Why am I Dan Quayle?

I just finished a Marathon game at Noble level on a large continent map, playing Asoka (by random selection). I've attached the game at the state just before I "backstabbed" Roosevelt.

Poor guy, Roosevelt just kept following me around and building cities on top of those I razed. If you look at the game, I've first suckered him to wipe out Monty's last city for me and he did it for free. He succeeded in doing that and I again suckered him into a war with the Chinese, also for free.

This guy apparently trusts me a lot coz he leaves very small armies in each of his cities except for the main ones on his continent but those are small compared to the armies I've amassed. In short, even while he was at war at my behest, I wiped him out and then worked on what remained of Quin's pathetic civ. I had to search the map for his last city...the bastard had gone in hiding!

For those newbies like me interested in seeing how I did it, I've got armies in all continents except the one in the North that Roosevelt occupied. It isn't obvious, but I've got 11 galleons brimming with artillery and calvary just outside his border, in between the northeastern part of my continent and the southeastern part of his.

Anyway, here are my questions:

1. At the end of this game, which was in 1999, I was said to have displayed the leadership qualities of Dan Quayle? What gives? I wiped out all 8 rivals, at one time waging an active war with three of them simultaneously (Catherine, Napoleon and Monty)? So why am I still tagged as Dan Quayle?

2. Second and most important, I've tried my best to use city specialization, trying to allocate few commerce cities amidst those that are purely production. And yet at one point, I've had to pull back the Science slider down to 30% so I won't go broke, something I knew was a no-no. So I know I'm still not doing things right. I might have only a few commerce cities. I need to know what's the best way, given the current cities I have to balance out commerce and production.

Will appreciate your comments, suggestions and advice.

I honestly the comparison thing is based on score. when I get around 8000, im usually near the middle. If I lose, near the bottom(score for losing was about 4000. I reloaded the game from a good year, won, and got a score of 8000, near the middle). and if I decide upon an early 1900's victory(domination of course) I get 25k and the augustus rank.

so my question is, what year did you win and at what score?

So it's all about the score? I won the game by Conquest in 1999 and my score was in the high 2000s. So this tells me that I should 1) win earlier and 2) expand my civ even though I don't need the extra cities. Weird. I had less than 10 cities total, if I remembered it correctly. Oh well...I could try reloading the game, deferring my conquest of Roosevelt until I have over 20 cities and then wipe him out.

that's my theory anyway. I don't think the roosevelt thing should matter too much unless approval rating is taken into account. also with all those cities draining the economy and seeing as you had teched slowly due to too many wars (gallions in 1999, enough said), your score would be pretty low.

You're right, ArmoredCavalry, in that I couldn't tech fast enough because of my constant warring. This, however, meant that I also affected the tech improvement in my rivals. I was the tech leader in the above game.

So this begs the question I posed in my original post. I'm obviously still not doing things optimally if I couldn't win the game earlier than 1999 and at the same time, keep my science slider at 50% or higher the entire game.

I can usually keep a slider at +70% the entire game, mostly sits at 80. you are right that you affected your enemies techs but staying behind the real world in tech reflects badly. For your economic problems, 2 solutions.

1) cottages are needed in every city, not just commerce ones(for commerce = science + wealth + culture). you don't have to have an entire nation covered in cottages to have a stable economy but possibly more then you have now.

2) seeing as you are going domination, you are going to have a lot of cities. you may need to rethink your choice of civics. somthing like this happended to me in a previous game

before: burocracy, free market, = +30 gpt
after: free speech, state property, = +130 gpt

as you can see, BIG differance.

So is the "leadership qualities of ..." just a scorecard? Hmm. I think I finally hit Harding on my last game.

Score seems to be most effected by time of victory. I'd always been the crappiest leader score, until I finally kicked it up and conquered the world by 1550, then I got Augustus and 156K points. Time seemed to be the key factor.

Also, as for science, look around this forum. Seems to be a good idea to run only 100% or 0% science, not sagging in the middle/lower-middle.

Good luck to ya!

There are threads around with detailed description of score calculations and the ranking is based on score only.
The score very strongly prioritize time and conquered land (with more weight on time).

Yeah, so bottom line, don't get hung up on the score or the ranking (which is the same thing) if your goal is to have a nice long game or you're playing against 18 opponents or something on a huge marathon game.

You can play for score, or you can play for fun (which may include playing for score anyway). Personally, I prefer to play for fun and score be damned. If I can get a good score, wonderful. If not, whatever. Long as I had a fun game.

