So if I'm trying to score as high as possible in the Metaverse (ToA) I should...

No. In fact due to the graft of having over 20K in your treasury it will hurt your econ portion of the score if you don't spend it down every turn.



Yes. This is basically your social score. The more the better.



Only to help you get the pop to a higher sustained level.



No.



Not the number as much as the combined stats of them. But as always more is better.



No.

1. It is in some cases possible to keep playing and increase your points though.

i) No, it is your economy score (cash generation) each turn that is taken into account, not how much you don't spend.

vii) Total Available Beakers and Production points when done?

viii) Maxed out development of Planets, type & quantities of specific building?
-- Example, controlling or having built all Galactics & Trade-Goods.
-- Owning all resources with Starbases on everything.

ix) Final Ratios of Influence/Diplomatic/Remaining Research when Conquest is the Victory achieved... and all other conbinations thereof.

x) Relative gap between the closest opponent (scorewise) to us, the actual winner? Such as, totally crushing 'hem to oblivion or barely skimming the edge at the very last minute of gameplay by luck or otherwise.

xi) Mega-Events tackling performance? How fast could someone get rid of the Jagged Knife for example.

xii) Peaceful or evilish as it could impact the Ethics demonstration, from choice to proper activities. You're a warmonger? Prove it within a required set of elements.

etc...

Thanks to Dethadder and Nocticulus for the replies and to Zyxpsilon for the follow up.

One thing to clarify -



So... my average cash that I generate per turn over the course of the game contributes to my score? If that's the case, is the following true then?

1. I start off bleeding money. By the end of the game, I am killing everyone and have way too much money. I should stay alive a few extra turns just making lots of money, to bring up my average money per turn?

2. Every time I rush buy something and thus spend 30,000 credits or whatever to rush buy the huge hull 50 doom ray 50 invulernability field with sensors ship of death etc. etc., I am actually hurting my score is a big way because of the big crash that turn to my average turn cash generation?

Sorry if my comment was unclear; it is not the average cash generation, but your economy score each turn is determined by the cash generation that turn. Just like for the other components (social, military, technology) the early turns have a much bigger impact on the final score than the later turns.

1. By lengthening the game, you decrease the overall score (the sum of all 4 components is divided by something related to the length of the game though I've never seen the real formula) and in addition the later turns don't count that much towards the final score.

2. With cash generation I meant income so taxes + tourism + trade + ... (I believe economic treaties are also included). The cost side is not taken into account for your economic score. So by rush-buying you don't influence your income, only your costs. And those huge ships will lead to a huge increase in military score

I think the score is basically the integral, that means the area under the curves, that are shown the Timelines screen. It is divided by some time dependent factor, so the score you get gets less whenn progressing in time. Correct me if im wrong.

That's also my understanding, though the details time dependent depreciation factor is still very much a mystery, at least to me
For the life of me I wouldn't know whether continuing a game at some point would increase my final score or decrease it.

xiii). As far as I know the difficulty level does contribute too, but never knew how or how much...

PS: with the immense maps in TA it may now be theoretically possible to reach 1 million points (Purge is perhaps already working on it...

Essentially Di55ec7ion is right. The scoring is simpler than a lot of people make it out to be. Just your four categories and getting them as high as you can in as short a time as possible. Lengthening the game is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you are still raising one of the components of score your score will continue to rise. At a certain point though no matter what you do it will not be all that beneficial to keep going. An example is the last game I did. On Dec 22 2229 score was 651500,
On Dec 22 2230 score was 757750, on Dec 22 2231 817,750, and for the final last year 852,750. So you see the diminishing returns as the game kept going and at a certain point there really wasn't much more to be done to try to increase it any further, nor was it worth it to keep going for what would surely be less than another 25K gain.

It really just involves taking the galaxy as quick as possible in order to spend the rest of the game developing/building score. In the above game I had 465 total planets, by 14 months in I had I think 427 of them and before the end of reported year one(or shortly thereafter) had 464 planets. After that it is taking the most efficient and quickest path to getting the scoring components up. Which that part of it is another entire conversation within itself . Not sure if this helps all that much, but just trying to give an idea of how it works.

One note; Technology score gives by far the least return for investment. Most of the top scorers have stopped pushing for tech altogether and just focus on getting the other three cat. up. In my game tech score was maybe all of 35K, while things like military ended up in the 12Mil. range. After a initial all labs strat for the first few months I built over any labs I had and never built another. When you have most the galaxy just the tech from focus on that many planets will still have you finishing the tech tree within a few years anyway.

