As it would take more time (and so add some points to the final score) to achieve a military victory instead of an alliance victory (you need to conquer the systems of your(s) ally(ies)), I don't see the need to a multiplier factor for the alliance victory.

I am both guilty of what Technician speaks (submitting military victories) for the points, and agree completely with his opinion on the game. There comes a time when you know you win, and it takes another hour to achieve the military victory, but you could win quicker with one of the other types. I wouldn't both to continue towards the military victory if the victory types were equal.

Let's also be clear, my achieving military victory is not an indication of a more difficult victory. It's an indication that I'm too stubborn to lose the points for submitting other types of victories. Not to mention it doesn't take that much longer to achieve a military victory through cultural dominance. Late in the game, I tend to have fleets of 40-50 contructors in space and more coming out every turn, so I just keep directing them to the next waypoint until all but the last sector are conquered, or I get the warning that I'm about to achieve cultural dominance. I don't turn off cultural victory, I just don't let myself trigger it.

Well Said Totally agree , glad someone here feels the same ...

I think that the fact the we are even having this discussion proves that we all care about the points and that we would all want to have fun achiving those points.

Admitted we all have different "sets of morale" in regards to what we will do to achive these points and i myself will gladly admit that the main reason i play huge/gigantic is because of the points.

On a gigantic map i can win by alliance and culture and take a hit in poins that only seems fair(since a real military victory is harder to achive), but if i win by Beyond Human (tech) my score would suffer significant and i don't see why.

Hear, hear!

One of the biggest thrills I get from the game is seeing an opponent who's much more powerful than me, and realizing that if I leave him alone, I'll never be able to stop him. All I can do is grab my less powerful fleet, take a deep breath, and charge in.

Idea, then -- why not weigh military victories additionally by the percentage of game spent at declared war?

For each turn, add up the intelligence (or alternately economic+military) ratings of the major powers with whom you are engaged in a declared war. At the end of the game, the ratio of this number to the largest possible (accumulated universe-wide economic+military or intelligence) will be used to modify the score. [1]

As a sheer guesstimate, take 10% as the baseline -- using the economic+military criteria, this would mean that you were at war with, on average, 10% of the galaxy each turn. Deviations from this would be rewared or penalized with the final score -- a 0% figure [something you'd get with an Alpha-Strike or a cultural military victory] could easily halve your final Metaverse score for a victory, while a 100% figure (meaning you'd always been in a declared war with all known major nations) would be worth doubling or even tripling the final score.

This, I believe, would encourage players to stick to the same overall whole-game strategy. A brief war to end the game after a near-cultural win should not be awarded the same kind of score as a long series of hard-fought wars; similarly, after said series of wars the bonus would hopefully outweigh decisions to stop-in-victory and go for a tech or cultural win.

[1] -- If it would be likely to imbalance this by dragging out the end of the game (by, say, gifting the AI's a class-12 planet and sitting there with a declared war for 20 years), then just normalize these values by your own nation's economic+military. This would only accumulate significant points if you were picking on people about as strong as yourself. GalCiv AI is good enough that you can't just sit on a war with an equal power.

~SDC~

I read in another thread, maybe on the strategic forum but I am not sure, that each turn, the population was taken in account for metaverse scoring using different multipliers and one was the percentage of population that wasn't in your empire. Maybe a similar formula could be used.

Easy to abuse. Alpha strike the opponent. When they ahve ZERO planet left, sue for peace. Take all their fleet (if any) and give them one PQ 1 world in the corner of the galaxy. Give it back to them everytime it flips. If sufficiently isolated, all their ships will be useless as they are out of range where they'd be useful. Next turn, declare war. Stay at war long enough. This will make the game longer, but you just have to count the number of turns already spent to know how many times you must press end turn before killing the major again.
Note this is just a variant of the tech victory exploit that existed in the eraly days.
As I said, nothing you do in-game, except victory, should affect the score. Only starting conditions. Otherwise, you bias the game towards one style of play and some abuses.