Ranking is all about score.
I'm not sure how the score system works, so I'll explain it the way I know it:
In the game you have your base score. It is affected by a few things- population (all city sizes together), all techs researched, land owned and wonders built.
This base score is multiplied, I'm not sure by how many, but I am sure that the earlier you finish the game, the more it multiplies itself.
That's the basic.

Thanks for your comments, guys. I'm currently in the middle of another Noble Marathon game on a large continents map and I held myself back from conquering all the other civs and focused on expanding. It is already the the late 19th century and I've successfully kept my science slider at 80% for most of the game, occasionally dipping to 70% when I began expanding.

My score did jump 1000 points from 2500+ at the point where I was about to annihilate everyone else and then stopped to found four new cities. I have to admit that it took a bit of the fun away when I became score conscious. I guess I'm saying that I'm glad I'm not alone in not putting too much importance to the score and ranking.

Although I guess shooting for an early victory, as in before the 16th century, should be a worthy objective.

Curious though...can anyone really win a Domination game (as opposed to Conquest) in the 16th century as well?

No idea on that. My personal approach is just to play to have fun. I'm not usually looking to destroy the AI that early on. I have a game on Chieftan that was my first game, which I didn't even finish. Not because I wasn't having fun, mind you, but just because it became clear to me that there was no way I'd lose. I had all the space techs and it was I think maybe into the 1900s. I was up against 18 other civs and had destroyed about 4 of them on a huge map of Earth that someone posted here, in I believe a marathon or epic game.

I suppose I could go finish the game, but why bother, really? I know I'm gonna win and the score doesn't matter so much to me. Mostly I use it as a guage for how far behind or ahead of the AI civs I am.

Danicek said:

There are threads around with detailed description of score calculations and the ranking is based on score only.
The score very strongly prioritize time and conquered land (with more weight on time).

Click to expand...

Population is weighted more heavily than conquered land, if you look at the score breakdown (which you can see by mousing over your score).

Your score is multiplied by a fixed factor based on difficulty and a variable factor based on the date you finished.

I got my first Augustus Ceaser on Noble, about 28K points for winning domination in 1730ish (normal, continents, marathon). I've never gotten a good ranking in any game that's gone on longer than the 1900.

There are some threads around that detail how the score is calculated, try doing a search.

You really want a high score? Then chop yourself to victory. Even as a total beginner I can get a fairly high score just by doing a tiny or duel map on almost any difficulty and chop rushing some praetorians (playing as romans of course,) then invading before they can do anything about it. Its not really playing the game properly though, seeing as you dont get time to do anything interesting. I scored 51,000 for a game with 2 cities and one wonder between them which finished around 1800BC - not that satisfying really.(I know that its easy to do better than that, but I'm a total noob anyway ) Trying to get a good score on a fully played out game seems a fair bit harder. Though getting Dan Quayle is always a bit of a kick in the balls. I wanna try 2 get the balance between playing for fun (obviously the main reason to play a game,) but also getting a good score...

My highest score is a settler game, but i'm so much more proud of my monarch victory !

Perfect_Blue said:

Score seems to be most effected by time of victory. I'd always been the crappiest leader score, until I finally kicked it up and conquered the world by 1550, then I got Augustus and 156K points. Time seemed to be the key factor.

Also, as for science, look around this forum. Seems to be a good idea to run only 100% or 0% science, not sagging in the middle/lower-middle.

Good luck to ya!

Click to expand...

That is not true. I can be at 50-60% science for most of the game on noble and still outtech EVERYONE. Everyone except my arch-nemisis mansa musa that is. Unless i cripple his empire early on.

And no way in hell can you run 100% and win on higher difficultys. Reason is to run 100% awhile into the game you either have to have lots of religion spread and shrines for them or have very few cities.

if you look around the fourums the general consensus seems to be IGNORE THE SCORE!

Yup, I'm gonna ignore the score. Finally finished the Noble game I mentioned earlier. Because I stopped my warmongering, the rest of the civs survived. I hope they were grateful. Ended up as a Harding. Next time, I'm just gonna shut my eyes when the after-victory screens announce what kind of leader I was, although it's pretty obvious that if your score is less than 3k, you're a Quayle.

After defeating 7 rivals, you're still a Dan Quayle...preposterous!

I have some more proof about rankings being solely score based(not that it's still in debate but...). How do I display the qualities of Agustus Ceaser by sending a ship to Alpha centari???