someone will stop by with the code though. So, for instance, you may have built/captured more wonders (much smaller impact on score than land/pop, but immediately hits base score), as well as acquired more techs, while UHB grabbed more cities earlier than you which would impact more his final score.

land/pop>>>>wonders/techs, but wonders/tech hit base score immediately, while cities take like 20 turns or so.

Your final score differential is really minor in the large scheme of things, so it could be anything. Another way to possibly look at the final score, I think, is that UHB had a higher calculated final score earlier (mainly due to cities/pop), so he had more score to lose - so to speak - during the "cool down" to your relative finish dates. (final scores deteriorate over time after a certain point, and deteriorate faster later...base scores do not)

As my first GOTM this was insane ! Definitely doing GOTM again.

Greedybob said:

As my first GOTM this was insane ! Definitely doing GOTM again.

Click to expand...

Welcome!

thanks for playing and submitting

@Whb, Lymond

I dont have any source code, but have often looked at this... Final score depends only on base score, date (turn numbers, more accurately), speed and level (and starting score if you do a late ear start, or if the mapmaker thinkers with your starting population for example.), and because of the way the calculation is done, strongly on map size.

Base score is 50% population, 20% land, 20% tech and 10% wonders...

1-Pop is just your pop devide by max pop (estimated for a given map based on available food) * 5000 (to change the 50% to interger map, as cive loves to do.)

2- Land is 2000 * your land tiles / land tiles on map.

3- Tech is 2000 * your techs/(all techs until future tech 1).... (techs are waited by ear... ancient are 1 point each, fusion is worth 6 points...)

4- 1000 * your woderns (includes national, corps, shrines)/all wonders. {but ignore these, see below}

Once you have this base score, this score is exponenientily increases if you win before 2050... BEcause civ loves discreet math they calculate the exponential expansion very weirdly (your math teacher would not approve), but in the end it means very roughly that...

Time (including game speed, because time is in turns) goes in roughly exponentially, while dificulty goes in linearly (+20% per level, so Diety scores double what noble scores...)...

MOre importantly, initial score goes in exponentially while raw score is only linear! This means that map size plays huge role!

Basically, the exponential part of the scoring system is done for each of the 4 categories seperatly. Say, for pop...

(Starting pop/Max possible pop)^(wining turn/total turns.)

So lets say you finish a game in half the total number of turns availible... Starting pop is 1.... On a normal map, max pop is say 1000, where as on a dual it might be 100...

This means this factor is .1 on Dual, and .03 on large (in a denominator), so large would be 3 score 3 times better, for the ame base score.

{Beause of a bug in the code, the wonders do not get exponentially correct for date, but only linearly... This means that they are defacto useless for boosting scoress unless you are finishing near the year 2000, when the exponential term has become near linear as well.}

Deckhand said:

until someone posts a more promoted unit.

Click to expand...

That's very sweet of you

nocho said:

Yay!

Not a bad list of players to be among, though other than having fulfilled the prerequisites I can hardly claim to be among equals. But hey, who cares.

Click to expand...

Congrats, nocho!
Imho, if you are able to get gold and fastest domination (which seems to be the favorite vc among hardcore players), then you rightfully deserve to get your own nude boy statue

Cow isn't needed for BtS Eptathlon.
It's still quite a feat, even if he didn't have any competition for the culture award.
Gold seems the most unreachable for me.

Congratulation nocho

Jastrow said:

@Whb, Lymond

I dont have any source code, but have often looked at this... Final score depends only on base score, date (turn numbers, more accurately), speed and level (and starting score if you do a late ear start, or if the mapmaker thinkers with your starting population for example.), and because of the way the calculation is done, strongly on map size.

Click to expand...

That's what I thought. So I'm confused why: my base score is higher, finish turn earlier, speed and level are the same (set by the map), but final score is lower (compared to a couple of other participants' results).

Could it be a weird Windows / Mac difference?

Congrats, nocho! Your hard work and persistence have paid off!


Good work, hhhawk, with taking the Challenger saved game and scoring the Gold Medal!

whb said:

That's what I thought. So I'm confused why: my base score is higher, finish turn earlier, speed and level are the same (set by the map), but final score is lower (compared to a couple of other participants' results).

Click to expand...

Maybe you can try loading up the final saved game for both of your games and recording the Score values for both of your games. I think that you can get details about the 4 components of Score that Jastrow mentioned by hovering your mouse over top of your Leader in the Scoreboard found at the bottom right of the "main" game view, just above the mini-map. Post the detailed numbers here, as well as the actual Base Scores and Final Scores for both games, to make someone who decides to help you to work through the math have an easy time of it.

It may also be important to get the Score data from 20 turns prior to winning; I'm a bit hazy on this aspect of Score values myself. However, it sounds like that info might help to have, although you can only get that info if you have the saved game and only from UB40 if UB40 also happens to have the saved game from 20 turns prior to winning.

Chances are that the difference is explainable by the numbers, such as by accounting for Jastrow's point that the Wonders component of Score gets weighted differently from the other components due to a bug in the Civ 4 code.

c00per said:

you rightfully deserve to get your own nude boy statue

Click to expand...

