I think you guys are starting to take this thing a little too far in the wrong direction. Wasn't the idea behind the Lowest Scoring Challenge to be something fun to do in games, something that didn't involve endless milking or rushing the other civs to produce higher scores? I was intrigued by the idea as something fun to do in a game, since I enjoy OCC games, and because trying to get a low score was a new experience for me. For that reason I had no desire to go into mobilization to cut down my culture, and wouldn't have done so even if there was no threat of the AI civs winning. What you guys are starting to do now is to min/max this thing into the ground, trying to find every last way that score can be reduced by delaying victory as long as possible. And, to me at least, that's where the game stops being fun: at the point where it starts becomes a formula. Some of these posts are starting to espouse a sort of "reverse-milking" philosophy that I want no part in. I left the GOTM because I was bored with endless milking and kill-em-all gameplay. For your own sakes, don't do this with the lowest scoring challenge. Have fun with the game, and don't be concerned with endless min/maxing of numbers. In the end, I think you will enjoy the game more if you treat it as a game and not as a mathematical program designed to produce a certain result.
Wouldn't a HIGH scoring OCC make more sense? It would be the reverse of the 'lowest scoring' idea, but with only 1 city, you still would have scores at the bottom of the scoring list. When limited to one city there is no way your population and territory would be increasing fast/high enough to make up for the early win bonus you would be losing out on. This would be true on any map size. The early win bonus and your 1 city territory size and population would be consistant regardless of what map you play on. This is the opposite of when you normally try and achieve 'max score' by claiming 66% of the entire map.
Whenever you have a challenge or competition most players like playing the game for that very reason - competition. And in this case it is competition against others for (low) score. I guess it's human nature to like to have a competition to compare their game to others and the way to do this is by score. How else can you judge it? Whoever writes the best summary
?
And players will do whatever it takes to get them the lowest/highest score to make them feel like they played a better game. Now, of course, there are limitations. Most don't re-load and 99% don't do blatant cheating like the person in the 'cheater' thread. But what about when you get to those grey areas that will get the player closer to his goal (in this case score) but would not make good game play sense?
I guess you could compare it to college football. If a team is up by 28 points in the fourth quarter, do they continue to ring up the score, even though the game is 'already won'? Of course they do, if they have/want a shot at a national championship. A 56-7 win is more impressive to the voters than a 35-7 win.
As it is now, alot of you could have scored even lower if you were allowed to build some more cities temporarily. When you know you are on pace for a culture win, build a bunch of cities all around your capital and as close to the capital as you can. Donate all these cities. Those cities will be taking up some/most of your territory. This will decrease the territory part of your score. Just refuse any city that wants to flip back.
And even with the high score OCC, you will have people trying to shave (formulas
) 1 or 2 turns off to score a couple more points. Is trying to win 1 or 2 turns sooner any different than trying to 'milk' for a few more points? Is it any worse than micromanaging to squeeze 1 more shield/food/gold out of a city?
(poor Romans, Aztecs and now -hopefully- Germans..). that is my way of preventing an AI to dominate too much.
. Giving you extra time of course. As the AI is committed to spaceship he will rarely attack because it might unleash a great war which of course will influence the needed peace to build its space ship. All you need is a big cash supply. Nice huh!
).
