If one is in a situation, where victory is yours and you want to maximize your score. Which victory condition is best? To be specific, I know that land, population, and technology are the main drivers. But when you get to a situation where you are in corporations, your land is on the edge of dom threshold, you are teching at a super fast pace, and finished off all but one AI. Does your score get pushed higher from finishing the job via knocking off the last AI for conquest, crossing the Dom threshold, or launching your space craft? I don't know enough about the mechanics of the game to figure it out myself. Basically, I am trying to get 1 Million in score. Thanks in advance for the help on this issue.
How to maximize your score at the end
- Thread starter Trout
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elitetroops
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Victory condition doesn't matter, but for practical reasons you probably want to aim for domination.
Score comes from a variety of sources, but population is by far the most important. The rest you can pretty much ignore. Choose a map type with lots of islands (Big&Small is generally considered to be the best), aim for fast sushi, while conquering to close to the domination limit. Once you have sushi and a ton of cities+seafood, you only have to decide when to trigger domination. Your final score is adjusted by a multiplier depending on your finish date. As long as your population is growing fast enough to make up for the lower multiplier, you should delay victory. Then trigger domination when your final score wouldn't be growing anymore. There are calculators online to calculate this, or you can just hover over your score and it should tell you your final score if you finish this turn and see how it develops (at least it does with BUFFY, don't remember if it does without mods).
Final score is also multiplied by a difficulty modifier, so you'd better play at a high difficulty. Deity/marathon on large or huge map is the strongest option.
Score comes from a variety of sources, but population is by far the most important. The rest you can pretty much ignore. Choose a map type with lots of islands (Big&Small is generally considered to be the best), aim for fast sushi, while conquering to close to the domination limit. Once you have sushi and a ton of cities+seafood, you only have to decide when to trigger domination. Your final score is adjusted by a multiplier depending on your finish date. As long as your population is growing fast enough to make up for the lower multiplier, you should delay victory. Then trigger domination when your final score wouldn't be growing anymore. There are calculators online to calculate this, or you can just hover over your score and it should tell you your final score if you finish this turn and see how it develops (at least it does with BUFFY, don't remember if it does without mods).
Final score is also multiplied by a difficulty modifier, so you'd better play at a high difficulty. Deity/marathon on large or huge map is the strongest option.
Thanks Elite Troops. So I think you are saying that victory condition is meaningless for score. So if I am in a situation where on a certain turn, you can either eliminate the final AI for conquest, cross the Dom threshold, or launch the space ship and wait for it to arrive while still expanding your population via sushi, the outcome score-wise is the same for all three scenarios. Do I have that right?
elitetroops
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Yes, victory condition is meaningless. But in the situation you describe, you would gain some population from eliminating the final AI, or conquering some more cities to cross the domination threshold, so those would yield a higher score than simply having a space ship reach Alpha Centauri. Also, with military victories you can choose the exact turn to win the game at any time, a space ship has to be launched well in advance. This is why Space is not considered a good victory condition for highest score.
The ultimate resource on high score games would be this thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/g-major-144.563566/
In there you can find a ton of info on all the relevant mechanics and all sneaky tricks in the book (though not necessarily easy to find in the long thread). The competition resulted in a couple of 10M+ games, so it's not like you need to use even close to all tricks described in there for 1M score.
The ultimate resource on high score games would be this thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/g-major-144.563566/
In there you can find a ton of info on all the relevant mechanics and all sneaky tricks in the book (though not necessarily easy to find in the long thread). The competition resulted in a couple of 10M+ games, so it's not like you need to use even close to all tricks described in there for 1M score.
There is this period some time after 1000 AD when only Sushi/Cereal growth can really outpace decrease in score but... at some point (usually when all cities got Corps and... you already are in Strike - all that sea food on Huge/Archip map literally costs thousands/turn 
) you will see that score actually decrease some turn when just few cities are going up.. I would just estimate from F1 screen (column "turns to next growth" next to surplus food) how many pops cities (together) will grow next turns (not just next but maybe 5-10 more) and... "cut down" game. But yeah, in my NTT games score (so far 650K with 17 starting AI on Huge/Mara) is much lower than in regular games (specially because of slower early-mid part of game when tech trading usually allow to direct tech/bulb and fill-up everything else from AI).
) you will see that score actually decrease some turn when just few cities are going up.. I would just estimate from F1 screen (column "turns to next growth" next to surplus food) how many pops cities (together) will grow next turns (not just next but maybe 5-10 more) and... "cut down" game. But yeah, in my NTT games score (so far 650K with 17 starting AI on Huge/Mara) is much lower than in regular games (specially because of slower early-mid part of game when tech trading usually allow to direct tech/bulb and fill-up everything else from AI).
elitetroops
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I did address them with this:
Yes, they contribute, but in a 1M point game they contribute very little compared to population. In this context ignoring of course doesn't mean that you can ignore them in your game. You'll want to tech lightning fast to sushi and there are plenty of wonders that can help you get there faster, so you will want to focus on them as means to reach your goal. But getting the most wonders or techs is not a goal in itself. Make highest possible population the only goal, then you'll achieve quite high wonder and tech scores anyway as a byproduct. You'll conquer most of the known world to capture most of the wonders, and after teching Sushi, teching will continue automatically with all the sushi scientists.
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