Good job, c00per, on your Diplo Victory and thanks for the entertaining humour!

Congrats, nocho! Very impressive.

Also congrats to all the others who finished this game, or participated. Count me as another incomplete game, although I did not get around to submitting my save. This was definitely a very tough game for Noble.

whb said:

That's what I thought. So I'm confused why: my base score is higher, finish turn earlier, speed and level are the same (set by the map), but final score is lower (compared to a couple of other participants' results).

Could it be a weird Windows / Mac difference?

Click to expand...

I doubt it is mac/windows (that would be a grotesque bug!).

Also, only the final score counts... The one 20 or whatever turns earlier is not relevant!

I have no idea what "UB40" is, so I do not know what game you are compairing to... I see 3 possibilities:


1- The initial score (the score you have on turn zero before settling or doing anything was different because a mapmaker added tech or something similar)

2- Your two base scores are very close, and wonders make the difference (very unlikely)

3- Most likely....It is map "size"... I should have been more accurate when I mentioned map size last time... Size here dose NOT mean normal, small, huge, etc... It means:

a: The actual number of land tiles on the map.
b: The number of food bushels on the map at the start of the game (after removing jungle and forrest, I beleive.)

To get a precis explanation of this case, we need for both your game you base score breakdown. If you mouse over you score you will see it. It is made of 8 numbers... For eample:

677/1734
523/1214
180/336
30/325

With that for both games, it will be possible to explain the results.

Dhoomstriker said:

Chances are that the difference is explainable by the numbers, such as by accounting for Jastrow's point that the Wonders component of Score gets weighted differently from the other components due to a bug in the Civ 4 code.

Click to expand...

Yep, that was my thinking after reading Jastrow's explanation. A different weighting of the wonders between base and final score appears to be the one thing that could cause one person's base score to be higher, but the other person's final score to be higher, when playing the same game.

Unfortunately, whb played on a Mac, and UB40 played on Windows. The file formats are different, which means the only people who can load up both games are people who happen to own both a PC and a Mac, and own both versions of Civ! I doubt there are many such people here...

Jastrow said:

I doubt it is mac/windows (that would be a grotesque bug!).

Click to expand...

I doubt it too, although it's impossible to completely rule out that the possibility of tiny differences between the Mac and PC versions of Civ

Jastrow said:

I have no idea what "UB40" is, so I do not know what game you are compairing to... I see 3 possibilities:

Click to expand...

UB40 is a 'who' not a 'what He (or she?) regularly submits games and features in the results, but doesn't generally post much. whb is comparing his BOTM 83 game scores to UB40's BOTM 83 game scores.

(It's also the name of a British reggae-pop band from the 1980's. I'm guessing that they in turn got their name from the name of one of the Government forms used in the UK during the early 1980's to register as unemployed and claim what was then known as 'unemployment benefit' - you had to fill in a form called UB40)

Unfortunate i could not submit my save, I had the fastest win with AP win in 1040AD.

Well played everyone. This game was not easy.

Jastrow said:

I have no idea what "UB40" is, so I do not know what game you are compairing to...

Click to expand...

The BOTM83 submission by UB40. I was looking at the results in the table and just happened to notice it, and thought "hmm, what's happened there?"

1- The initial score (the score you have on turn zero before settling or doing anything was different because a mapmaker added tech or something similar)

Click to expand...

Shouldn't be the case because they are both the same BOTM starting map. (Except for Mac-isation)

3- Most likely....It is map "size"... I should have been more accurate when I mentioned map size last time... Size here dose NOT mean normal, small, huge, etc... It means:

a: The actual number of land tiles on the map.
b: The number of food bushels on the map at the start of the game (after removing jungle and forrest, I believe.)

Click to expand...

Again, shouldn't be the case because they are both the same BOTM starting map.

To get a precis explanation of this case, we need for both your game you base score breakdown. If you mouse over you score you will see it. It is made of 8 numbers... For eample:

677/1734
523/1214
180/336
30/325

With that for both games, it will be possible to explain the results.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't be able to get that for UB40's game.

It's not something I'm bothered by, it's just a bit odd and made me wonder if there's a Mac bug we don't know about.

whb said:

I wouldn't be able to get that for UB40's game.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry. I didn't clue in to the fact that one can't load a saved game from the opposite O/S version. Of course that fact makes sense when thinking about it, as otherwise we wouldn't need a separate set of 4000 BC saved games.

whb said:

It's not something I'm bothered by, it's just a bit odd and made me wonder if there's a Mac bug we don't know about.

Click to expand...

Well, since very few people who participated can load your Mac-versioned saved game, if you take the time to provide the numbers that Jastrow mentioned from your game, I'm sure that someone will kindly be able to go to the trouble to do so for UB40's game, on your behalf.

Thanks for all the congrats, guys. I guess it's a nice high-point in my civ4 career after which it would be wise to call it a day and stop. However, as I'm told that the deplorable sequel to BtS recently got an even worse follow up, I guess I'll stick around with BtS for a while. So I might go for a second "nude boy statue" to fill my days. One has to wonder though how GOTM staff got the physical resemblance so strikingly correct. I sure hope there are no cameras behind the mirrors in my bathroom.