The GOTM Scoring System

[Shillen]

What if you categorized each VC in a separate ranking? That way, it measures the best of each VC (including best loss) and then you don't have a milking domination victory kicking all the cultural victories to the curb. It also offers incentive to play the lower-scoring VCs because you'll be "competing" against a smaller group of people. Each "Medal" could then bear some icon representing the VC it was awarded for.

Then, if you wanted to, all the scores could then be scaled, ala EEO, and you could have the general ranking. Someone who can manage to win gold in each of the VCs would certainly be worthy of the title of Master Civsman (or Civswoman)

Thoughts?

As to your first paragraph...that's how the GOTM works already if you sort by speed ranking, which many consider the better ranking out of the two. The second paragraph I've already explained why that just plain doesn't work. It really doesn't make any sense because there's a lot of map factors that affect the score of each victory condition in a different way. i.e. A pangaea map drastically increases the speed and therefore the score of a domination limit, but it barely speeds up a spaceship victory at all. There isn't a set multiplier you can use for all maps; it would have to be based on the map.

 

[Shillen]

Surely, in that situation, the domination win would still score highly because you'd get the bonus for the early finish. Avoiding triggering the domination win but waiting for a later cultural win might give you a bigger multiplier, but then you lose some of the bonus for the early finish, so it's not clear you would gain.

Oh it would blow away the domination score because you're suggesting basing the multiplier to equalize a fastest finish cultural victory's score with a fastest finish domination victory's score. The thing is a fast finish culture victory is low scoring because the player does not attempt to reach the domination limit or max population. If he were then to do so, even if he delayed his victory by 50 turns to do it, he would absolutely shatter the domination victory's score as well as shattering another cultural victory's score that didn't delay victory in order to acquire territory/population. You would not be able to compete unless you worked towards the domination limit in every game, no matter what victory condition you were going for.

 

[Alraun]

Ok, so I voted "Yes, to give all victory conditions a more equal chance to win medals." There's a pretty significant risk to trying to work out a system for something like this though, which is the fact that people don't play some victory types to maximize their score as it stands. Cultural victories in particular work this way. The reason that cultural victories don't place highly isn't because they can't but because high scoring cultural games have to be played much differently from fastest time games and still require you to conquer a large portion of the world. ANY victory condition will score higher simply by conquering a large portion of the world before completing it, but most people who go for the non-military victories don't bother, and for non-military victories it kills your chances of getting fastest finish. If a system doesn't take this into account, then we'll just see all the medals going to people who conquer to near the domination point then start working seriously on their culture, making for absurdly long games.

 

[Déja]

As to your first paragraph...that's how the GOTM works already if you sort by speed ranking, which many consider the better ranking out of the two. The second paragraph I've already explained why that just plain doesn't work. It really doesn't make any sense because there's a lot of map factors that affect the score of each victory condition in a different way. i.e. A pangaea map drastically increases the speed and therefore the score of a domination limit, but it barely speeds up a spaceship victory at all. There isn't a set multiplier you can use for all maps; it would have to be based on the map.

Yes, but presently, only the fastest wins in each category are recognized with a medal. I'm saying that medals should be awarded separately for each VC (including loss) based on score.

 

[Shillen]

Yes, but presently, only the fastest wins in each category are recognized with a medal. I'm saying that medals should be awarded separately for each VC (including loss) based on score.

Why? A high scoring spaceship victory is a poorly played spaceship victory. High scoring means you got max population and max territory. That directly hinders your ability to research. How can that be considered a good thing to reward someone for deliberately hindering his ability to win the game? That's poor strategy, not good strategy.

 

[Alraun]

that's how the GOTM works already if you sort by speed ranking

As best I can tell, speed ranking was taken out. I can't find it anyway.

 

[Déja]

Why? A high scoring spaceship victory is a poorly played spaceship victory. High scoring means you got max population and max territory. That directly hinders your ability to research. How can that be considered a good thing to reward someone for deliberately hindering his ability to win the game? That's poor strategy, not good strategy.

Then perhaps each VC should be scored separately based on what is considered to be the "best" win. For example, space ship could be fastest, cultural could be the most total culture in the civ, domination could be highest score, conquest could also be speed-based, diplomatic could be who earned the highest % of foreign votes, etc.

 

[azzaman333]

@Any GOTM Staff who happen to be reading this thread;

Are you planning on introducing something similar to the Civ 3 Jason Score system to Civ 4?

