In general, on a given size/difficulty combo, you'll get more points from challenging existing games than playing an empty table. On lower difficulty levels, it's almost certain. On the highest difficulties, and if the existing target is beyond you, you may get more points by opening a new table. But you'll still get a decent reward for trying to beat an existing game and failing, something that doesn't happen now. So there's still plenty of encouragement to compete, to beat what's there already.
But you'll be rewarded for setting a target for others to challenge. You won't feel like a game is completely pointless the way you can now, because it will give you no HoF reward, and you feel nobody's ever going to attempt the same game and maybe give you a bronze medal. If you're interested in your VVV rank, or in a subsection rank, you won't feel forced to select from a handful of games because they are the only options for getting a medal.
xger said:
Fair enough. I do find that surprising, and I don't think they're the sort of players who are going to look at the scoring system in detail to try and maximise their own score. But I may have a weird psychological makeup.
And as I said, it's very easy to have all modifiers be at least 1.Yeah, I've got no issues with it. I can fiddle with those 'bonus games' numbers too, try and make a duel/quick/settler game be worth 1 point, while leaving the standard+ deity games the same. The bonus games bit will make near-zero difference once a table has 5+ games, it's only there to reward/encourage people to open new tables, in particular harder new tables, but without giving more incentive to duel spam. I'm going to be away for the weekend, but I'll try and make a couple of spreadsheets to cover the system in detail, and can then quickly tweak values to see what happens. It should actually be pretty easy to give duel/settler and the other lowest scoring games a boost to above 1, without making too much difference to an empty duel/deity, which is currently worth ~10 points, and leaving an empty std/deity at ~150.
Apart from working out the best way to balance empty/near empty tables with these bonus games, do people think the other weights for the actual scores are about right?
They are:
Duel: 1
Tiny: 1.5
Small: 2
Std: 2.5
Lge: 2.75
Huge: 3
Difficulty modifier:
Settler: 1.0
Chief: 1.2
Warlord: 1.4
Prince: 1.7
King: 2.0
Emp: 2.5
Immortal: 3.0
Deity: 4.0
Speed modifier:
Quick: 1
Normal, Epic, Marathon: 1.25
Finish time:
If you finish x turns behind first, you'll get 1/2 the points. Finish 2x turns behind, get 1/3 the points. Finish 3x turns behind, get 1/4 the points. Just a question of what to make x, I've currently got 15/25/35/50 for quick/std/epic/marathon. There is actually one downside with this bit which nobody's mentioned yet, and that's that if first place is only one turn ahead of second, their scores are practically identical. There should be some extra reward for actually being first (say 5%?). Which is also easily doable in theory, assuming it's possible to have a modifier in the formula where y = 1.05 if the game is in first place, y = 1 if it's not.
