Originally posted by Cartouche Bee
So I looked at your spreadsheet and find a number of peculiar things in your calculations. For instance, in GOTM7 there were 97 participants, only 19 finished in victory. Yet your table shows the average years left as 500+ years and used that to calculate the finish bonus (it should have been about 114). Why were the early finishers not able to have the data posted by people who had losses in the game toward the average years left in the game? Those same people had their results factored in to enhance the average score in favor of the winners to determine 'score ratio'.
GOTM 7 was the deity game. If any game is going to break a scoring formula this will be it as the results are so unusual.
The reason the average score and average years left are computed from winning games only is to improve the comparability. In general, the results from a losing game are essentially random and tend to make the end results less comparable. This is particularly true of years left. A person knocked out very early would raise the average years left not lower it, in effect lowering everyones score. For example, in GOTM 7 Melinder got wiped out in 470 bc with over 2500 years left in his game. BTW, the average years left in GOTM 7 if you include losing games is 712.
I think GOTM 7 is an anomaly and no scoring formula could make the results of this game comparable to others. Only some of the best players and the cheater got comparable scores to other months.
Originally posted by Cartouche Bee
In equations like those you will find that if you apply a win bonus in the years section of the equations you will have much better results (we discussed way to acheive this in that scoring thread.). If, two people that finish the game in 2050 with the same score but one won and one lost need to have a way to distinguish that fact in their final score.
I looked through the posts and I think I know what youre talking about. This modification has more application on an early version of the scoring formula. The formula a few posts up does not favor milking and therefore does not need this modification. The only time where this may be a factor is with finishes around 2050.
When the finish is this late, the game is either a milked game or one of the lower scoring games. For milked games, finishing at 2050 with a win or a loss is just semantics, the game should have been won ages ago. Note that with this formula a milked games score is not limited to 33 or 50 as in previous versions of the formula. If the game is milked exceedingly well, your score can be over 100. Your worker dogpile game in GOTM 8 would receive a score of 162 with this scoring formula.
For a lower scoring game even the measly finish bonus awarded for a late victory will significantly effect the score.
Originally posted by Cartouche Bee
And I still say that your adjusted base score premise is lame, lame, lame....
And I repeat my lame premise for removing the game computed finish bonus:
The game score has an imbalance between your per turn score and finish bonus. On a tiny map the highest score is achieved by finishing fastest, on a large map the highest score is achieved by milking the game. It is kind of balanced for a standard map but that also depends on your skill level, play style and other factors. This is one of the reasons it is impossible to compare the scores between a large and small game on the same level.
Keeping the finish bonus in the game score would tip the balance of the formula to strongly favor fast finishes. This is not necessary as the formula already favors fast finishes. Leaving the finish bonus in also re-introduces an unbalancing component to it.
