Judging Quality of Victory

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I don't understand why your number of turns would matter at all, unless you're in some sort of tournament or something and that's how you're being ranked.

I would play the same game a few times to understand how different builds help in different situations... like when to build a monument before a settler

To build on this, it's relevant if you're interested in balancing the choices offered to the player. If 95% of the time option A leads to a player winning 50 turns earlier than option B, then option A is a candidate for a nerf / option B is a candidate for a buff.

The tighter the underlying economic system is, the easier it is for players to play for fun / intuitively and have the game run to conclusion in similar time frames, which helps with pacing and late game design decisions. It also makes it easier on the AI (and new players), as it will be presented with fewer clearly suboptimal options. Average turn to victory is the best measure I'm aware of to objectively assess whether choices are reasonably balanced "under the hood".

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you want to be competitive without playing multi-player games you have to use finish times as the yard-stick. Wracking up a high score is more about having the patience to grind out a long game on a huge map than it is skill. Once you defeat the AI you can do as you please with the map. I guess you could try to maximize that but it won't be very entertaining.

Even in Civ 4 era score could be and was milked. It required quite a bit of skill though - the records set back then were tightly clustered around very few players who put planning and time into the micro required to attain it. By any measure these players could win easily on standard settings deity also, maybe not quite as easily as players who played only challenge positions, but they were still very strong players with good showings in XOTM/succession type games too.

 

[NukeAJS]

Because scores aren't weighted after victory, score basically just becomes who had the largest empire. If you pull off a science victory with just 4 cities on turn 210, you've really done something amazing and you get -- 900 points?

If scores were weighted after victory like in Civ4, that could make sense. A lot would still depend on how we arrived at the base score, of course. As an example, I believe you still just get 10 points for founding a religion or 0 if you don't. Ok, that's fine, but if I spread my religion to everyone in the game and win a RV -- I still get just a measly ten points? At least techs, civics, wonders, and "empire" (# of cities + # of tiles) slowly increase as the game goes on.

I dunno if religion points still work that way (I almost always disable score victory because it's fairly pointless when playing on anything king and above), but it's just an example of how going for certain victories will get you a lot more base points than other victories. As it stands right now, domination will get you the most base points because it directly contributes to empire score points as well as wonder score points via capturing cities with a wonder.

Anyways, I do agree with the OP, at least the heart of the argument.

I don't really judge my own victories by what turn it was when I won. I judge my own victories in an ad hoc manner. Was it an interesting victory? Was it fun? Was it efficient? Where there points in the game where I was on the road to defeat and then came out on top? Was I doing well in other victory conditions as well? Did I successfully use diplomacy to help my victory (usually by keeping rivals off my back)?

Efficiency isn't everything although victory on what turn is really the only objective tool we have to judge how good a strategy is. But having fun isn't objective. As an example, Korea is a very good science civ but I find them to be one of the more uninteresting civs for a variety of reasons. The only real strat you have to remember is not to put other districts near seowons (or do that only if necessary) and put farms mines next to seowons. Other than that, it's just spamming seowons, turtling up with hwachas, putting governors in your highest science and culture cities, and knowing what great scientists to gun for and which to pass on.

 

[ShakaKhan]

I don't understand why your number of turns would matter at all, unless you're in some sort of tournament or something and that's how you're being ranked.

Wow. In the entirety of your post, you described a very interesting approach to the game: it's like Sim City with some problem solving thrown in.

To answer the quoted selection, and only in my opinion, there is an inverse relationship between the length of the game and the amount of fun that I'm having, for reasons established in my previous post.

 

[BTSeven7]

I still think it would add a lot to the game to have a better scoring mechanism or a different one. I agree with the factors everyone stated in terms of “quality” and play style, A scoring system weighted by difficulty, that accounts for diplomatic play, efficiency or any other things people can think of aside from quantity of cities, wonders, etc would at least give a different way to play and look at our games. Would be nice to have the option to play a complex score game or a speed game or the general can I win by my own standards of quality and fun.

 

[Victoria]

a better scoring mechanism or a different one

A different one is pointless if not better.
The issue is the game, not the scoring system. A large empire always allows for a better quality score aperture from in one respect that seems to be the most accurate.... speed of victory.... oh my, did that sound a lot like a faster victory is the only half decent measurement.
If you disagree, come up with an example, I would be both pleased and impressed because I want what you want but am about 2 years more letdown than you.