Changing the Jason score system to balance out victory types

[tR1cKy]

It is common knowledge that Civ3 is heavily biased toward military-style victories, and the GotM/CotM competitions aren't immune from this bias. If you don't play the warmongerer, you have little to no chance to score high in the scoreboards.

My opinion is that the only way to possibly nullify this bias, or at least to reduce it to manageable levels, is to alter the Jason score system formula.

Here's an example, my submission in GotM 126:

game: classic gotm 126
score: 9868
date: 870 ad
victory: diplomatic

The online Jason score system calculator gives the correct result of 10.850 Jason points, but if i change the victory type to Domination and leave everything else untouched the resulting Jason score is 10.800, a mere 50 points of difference.

It is clear, though, that the actual scoring system does not reflect at all the extra challenge you have by playing all the way up to the domination limit and, at the same time, obtain a victory of this type in a date not too far away from what you would have achieved in a "pure" Diplo game. What really matters is how fast you can get to the boundaries of the Domination limit. Everything else has little to no impact.

The Jason score system does pratically nothing to balance out the victory types, but it's just a formula, and it could be changed in order to have the "peacemongerers" back in the competition with the bloodthirsty players.

How to change it, is entirely another story. I don't have a simple answer for this, i don't even have a clear picture of how it is calculated in the details, i tried to figure it out but it was a horrible mess and i just didn't have a whole day to dedicate to the task of sorting it out. But it's surely not an impossible task. There are a lot of past games to use as test cases.

Opinions?

 

[AlanH]

Good luck with that. I doubt if anyone on the staff now has the combination of expertise plus enthusiasm plus time for improving the scoring system, even if it were possible. I certainly don't. And even if you did, what would you do with the past results? Recalculate them all? I think not!

The main achievement of the Jason scoring system was to remove the need to "milk" the score all the way to 2050 AD. The Jason formula grants you the extra score that you would have reached if you had played on to 2050 AD at the domination limit.

I would point out that Aeson, the original designer of the Jason system, once played a "peaceful" VC to a high Jason score to demonstrate that the system does compensate non-military VCs if you are single minded about maximising score.

Please also note that we give out twice as many speed-related awards as score-related ones. Why the focus on score?

 

[tR1cKy]

Good luck with that. I doubt if anyone on the staff now has the combination of expertise plus enthusiasm plus time for improving the scoring system, even if it were possible. I certainly don't. And even if you did, what would you do with the past results? Recalculate them all? I think not!

No, who said that? Leave the old results as they are, start using the new formula with future games. Supposing there will be a new formula, of course.

The main achievement of the Jason scoring system was to remove the need to "milk" the score all the way to 2050 AD. The Jason formula grants you the extra score that you would have reached if you had played on to 2050 AD at the domination limit.

Acknowledged. And, in this respect, it does a great job.

I would point out that Aeson, the original designer of the Jason system, once played a "peaceful" VC to a high Jason score to demonstrate that the system does compensate non-military VCs if you are single minded about maximising score.

I take your word on this, there's no reason to think otherwise. It just seems to me that the compensation isn't adequate to put peaceful victories on equal grounds with military ones.

Please also note that we give out twice as many speed-related awards as score-related ones. Why the focus on score?

Well, you should ask this question to mad-bax, its his idea Although i think it has its merits. If you play peaceful, you're almost guaranteed that some warmongerers will beat you on score, no matter how good you play. And, while an award is an award, gold is always gold

Now, i took a deeper look at the scoring system and it's not the horrible mess as it seems at a first glance. It's actually well-thought and i need to give respect to the guy who once devised it.

There's something i need to know, and someone must know, or else new games couldn't be put in place at all. This part of the formula:

MaxScore = MaxTurnScore * MapModifier

MaxTurnScore comes out from an evaluation of the map. I don't know how it's done in the details and it's not important by now. I suppose there's a tool that is given a map and produces the domination limit and the food count and does the calculations.

MapModifier is what matters. I saw the excel file with the various modifiers, but how are they used to produce the final result? Are they all summed up? Are some ones summed and some others used as a multiplier? Nowhere it is said, and the answer is not obvious. If, say, they would be all summed up, then some of them could be discarded entirely, because something like 330 + 0.0045 isn't going to make any difference from 330.