What determines your score?

[HaplessHorde]

Anybody know what factors go into determining your civ's score?

Researched Techs play a big factor, but I cannot see that having a high culture has any effect at all. I am routinely at or near the top in Most Cultured list, but languishing on the leaderboard.

I find myself skipping cultural buildings in favor of research and financial, except where they give both, and it seems that having the gold to run up your Research rate is better than maxing the research ability of your cities, which coincidentally costs a pile anyway.

Eventually everybody will have researched every tech, so why don't the scores even out? Instead the leaders just start to run away with the game not too long after Gunpowder becomes prevalent.

Since I've noticed this pattern I've started Retiring a lot earlier, since I know that once they get 200 pts. ahead I'll never catch them.

[Krill]

Land (or rather the amount fo land you had 20 turns ago), population, tech and wonders (both small and world types).

Being 200 points behind though never means you'll never catch up. You can be a 500 points behind, but have greater GNP and MFG. It mostly depends on the cities/land/tech position you are in.

[HaplessHorde]

Maybe I need to be a little more nasty to my neighbors in the early going.

[Solver]

Note that if you move your mouse over your own name in the score list, you will see a breakdown of what constitutes your score.

[HaplessHorde]

How I never discovered that just by sheer accident, I will never know.

[CreepyD]

I was over 1000 points behind for most of 1 game and that same AI had a power graph about quadruple mine (I was in 2nd place).
However I still managed to win via space race.
I had less cities, land everything but managed to keep up in tech. I went to war with that AI as he started building his spaceship (about 30 turns ahead of me) and that seemed to halt spaceship production while I built mine.
I even took out some cities with my smaller number of forces.
This was on prince level with Blakes AI (which is certainly a tougher challenge).
Proves score doesn't mean much, I'm often not at the top on score or power, and yet I know I'm winning.

[HaplessHorde]

Thanks for the inspiration, CreepyD. I'm still a fairly novice player, stuck on Warlord difficulty, but have started to figure a few things out. It seems there are more ways to win a game than I had thought.