Game "score"

[Grumbold]

Hi, its been quite a while since I put Civ IV back in the cupboard. One niggling issue for me was how the game calculated your final victory score. I don't want to have to annihilate the world by 100 AD to score well. Has this aspect been tweaked at all?

[Will9]

Do you mean the score that is given to you at the end of the game or the one that you see at the edge of the screen?

[MightyTiny]

What else could he mean?

And to answer the question, if there's been any change, I haven't noticed. Quick conquests, land grabbing etc still seem to be the thing to get a good score. I do like warmongering, but occasionally, I just want to try a builder tactic and go for, say, a cultural victory; peaceful builders definitely get penalized in the scoring.

This is a minor gripe of mine, because in addition, the scoring system doesn't take into account the circumstances - most notably, when you play an OCC game, you always end up getting compared to Dan Quayle, even when winning with such a great handicap as being limited to owning only a single city. OCC should have it's own scoring criteria.

[Stuie]

Does the score really matter to people? As long as I'm having fun I could not care less.

Regardless, I doubt they changed whatever calculation is used.

[rah]

Agreed with Stuie. The satisfaction I get out of the game is the most important. Your highest scores are probably those games that presented the least challange, but you remember that games where they all jumped on you and you were able to beat them back and eek out a victory. (or just survive)

[dregor]

I was disappointed when my last game I scored highest rank of Augustus. Seemed too easy, I got a domination in the 17th century. Doesn't seem like it should be top-rank worthy.

[Jaybe]

If real estate didn't count AT ALL in the score, I think it would help a lot.
But only if the AI still tried for real estate (but preferably through building "perimeter" cities' culture, not building "worthless" cities).

[Blaupanzer]

Winning would be nice. At warlord, no problem. At Noble, not often. I use the scores to sort my losses, but in all honesty the score when you lose is a lot more about how long you lasted than how well you played. (Note I've never been exterminated. I just get so far behind (especially in techs) that I know I'll lose, or it comes down to the wire over the spaceship.

[Randolph]

I've only won about two games, I don't see how people can stand to spend hours on a game they know they've already won (or lost for that matter).

[padillah]

Well, unless you are winning by such a huge margin that you are definitivly going to win, regardless of what you do, then you should play it out to make sure you are winning.

And if you are winning by such a huge margin as to make questioning a win futile then step up the difficulty.

Tom P.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Randolph
I've only won about two games, I don't see how people can stand to spend hours on a game they know they've already won (or lost for that matter).

It's the journey that counts, not the destination. Then again, I play marathon games -- road trip!

Also, sometimes a wrench will be thrown into your plans. I have been surprised by AI spaceship advances on occasion, and had a challenge beating it. Wouldn't have happened if I had just "called it" a win.

If you don't play it out:
you won't know what you missed;
you will be less experienced at the later game dynamics;
you will also miss out on some drudgery (aka work).

[samspock]

I only use the score to help me figure out how I am doing relative to previous games. My best score so far (on vanilla) has been around 140k on a domination victory.. When I finish a game I try to figure out what I did differently that worked and did not work and what about the game was different.

If you want to see how well you did by different victories, you can sort by that in the Hall of Fame. It's better to compare by victory type than between them. If you are going for domination but end up with space race, don't be dissapointed that your score is lower than it could be.

Just like everything else in this game it all depends.

[Grumbold]

Quite true, its possible to sort by victory type. However its my experience that (say) a space race victory in 1920 will outscore a space race victory in 1960 where you had more tech, more cities, more land and more culture. I don't like to feel rushed, but I do like to measure my games by the score from time to time. Its the one lasting record you have.

[DrSpike]

They've done a much better job of scoring this time around, but it's still true on most maps that an early domination is the way to get the highest score.

[Schtix]

Originally posted by Grumbold
Quite true, its possible to sort by victory type. However its my experience that (say) a space race victory in 1920 will outscore a space race victory in 1960 where you had more tech, more cities, more land and more culture. I don't like to feel rushed, but I do like to measure my games by the score from time to time. Its the one lasting record you have.

That's a really good point. So then, maybe no two games are created equal?

Overall though, I've had some very early settler games with extremely high scores when I played like shat, compared to some very recent noble games where I got just decent scores playing some of the best games of my life.

So, it allll depends.