Okay... now I'm feeling VERY humbled.

First, I think I'm talking to some Maths PhDs.

Second, I just posted a 13k score to the Metaverse which I sweat blood to do... and I read about scores plus 800k?

Hmm... a bit of work for me to do

Thank you for all the informative posts. It seems that Military is the best way to up score.

How the frak can that be done?!? (I assume you're playing on suicidal as well) I can see rushing spore ships and such on low-density maps, but 400+ planets in little over a year? That's the part I can't wrap my head around.

800K is close to the highest scores ever submitted for a Metaverse game. In addition you'll need a gigantic (or with TA you can even go for immense) galaxy, preferably with everything set to abundant. And then pull every trick from the book to get everything up and running as fast as possible, etc.

To put things in perspective I can't remember submitting anything above 20K, even including some medium galaxies.

I had a lot of practice and a lot of good advice from the experts for a long time before putting up a score like that. That game was in fact a DL game, but all the same things can be done to a DA game(That's what I'm about to start). Mumblefratz consistently puts up higher scores than that. Magnumaniac and Purge can also at will do it. These are the people I learned a lot from, so if you come across their advice around these forums it is good to pay attention. Wyndstar and MottiKhan are a couple of the smaller map masters, able to push those to higher scores than most.

On the TA immense thing. I am playing an all abundant TA sandbox game right now and it is not looking like it's planet count is going to be much higher than a gigantic. Without more planets the scoring potential will remain in the same ballpark. I believe also that TA is somewhat handicapped in scoring potential from either DA or DL. I'll know more towards the end of this game, but the econ is a big part of those scores and I doubt your going to be able to make near as much per turn with TA. The best DA econ I've had was 796K/turn and DL was around 1.2M/turn, I doubt TA can come close to that kind of econ the way it's shaping up so far.

So you would prefer gigantic for MV scoring? Gigantic and immense would be the same, immense just taking more time if you are right.

Actually there would be one little thing - immense has more influence capability - or is influence only calculated by planets, not by the area controlled?

Once I get a concrete figure and if there isn't anymore planets then Gigantic would definitely be preferable. The Immense would essentially just add a lot of space and travel time slowing the whole process down.

There just has never been any real evidence that influence actually effects score. Not sure how that could be tested so it may remain a mystery. I believe if it does have an effect it is just a small secondary benefit while overall population remains the big factor for social. Of course, like I said there's no real way to tell without some specialized testing.

I may be wrong, but if you can tip the scale at 75%+ in influence, you win a game. Fast or by any other means. Right?
That is scoring - indirectly.

I think that it should be changed. Playing immense should have some kind of benefit, i want to be awarded for playing that long for a win. Difficulties do modificate score as well - why not the galaxy size?

True that, But I would call it more of a victory mechanic than a scoring mechanic .



This I think has more to do with the cap they had to put on stars to help with the OOM errors people were getting with DA. When DA first came out you could get 900+ planets on a gigantic/all abundant, but now it's only around 740. It may simply be the overall limit that both Gig. and Immense maps can reach with abundant settings.

I am aware that it has technical reasons, but at least one could be rewarded by an aditional score modificator for galaxy size.

All things being relative, i would have to alllllmost disagree with a bonus scoring applied to map sizes;

1- You win or you loose bad.
2- It is presumed that anything above large MUST take longer and implies producing much more ships, colonies & what else than lower conditions... thus, if we were to have more points for a tougher Win would that also imply penalties for winning on tiny maps since it takes less developped resources? Indirectly, that is.
3- Then, a true to reality Metaverse (which would be based on the size_scoring formula suggested - while i'm not totally that much against it, btw) would have to determine an alternate system of classification. Some results could show up as being through the roof, while BETTER performances (in fact, they really are) would simply be bumped all the way down!

A bit like DethAdder has said; the whole usual mechanic of 'perceived' variations to integral scores would become more a matter of exploiting the optimal probabilities (say, everyone would always hit the Immense spot since it could give much more points automatically) than a fact of winning the smart way(s).

At the risk of sounding like a noob, how do you know what your score is at various times in the game? Do you just save, quit, get the score, and then start playing again? Or is there an easier way?

Thanks much

Basically that's it. Just save it, invade your last enemy and check the score. Then don't post it, just reload and keep trucking .