And no, not everyone is interested in the metaverse for scores. I'm talking about it because I think the metaverse could be used to collect data about how the game is played, but the scoring system makes people play the metaverse instead of the game, thus the metaverse information collected by Stardock are biased and do not reflect the actual way the game is played by those who don't play metaverse but play Galciv. Thus I'd much rather have a scoring system that doesn't provide incentive to play one way or another (including map sizes and, to a lesser extent, difficulty level), but either no scoring at all or a more neutral system, which rewards only the number of victories, based on the diffuclty of the starting conditions.

I like that idea

Yes, but you forgot both balancing alternatives -- accumulate economic+military score, and normalize by your own economic+military. With just the first, that means these points will accumulate at a glacial pace, on the order of 100 turns at "fake war" per turn of actual game -- and by that point other score penalties for time would come into play. With the second, the accumulation will only reach an eventual equilibrium of (their economic+military)/(your economic+military)... which in the case of any empire small enough to be no threat is a very trivial amount -- still well within range of score penalties.



But your ideal is not reflected in the (presumed) current scoring structure -- it seems that population totals are already summed up, as both a scoring component and a balancing factor. I feel that the addition of a similar scoring factor for military victories would help present a more equal scoring system, based on reports here. Additionally, your argued "starting conditions + victory" score is either simplified to the point of uselessness (if it's just a victory:yes/no calculation) or overly rewarding of speed play (if you take year as the sole victory variable into account).

It is far from the only necessary step, of course -- cultural victories would probably need some adjustment as well in light of a modification to military victories, and I'm not aware enough of the issues with alliance victory to speak for that one. In the final total, though, I feel that any steps to balance the system for current exploits would be beneficial.



~SDC~

That's part of my point. This community doesn't get up in arms whining about fixes to exploitable problems. There was some angst posted over the 1 IP trick, but the community moved on, and is either happier with that exploit gone or at least accepting. Thus Stardock would not face backlash from status-quo defenders if they fix problems.

How to get it right is a big question. Certainly accumulating more and more score just for marking time is part of the problem. That's what they tried to fix by nerfing the tech win, but the exploit-minded players simply moved on to the next best loophole, and the rest of us are left with a victory condition that is not worth pursuing, in the Metaverse competition between empires.

The game has too many variables for its current scoring mechanisms. None of the starting variables other than map size and difficulty level are accounted for. Having all of the game results weigh the same without regard to other starting conditions leads to things like turning off victory conditions to better enable the higher-scoring military wins, and playing all rare all the time (for some) to crank games faster.

I disagree with the notion of reducing scoring complexity, down to wins and losses. It would be especially bad to ignore difficulty level. Can you see it now? Player X starts cranking games with the AI's set to the lowest level ("bleeding idiot"? Heck, I don't even KNOW what the levels are below normal). Someone is then able to crank out a lot of these wins, and even though they might not be playing the game any more, instead going through the motions just to rack up the most points, the Metaverse will see them rise to the top anyway.

What's the point of that? Isn't the Metaverse here to set goals? Markers? A means to accumulate a history with the game? I'd be in favor of tracking and accounting for more variables, not less.

Of course, a lot of the scoring issues would disappear if more of the AI's weaknesses were shored up.


As far as the Metaverse goes, players can even USE MODS and still submit. What is up with that??? For competition to matter, players need to be playing the same game.

Warcraft III has an interesting ladder system. To get onto the ladder, you have to use the automatic matching process. The servers pick opponents for you at random, or set up opposing teams at random. They use their ranking system to try to keep the matchups close. WHY IS THAT IMPORTANT? Obviously, because games are more fun when they are tightly contested, when both sides have a fair shot at winning. The system does not always achieve that, but it does a lot better than the old OLD method I remember from playing Warcraft II on Kali in 1996, 97, which was for players to set up their own games at random.

The War3 ladder does something else, too. It only records standard games, using the standard rules and approved maps. This limits the competition to a format that is hard to cheat: an even playing field, no way to choose opponents (no way for groups of players to arrange phony matches, etc). By having the GAMES be the same, or within a specified range, comparisons take on more value, and more interest.

