Guide to 500k+ scores through Huge map domination on Immortal difficulty

[killercane]

I'm glad to get some sort of comparison, but keep in mind, I had never played a score game. Never used corporations, Never rushed to get Sushi early, didn't use slavery much if at all, I still don't understand the big deal with Cristo Redentor, etc. I was not very good at the many tactics used on this game. So if you're goal was to show that Huge is better than Standard size maps, you would need to play standard yourself. I'm betting you'd get 800K - 1 million on standard or large. However, if you goal was just to kick my butt, then Congrats! nice work!

No I dont think it goes to Standard/Large argument, or kicking your butt; it took a week to get up to play the last 20 turns or so. I tried the gauntlet at first and since it wasnt feasible to use rainforest at normal, I thought I would try marathon and your game gave a good goal. I didnt count on getting so burned out with moving workers and dealing with repositioning cities and the whole thing slowing down. So I cranked up culture to 50% once I hit 600k and just slid by you.

Most of the AIs had just adopted Emancipation so that to keep a city happy I needed 57 happiness sources. Switching out of caste cost many thousands of gold and brought the economy to a halt, and switching back I had to switch citizens to merchants in every city, and still I didnt follow through on that. Im too lazy or burned out on the score thing to actually do it anymore but who knows that may change.

 

[kivanc]

I have played some Rainforest maps and they are nice if you can get enough workers built to clear the jungle. The pop limit seems to be around 3300-3400 for Huge, and the starting locations are amazing in terms of food. These are on your base Rainforest, but I discovered that if you play a non rainforest map where you can assign sealevel to high, and then switch to Rainforest, the results are large lakes that can have seafood in them for the health bonus (health is a problem on RF). Some of these are the problematic cant-build-lighthouses kind however.

i also noticed that on a highlands map.
on such map types, climate cannot be assigned. so it seems to take your previous selection of map type.
i started with a tectonics/rocky map and then went into highlands, i started near a large group of hills
and then started on a pangaea/temperate map and then returned to highlands, and then i started near a large flatland. hmm strange.
it seems not fair bec i noticed that HC started on a flatland while i started on a rocky land in the first try.
i thought i would be rocky and thus nearly equal positions for all but it seems not.
i like rocky climate but only when all AIs start on rocky climates as well.
i think the climate is only for your starting position, not AIs, right?
but however, the guys who are experienced on map types say if you select tropical climate, then the map will have more jungles.
i really am not sure. if it's for your starting locations or for the whole map.

 

[oyzar]

Highlands doesn't read the sealevel and temperature parameters at all.. It does generate some flatland, just not a whole lot...

 

[kivanc]

Highlands doesn't read the sealevel and temperature parameters at all.. It does generate some flatland, just not a whole lot...

sea level: well, first of all, you are able to select the sea level in highlands map. if you cannot see any selection about it then just click esc and go into map type again; that time you will see.
the game rememebrs some selections and doesn't ask much except world size (when you go thru play now)

climate: and about climate i believe what i wrote in previous post is true. but still i have to try a bit more to be sure.

yes, there isn't any selection for climate in highlands map. but the script seems to remember and selects (as default and cannot be changed) the climate type you have selected in your previous start on another map type, which allows climate selection.

as it's pale grey and there's no permission for selection of climate, a person cannot be sure if it will generate a world like it knows as default or if it will generate the world according to the climatre type you have previously selected.

i tried a few times to generate different map types with different climates and then go back to highlands and generate, each seemed to have different results. that way seemed to allow me to select the climate type, like a trick.

but as i said, i have to test it again. as killercane just told a similar thing to my own experience, i thought it was not a coinsidence. i think, it reads climate selection that way.

 

[killercane]

sea level: well, first of all, you are able to select the sea level in highlands map. if you cannot see any selection about it then just click esc and go into map type again; that time you will see.
the game rememebrs some selections and doesn't ask much except world size (when you go thru play now)

climate: and about climate i believe what i wrote in previous post is true. but still i have to try a bit more to be sure.

yes, there isn't any selection for climate in highlands map. but the script seems to remember and selects (as default and cannot be changed) the climate type you have selected in your previous start on another map type, which allows climate selection.

as it's pale grey and there's no permission for selection of climate, a person cannot be sure if it will generate a world like it knows as default or if it will generate the world according to the climatre type you have previously selected.

i tried a few times to generate different map types with different climates and then go back to highlands and generate, each seemed to have different results. that way seemed to allow me to select the climate type, like a trick.

but as i said, i have to test it again. as killercane just told a similar thing to my own experience, i thought it was not a coinsidence. i think, it reads climate selection that way.