 

[drkodos]

I'd say more that they meant it to be a reflection of history and that encouraing domination & conquest over victories such as cultural & diplomatic is much better reflection of history.

I can live with that. It makes sense.

The use of culture as a tool of "attack" or a form of Imperialism is really less than two centuries old, anyway. Killing and conquering by force has been the default for a lot longer than the 4,500 years the game spans.

 

[Piscator]

Fast Victories
Biasing the score system more towards fast victories seems a bad idea. It would remove the need for having both score awards and fastest speed awards. And we already have this in the combined speed/score rankings.

Cumulative Scoring
Using cumulative scores for the global ranking instead of the normalized scores seems a bit pointless in my opinion. It's comparing apples and pears over time. You still could factor a higher normalized score for higher difficulties, but that doesn't sound too appealing to me as well (and favoring the better players even more)

Milking
Only the best players can afford to do that (when they have the patience or the inclination). Reducing the effect of that will perhaps reduce a bit of the disgruntlement of others, but I wouldn't expect too much of a landslide in the ranking of the players anyway.

Victory Conditions
As for the game rewarding warmongers over the other victory conditions is only logical, as those conditions are just harder to achieve (imho). Perhaps not always in strategy but certainly in effort. Here is my list of how difficult the conditions are to achieve (in increasing difficulty/effort).

1) Diplomatic. Doesn't require much planning. Just do a decent land grab with some average conquest. Keep some civs happy. Usually my escape when I tire of a game and want to be done with it.
2) Space Ship. Requires little planning. Focus on a lot of tech (cottage spam) and get quite a bit of great scientists. Reserve some sites for production for the final job.
3) Culture. Requires most planning of all the conditions and perhaps this condition is strategically the most challenging. If you want to go for this victory, you have to plan for it really early. Once you get rolling, it doesn't take too much effort to complete (just a lot of shift-enters...).
4) Conquest. Average planning. Depends largely on the map you play how difficult this is. A lot of similarities with domination but you can ignore your economy to some degree.
5) Domination. Average planning. You have to balance your research rate, economy, production of buildings and production of military carefully. All in all, you have to balance all the game aspects.

Current Problems related to Scoring
1) Looking at the victory conditions, I think that both Cultural Victory is a bit underrated. Time-wise the score is a bit penalized (compared to Diplomatic, Conquest, Domination). For having little territory and having a low score, you can really do something about that if so inclined.
2) Looking at the victory conditions, I think that Spaceship Victory is underrated. Time-wise the score is heavily penalized.
3) Effect of biology on population and score.
4) Settler rush. Settling a lot of cities the turn before you finish gives a huge territory score.

Solution
To address the problems.
1) A culture score. This score gives points depending on the culture level of a city. Each city has 5 levels. Points should start, I think, from level 3 and up. Additionally bonus points for every religion you founded yourself. And if you founded a religion, made it your state religion, you get some points for spreading it (only when you founded it yourself...).
2) Add a bonus to the wonder score for finished spaceship parts. Also reward the expensive technology more in the tech score. This seems a bit of a balance issue.
3) Make each population point count less in the score. A gradually decreasing scheme instead of just lineary toning it down.
4) Don't count territory in the score if the city is just level 1. Give some penalty in the score for cities of level 2. Give max score to cities of level 3 and up.

But I really think this should be more a task for Fireaxis than us. The other ideas I've seen are also quite nice (a civilized score), but deviating too much from the current system seems quite an impossible task. Balancing that would take loads of time and I doubt general acceptance/consensus.

 

[DaviddesJ]

Letting the players decide on the scoring system and how it is implemented is likely a mistake.

There's no chance of that. The players will discuss the issues (that's what threads like this are for). The staff will decide. That's how it's always worked, and I'm sure how it always will work.

The current GOTM staff listens a lot more to player input than in the old days. (For better or for worse, I'm not sure.) But they still all understand, I'm sure, that ultimately they have to make the decisions.

 

[Piscator]

An idea of a different kind and easier to do. I got the feeling that people want more of a competition in fast speed finishes as opposed to just a single fast speed award. I know the feeling if you finish second or close around the fastest finish.

A scoring system for fastest finishes a-la grand prix old-style.
1st: 10 points
2nd: 6 points
3rd: 4 points
4th: 3 points
5th: 2 points
6th: 1 point

In a single game, you can score the points for every victory condition. Time victory is, obviously, excluded since it's not fastest and would always be at 2050
Between games, you keep track of the cumulative in a single ranking.

If there's some enthousiasm for this idea, I could make a calculation for the past gotms to see how this would turn out.

