Scoring Question

[Greg]

I have played Civ for a long time, but have never read any strategy guide. I have a game at the Deity level, on a big random map, where in the late 1800's I arrive at Alpha Centauri, I have 320 million citizens, who are +80% happy, and my %tage rating is around 790%. The current top Deity game in the HOF has a score that is approaching 1500%. I downloaded the save game and saw that it was saved from 2018AD and the population was "only" around 157+ million. Can anyone tell me why my score would be so much lower (my 320 million citizens only give me around 4700 points; whereas 157+ million citizens in the top game gives over 10,000 points) Thanks.

 

[Smash]

it says 157 million but he has way more than that just at a glance.Its strange.

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

There is a bug (or a Design Flaw as developers like to call them!) that will not display any population over 320 million. I guess it starts to wrap around at that point. (I don't know for sure...I've never had that many citizens before

)

If you add up the actual population of all the cities in that HOF game I think they number over a billion.

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There are some who call me...Tim

 

[Kev]

Greg -

I think if you look at the "score", there is a number right below all of the faces that gives the number of citizens. In this case (which is actually my game

) I believe it reads the number of American citizens as 10145. I am assuming that this number is actually in the "ten-thousands" which works out to slightly over a billion.

Of course, I'm no expert on the scoring - ironically enough as I was nearing the end of my game I started a thread in this general forum with the same title (scoring question). In it, I tried to solicit help on boosting my end-game score and the people there (especially Stormerne I remember) were very helpful. At the time I never knew about things like food freight, building settlers into cities under size 8, airbases and the like, so I never used them and therefore had some cities that were still size 2 when I ended. However, with some good advice I was able to just get over the top.

Just so you know, the last part of the game was very tedious and boring. I am sure it would have been even more so with food freght and things like that. You should be thankful that you chose to land early and not play the 100+ years you had left.

One last thing: I thought I was pretty cool getting the score that I did, but then I went to the Apolyton site. There were about 10 or so games with scores higher than mine and one that was over 17,000!!! Very humbling.

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Diplomacy - the art of
saying "Good Doggie"
until you can find a rock

 

[Andu Indorin]

Heaven only knows how that population indicator works. In the last game I finished, I maxed at 320,000,000 in 1897; the indicator reset itself around 1933; I maxed out the second time in 1962; the indicator reset itself in 1993; and I maxed it out the third time in 2017. As for actual population at the end the game, I calculated it at 1,694,000,000. At a wild guess, the population indicator measures only every other 320,000,000 people. Which would still leave us the question. WHY???

 

[stormerne]

It's a software bug.

There are several such bugs. One is that you can't have more that 255 cities (yours + the AI's). This is bad news for super-expanders on a large map, and bad news for big scores. Another is that you can't get more that 255 future tech. Again bad news for big scores. Those two important bugs are not fixable by patches.

The population bug you mention is however a different class of bug. I think (?) there's a patch for it on some versions. But in any case, it's only cosmetic. It affects the population and the power graph (temporary sharp chasms) but it does not affect the points scored nor does it affect your percentage. It's just annoying. No one uses the population as a guide in a hall of fame. And in Game of the Month we took it out as an indicator (number of cities is better if you want anything other than points).

If you really want your total population in high scoring games, you have to add it up yourself, as some above have done. Press F1 and count the total cities of size 1, total cities of size 2, etc and apply the different populations for the different sizes. When you have over 200 cities it'll take a while!

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[shadowdale]

I know how that darn thing works!!!
When you reach 320 mill it stops counting and then when you get 640 mill it begins again!!! So at 960 mill it stops again and at 1280 mill it begins once again!!!

I tested this by counting my total population in a game once because I couldn't understand why it acted so strange!!!

I think that the problem is the same as they old percentage problem, when you reached 320% it would drop to -320% and start counting up again!!! It probably does the same on the pop number but we just don't see the negative pop number!!!

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Coolbook:
Håkan Eriksson, Stormerne, vladmir_illych_lenin, Cunobelin Of Hippo, vanillacube.

 

[Håkon]

That would probably make it 1,437,000,000 (which is too low) or 2,077,000,000 (which looks abnormaly high) for the high score game.

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forever!!