For Frogboy to admonish us to play the game, not the Metaverse, ignores the appeal the Metaverse is aiming at: to give players a way to compare, contrast, and compete. That gives us goals. Goals are something else the Warcraft III ladder does well. They have simple little icons for chat rooms, and players have to have specified numbers of victories on the ladder to earn each icon. As silly and simple as that may be, it adds focus for players. It gives them shape and form to their gameplay, a reason to keep playing IN ADDITION TO enjoying the game.

Having bothered to create the Metaverse, Stardock is now stuck with it. Maybe they regret it, maybe they don't. I think it still has a lot of potential. But because it currently allows mods to be used (with nothing more than a few checks for "anomalous" results to try to restrict mods to the spirit of the option), and because the Metaverse does not track things like turning off all victory conditions or always using the best bonus picks and political parties, and whether or not the AI alignments are normal or tilted... The scoring is inaccurate, and thus loses meaning. There is still enough validity to the REAL DIFFICULTY of Masochistic to draw a line between it and lower levels, with the top ranking Meta players all being genuinely skilled at the game, but even that draws complaints from those who either cannot or do not want to play on Maso.

There just isn't enough traction. The scoring is not ambitious enough at this point to get the job done.

Fixes over time are making things better! But we are running out of time with still a lot of room for improvement, as 1.2 is expected to be the last patch for the unexpanded game. :notsure:


- Sirian

In starting conditions, I include map size and difficulty, which means that it doesn't reward speed of play only, but time spent playing the game successfully, and difficulty of the challenge. The current system rewards same except you have to exploit the metaverse scoring system flaws in addition.

My point is that whatever solution you choose except a drastic one, there WILL be exploits. I just showed one example. Here's another example:
Consider you're so good at expanding that you can beat the ai to it. You get 4 or 5 times as many planets as the ai and crush them in a few turns. With your proposed system, you get less points that if you struggled against the ai for years because you had not been as good at expanding. Thus you reward players that are bad at expanding vs. those who are good at it. This may or may not hold, but whatever solution for scores you promote, you will be promoting a certain type of play. Wht should a One Sector Challenge yield less points than a massive military victory? It's probably harder to manage. So why should it yield less?

If the goal is to compete, then the metaverse should give comparison games to download them directly. A map generated randomy can always be reduced to a single number, so it's not like it would take bandwidth to download the map. You could even send the map seed without at upload so don't really need downloading it in the first place. You could give points to people who won a map. (It would also fix the Ctrl N abuse). Those who are the only ones to have beaten map X would get more points. If you bet map X, get A + (B/number of people who bet that map) points. So if you want to beat player XXX, you can attack them directly by playing the same map as them. It will give you less points, but reduce their score. Such a metaverse would let you play the game however you like and probably foster more competition.

Your comments are correct about Blizzard, i think the problem is more like the one Diablo II had though to be honest, it has taken them over a year and a half plus to get it right but they had the same problem with classes as we are with scoring for each win, the D2 tables used to be all one class at the top, others were left behind, evrytime there was a patch to cover exploits for a class another 'loophole' was found for another class, so that that class ended up at the top. Only by constantly patching and balancing has D2 got where it is today, ALL the classes are spread out evenly over the table, no one class is better than any of the others, they all have strengths that are unique, but more important, its more fun to play. Stardock would have to do the same with the scoring for each road to victory and disable mod submissions with scores for a start. Its got to be possible for the scoring problem with Metaverse to be fixed, and with the new expanded Metaverse due soon i should imagine that someone, somewhere at Stardock must realise its not just the game that needs patches, its the Metaverse too.

Firstly... I have doubts that anyone can out-expand a Maso AI, simply because of the production and scouting benefits that they enjoy. Being able to do that, therefore, would mean that there is a fundamental problem with the AI or you are playing on too easy of a difficulty.