Any interesting variations you have found on the climate strategy?

 

[Icewise]

Nice thread!

 

[oyzar]

I used much of this in my attempt at G-Major 40. However it is funny to note that even with my clearly suboptimal playing and luck i managed to beat the OP game by 50%. Judging by my game it certainly should be possible to get 2M if you milk sushi and the new colony bug in the hof mod... Despite the claims that darius rocks, playing julius is just sooo much easier...

 

[Jrrd Tzu]

...this seems pretty bad*ss. Thanks for all the info.

 

[WastinTime]

This discussion is a bit dusty, but I thought I'd add my update. There was a good debate going on whether Huge maps were the best size for high score games. Seems like the obvious choice, more land = more cities. I was strongly against this assumption, but didn't think I had the patience for high score quests to prove my theory.

I had a 2.1 million score game on Tiny. Tiny was clearly too small for the biggest scores.

My 3.17 million score was on Small. I still feel like I ran out of space a bit.

Standard size may be the sweet spot. It depends on if the slower tech rate or the likely later finish date (because you have to build many more cities) hurts your score too much. Anyone up for the challenge?

 

[T-hawk]

Bumping an old thread but I have a significant new contribution.

I've analyzed and reverse-engineered the victory score normalization formula. VirusMonster did this up earlier in this thread, but I've gotten it to come out to match in-game values exactly. Here's my article with detailed explanations of the formula, and a calculator.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/index/score.shtml

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/index/calc.shtml

 

[WastinTime]

I like your article. I had to read it several times to grasp it. It is a good analysis of the score formula. However, I believe you have a faulty conclusion.

You claim "bigger maps are better for victory score". And then go on to explain how the LAND component of score is easier to maximize on bigger maps. While that's true, we all know Population is the key to score, not land. I still think Huge is too big for the highest scores.

 

[T-hawk]

I used land to illustrate the formula, because it's easier to see what's going on around that concept of "magnification" from a base value of 21 land tiles rather than from a base value of 1 population. Population is of course the heavyweight in practice, because of that tiny base, but I found it a little harder to wrap your head around at first. Maybe I could have connected those dots together better.

You are right that the most score potential is created not by bigger map size but by higher possible and actual population. But of course there's a strong correlation between map size and possible/actual population.

"Bigger maps are better" is a general conclusion in theory, and it's true that the potential is always higher for a bigger map on the same script. Whether the actual score comes out higher -- whether the higher possible magnification outweighs the reduced exponential bonus for taking longer -- is beyond the scope of my discussion there. I'm hoping the calculator can serve as a step in that direction, so you can play with the numbers to see what a large or huge Big and Small map with Sushi might do.

 

[ZPV]

You are right that the most score potential is created not by bigger map size but by higher possible and actual population. But of course there's a strong correlation between map size and possible/actual population.

"Bigger maps are better" is a general conclusion in theory, and it's true that the potential is always higher for a bigger map on the same script. Whether the actual score comes out higher -- whether the higher possible magnification outweighs the reduced exponential bonus for taking longer -- is beyond the scope of my discussion there. I'm hoping the calculator can serve as a step in that direction, so you can play with the numbers to see what a large or huge Big and Small map with Sushi might do.

There's another big factor in working out how much potential population score you can get on a map: how many Sushi (or Cereal Mills if you prefer) resources there are on the map.

In particular, the corporation yield modifier scales roughly with the number of tiles, but the number of seafood resources doesn't - those will scale with the length of the coast, (proportional to the square root of the number of tiles).
This means your cities can get more food in smaller map sizes.

(The "expected" population, and the number of cities you can squeeze in, also scale with the number of tiles.)

This competes against the exponential magnification, (which does favour larger maps), which makes it quite possible that something other than Huge gives the best scores.

 

[Luigiii2]

nice thread! Now if only I lived long enough to use some of the corporation tactics you guys are talking about...

 

[WastinTime]

nice thread! Now if only I lived long enough to use some of the corporation tactics you guys are talking about...

Yea, this thread is a good start, but we're an order of magnitude beyond this. Instead of 500,000, the target is 5,000,000 points here.