Getting penalized for playing nice?

[fzgtics]

OK, so I have played 3 games so far of Civ, each on successively higher levels (chieftain, warlord, prince) - and won.

However I noticed something - On the first two games, I went for domination victories - I never made it even to the modern age before I wiped my opponents off the map. Granted, at those levels and map sizes, there were less opponents, however in both cases I was well into 'Augustus Caesar' territory.

For my prince game, I decided to play nice. I got lucky in that while the map was a continents map, all the AI's got stuck on continents with each other and I ended up on a large island, and left to my own devices. I kept the number of cities small, and went for science output. In the end I won the game with the space race. cheap dreamweaver However after all that, and despite being way ahead of my opponents technologically, I was only at Joan of Arc level.

Is Civ penalizing me for not obliterating my opponents? I mean, I only had one small war, and that was because the Japanese decided to dump two cities on my private island, and I booted them off with FAR superior technology (I didn't attempt to bring it to his doorstep before he cowered and asked for peace). With all the other AI's being nice to me and all wanting to be my friend and help them fight whatever war they were fighting, it apparently was not good for my score.

Now I also had a good portion of the wonders of the world built myself, my people were happy for the entire game, and I had great gold output (BTW, the tip someone else had about forgetting about producing food and letting maritime CS's do it for you was a good one - for most of the game I was an ally to 5 maritime CS's and I never had to worry about food! - but I was lucky to be surrounded by maritime CS's).

So does Civ really penalize you for winning peacefully?

 

[Bandobras Took]

Essentially, yes, if you take score to be a measure of how much effort and thinking was required to win the game.

The problem is that score is heavily weighted towards number of turns taken, which means that warrior rushing on a duel pangaea map will get an astronomical score as opposed to a hard-fought huge space race victory.

My advice is simply to ignore the ranking at the end. Decide whether you did a good job based on whether you win and how.

 

[CharonJr]

And your number of cities/population seems to have a fairly large influence on the score, too.

CharonJr

 

[Rathelon]

Here are my scores so far from my playthroughs with each civ. You be the judge. From highest score to lowest, with # of turns and type of victory:

Germany - 3261 pts, conquest, 355 turns, ranking #1
India - 2551 pts, diplomatic, 382 turns, ranking #1
Persia - 2444 pts, diplomatic, 430 turns, ranking #2
Egypt - 2419 pts, diplomatic, 486 turns, ranking #2
America - 2370 pts, diplomatic, 442 turns, ranking #2
Arabia - 2330 pts, diplomatic, 410 turns, ranking #2
China - 2237 pts, conquest, 519 turns, ranking #2
Ottoman - 2208 pts, diplomatic, 446 turns, ranking #3
England - 2026 pts, diplomatic, 466 turns, (ranking #3 I think - didnt record this rank)
Japan - 1947 pts, diplomatic, 404 turns, ranking #4
Aztec - 1809 pts, science, 525 turns, ranking #5
Iroquois - 1591 pts, culture, 484 turns, ranking #8
France - 1482 pts, culture, 454 turns, ranking #9
Greece - 995 pts, LOSS, 500 turns, ranking #14

Some of the early games (America through China) I had Time victory turned off, and that's why there are two scores over 500 turns. I turned the Time victories back on for the rest of the games, and that's how I lost the one game with Greece.

 

[Yzman]

My highest score so far is a space race victory as Washington with 5374 points I believe. I think the reason it is so high is I started in renaissance era and it took only 130 something turns.

 

[JudgeDeath]

Here are my scores so far from my playthroughs with each civ. You be the judge. From highest score to lowest, with # of turns and type of victory

Without difficulty level and other settings it's hard to gauge. There's something wrong with the scoring on Civ V, in that it doesn't appear that you are rewarded for playing at a higher difficulty level, so the higher level you play the worse your scores get.

 

[Nunya]

You get a 20% score bonus for every difficulty level above Prince and a 20% score penalty for every level below it. So at Settler difficulty you get 40% of your score and at Deity you'd get 180%.

But I feel that's not enough. Deity is more than just 80% harder than Prince.

 

[budweiser]

My highest score is with Washington on the easiest level, about 4500 points if I recall.

 

[Rathelon]

At Settler it'd be -60% because there are 3 levels below Prince (Warlord, Chieftain, Settler)

 

[Nunya]

Yes, that's what I wrote. You get 40% of the normal score.