 

[jesusin]

In my opinion the main problem is not across victory conditions nor the way the finish date influences the score, but in the way the basic score is calculated.

Regarding basic score, I would change a lot of things, culture should count, GNP should count, population shouldn't count as much, etc...

But it would never fit every victory condition: In a cultural game you want 3 cities to get a lot of culture. Why should the scoring system force you to have lots of population or territory?

I like much more a simple system as the one proposed by Piscator. In that system, population, territory, culture... all have a weight of 0 in the final score. Only finish date matters.

 

[Shillen]

@Alraun - The speed rankings are still there as far as I can tell. Look at the global rankings page and use the dropdown menu near the top of the page.

@Piscator - None of the victory conditions are "difficult" (unless you're playing on deity). The difficulty is in achieving those victory conditions faster than the other players. And therefore all victory conditions are equally difficult in the GOTM. There's no reason to reward conquest/domination victories more than peaceful victories.

@jesusin - There's no way we could ever come to a concensus on what the scoring system for civ4 should be. I'd prefer to stick with Firaxis's before making an equally arbitrary one that just as many people would disagree with anyway.

@no one in particular - The main problem with the current system is that a fastest finish domination game can still win the top score medal while the fastest finish culture or spaceship game has almost zero chance of winning a score medal. My preferred way to handle this is to remove the score medals/rankings entirely and only use the speed rankings. It's better than coming up with a whole new scoring system that people will still disagree with.

 

[AlanH]

@Any GOTM Staff who happen to be reading this thread;

Are you planning on introducing something similar to the Civ 3 Jason Score system to Civ 4?

We have no plans in place, and as I've already pointed out, a Civ3-style scoring system is not applicable to Civ4, as Civ4 has different in-game scoring issues.

I'm reading with an open mind, and as I have zero experience of playing the game, I am in no position to suggest or impose any scoring changes.

My personal view, which may not be that of the staff overall, is as I've stated before. The GOTM competition is structured around the game of Civ4 as delivered by Firaxis and played by millions of people around the world. It's not based on another game that individuals might have created if they had been managing Firaxis. I consider that we should only replace rules or scoring systems if they result in a significant distortion of the way the game has to be played in order to win awards.

We have awards for fast victories, and awards for high scoring victories. We have the eptathlon that rewards fast play across all the victory options, and thanks to DaveMcW we now have ranking tables that allow you to compare your performances against speed and score criteria, game-by-game and over time. You can even get a combined ranking view that merges these two performance measures. I'm still not sure what you are trying to achieve here, but everyone should understand what we have already before attempting to design yet another ranking/awards system.

 

[Obormot]

@no one in particular - The main problem with the current system is that a fastest finish domination game can still win the top score medal while the fastest finish culture or spaceship game has almost zero chance of winning a score medal. My preferred way to handle this is to remove the score medals/rankings entirely and only use the speed rankings. It's better than coming up with a whole new scoring system that people will still disagree with.

Yeah, that would be my choice too. But people like points for some reason.

Maybe the real issue is not the score, but the fact that "certain other" victory conditions are not recognized enough in the GOTM. Sure, the fastest finisher in say, cultural, gets an icon, but it's buried within tables of scores. How about, say, at the top of the page (in addition to the current score-arranged GOTM table), all people with fastest-finish icons are displayed Or maybe list the top three fastest finishers within a victory condition?

Sure this would make it a bit like the HOF, but this might give people more motivation to go for other victory conditions.

I think that this is a very good idea. The current "sort results" feature provides this to some extent (thank, AlanH ). But I would ask AlanH to improve it a bit if it is not very diificult. Currently to compare the speed of say spaceship victories, I need to select "sort by date" first, then I need to select "sort by victory type" and then I need to scroll all the way down to see a list of space-race wins. Maybe we can add an option "sort by conquest speed", "sort by domination speed", etc. to emphaisze the speed contest a bit more?

It would also be cool to make combined rankings the default in the GPR.

 

[RobertTheBruce]

I think changing the scoring system will cause more problems than it solves. If I look at my space race victories they fall into two categories: fast science focus games and failed dominations without enough pop for backdoor diplomatic. The failed dominations have higher firaxis scores than the true space race victories. Space race, diplomatic, and cultural victories all will have these problems unless you totally reengineer the scoring system. Minor fixes won't help. Its easy to catch up on science with trading, the research bonuses for other civs knowing techs and cottaging half the world so the difference in the space race victory groups is only 50 or 60 turns at epic speeds. The fast finish component of the score would have to be huge to offset the larger land area and population of the failed dominations. To make these failed dominations to score lower than the small civ, little war pure space focussed victories would require a totally different scoring system.

There are enough rules associated with the game that we don't need a totally new set of scoring rules. Casual GOTM players would submit games with Augustus Caesar rankings and get a baffling "you get a horrible score" message from the GOTM system.

If you really want a medal you will have to learn to milk the scoring system. Changing the scoring system won't solve that problem.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Oh it would blow away the domination score because you're suggesting basing the multiplier to equalize a fastest finish cultural victory's score with a fastest finish domination victory's score. The thing is a fast finish culture victory is low scoring because the player does not attempt to reach the domination limit or max population. If he were then to do so, even if he delayed his victory by 50 turns to do it, he would absolutely shatter the domination victory's score as well as shattering another cultural victory's score that didn't delay victory in order to acquire territory/population. You would not be able to compete unless you worked towards the domination limit in every game, no matter what victory condition you were going for.

Actually not quite. I probably didn't make myself too clear. I really do like the concept of multiplying the score by some factor that does some equalizing between different victory types, but I haven't committed myself to precisely how that factor should be computed.

I think one of the points you are making is that players who want to milk for points are unlikely to go for - say - cultural victories, and that tends to depress the score for cultural victories. And if that's what you're saying then I think you're absolutely right, and that would have to be taken account of.

If I was thinking about an implementation, it'd might be something like this (I'm still open to pursuasion but this'd be my initial thought): Go through past GOTMs, and find out the average scores of the different victory types (it may be better to just consider the top 10 or top 20 victories in each category in each game), and see what the difference is. Domination is probably the highest scoring, and if say, it turns out that it on average scores around 6 times the cultural victories, then that suggests a factor of 6. I'd then immediately multiply that down - perhaps by 2/3, perhaps by 1/2, giving 4 or 3, to take account of the issue of more milking going on in domination victories. I'd rather estimate too low than too high. Then I'd use that as the factor for the next 2-3 GOTMs. Then I'd look at the results of those GOTMs. If those GOTMs are still showing that domination/conquest victories are still overwhelmingly taking the top scoring spots, then you know the factor was too low and needs to be raised a bit more. And basically keep fine-tuning the factors (for cultural and for all other conditions) until you're seeing that the top scoring games are showing a good distribution over all victory types. At that point you've achieved the aim of getting a better balance over all victory conditions.

(I probably wouldn't only do that. I'd also reduce the weighting given to population in the calculation of each score too, but that's a separate issue).

 

[azzaman333]

We have no plans in place, and as I've already pointed out, a Civ3-style scoring system is not applicable to Civ4, as Civ4 has different in-game scoring issues.

I'm reading with an open mind, and as I have zero experience of playing the game, I am in no position to suggest or impose any scoring changes.

My personal view, which may not be that of the staff overall, is as I've stated before. The GOTM competition is structured around the game of Civ4 as delivered by Firaxis and played by millions of people around the world. It's not based on another game that individuals might have created if they had been managing Firaxis. I consider that we should only replace rules or scoring systems if they result in a significant distortion of the way the game has to be played in order to win awards.

We have awards for fast victories, and awards for high scoring victories. We have the eptathlon that rewards fast play across all the victory options, and thanks to DaveMcW we now have ranking tables that allow you to compare your performances against speed and score criteria, game-by-game and over time. You can even get a combined ranking view that merges these two performance measures. I'm still not sure what you are trying to achieve here, but everyone should understand what we have already before attempting to design yet another ranking/awards system.

Once again, my lazyness to post any real substance causes it to be misread (i think).

I was more reffering to the fact that due to the Jason score system, cultural wins had a chance to gain gold medals, as did Spaceship and Diplo.
As it is atm, a 4otm played for a spaceship win has next to no chance of comparing to a dom or conq win scorewise.

 

[Obormot]

I am sure that a cultural victory can get a very decent score even with the current system, it is just that nobody has ever tried a milked cultural victory. A factor of 6 or even 3-4 would break the system completely in favour of milked culture wins. A factor of about 1.5 sounds more reasonable, but we need to see a milked culture game first, before we can come up with a more precise number.

Even then you still have 2 problems:
1. Even while going for culture you'll need to conquer the world and milk.
2. Since you'll have to do #1 you will have to sacrifice the speed of the victory a bit, therefore winning medals will require suboptimal play from the cultural point of view.

These are exact same problems that Civ3 GOTM Jason score has.