Secondly, I believe that the scoring system is already influenced, by part, by turn of victory -- a quick, dominating win as you suggest is already rewarded as you suggest, and it might not be out of line to increase the weight of this component in the score because of that possibility. I can't really say, though; I don't have the entire scoring forumula in front of me.



This statement is patently and trivially true, and established policy already -- they fixed the tech exploit, as you reminded me a couple posts up. It is the unstated goal of the scoring system to encourage fair and proper play, to the point of discouraging quick-victory methods, including and especially ones like alpha strike, which already border on cheating.

Galciv is a very flexible game, and it is a very difficult task to reduce the entirety of a game's play into a single number. This comparison, however, is an established, desirable goal of Stardock with the Metaverse, and in my opinion modification of the scoring system as you suggest would undermine the utility of that broad comparison.



Well, a One Sector Challence that wins by alpha-strike is already winning by exploit. One that doesn't is currently (likely) penalized in the score because of a low total population fraction game-wide, and if a OSS can pull off a real military victory then, honestly, I think they deserve the points.



This is a perfectly valid system, but I feel it would be best suited for a specialized ladder game rather than a general metaverse system. Another possible point is that the same map will already play very differently based on the outcome of effectively random events (certain AI behavior, random morality events, random non-morality events), so it may be specious to compare two games based merely on the same starting map.

wowsers,

this is the most positive stuff I've heard about Blizzard Entertainment for a very very long time from Sirian.

My opinion on the current topic:

60k should be the limit of scores acheiveable. However, gigantic maso games should be able to score higher than this 60k, with scores being truncated AFTER the win type multiplier is applied. Also they should bump up the multiplier for tech victory to .8 or .9. Additionally, there should be a small penalty for disabling any of the win conditions (say 5k Mpoints max). This would allow the game to be played as close to the spirit of what the designers wanted as is possible.

I think it would be a great idea to have a penalty for disabling victory conditions or as I understood Sirian - why not just make disabling of victory conditions a 0 Mv-score.

So, people like me, and others who have posted here, should not be allowed a score on the Metaverse?
(check my previous messages in this post, im a 'pure' military player, no culture modules on starbases, no culture / influence building build ups on planets except an embassy which helps a little at the start if you end up next to an AI)

I think that 0 Mv-score due to disabling a victory condition is a bit harsh:
- disabling tech victory: I only see the need in a scenario. If I don't want the tech victory, I just need not to research the final tech. So I don't see the need for penalty.
- disabling cultural or alliance victory: Ok for a small penalty since it allows to have a longer game and so to gather some Metaverse Points

Is it normal to have multiplier for alliance and cultural victory since shorter games mean less points?
I feel that it is wrong to be penalized to end a game quickly with an alliance when there are few planets left to the remaining majors.

Why would you turn off any victory conditions ? The only reasons i can see to turn of victory conditions is to 1) create a scenario 2) to avoid cultural victory or 3) to exploit alliance with getting the alliance victory. But there are probably others ?



Agree. This would be really nice

To turn on the military victory only is one of the only ones i can think of as thats how you turn on a military victory as stated in the manual. And as i said, im a 'pure' military player, i dont go for 'exploits' as i have already said. Each to thier own, i like to build an empire by mlitary domination, if i want to wipe out all the other civs on the map by using starships and transports till theres only me left and possibly a 'buddyminor' ive kept my frieghters going to, why should my game be penalised in score when i have enjoyed it as much as someone who likes alliance / tech / cultural etc? Just because you dont like the military victory doesnt mean no one else does, and it doesnt mean the person is a cheat either.
Having read about the AI on Maso' level, it has got to be nigh on impossible to win by a 'pure' military, so you would have to exploit weakness by using cultural etc to win which is why i would never go to the last two AI levels, i dont like the idea of having to cheat / exploit the game.
[Message Edited]

I don't know about everyone else, but this is the least satisfying victory condition for me. I dislike the victory movie and I don't feel like I've accomplished anything. I generally leave Alliance on, but once you've gotten them all to Close, you shouldn't have too much of a problem invading them...

~Evil Smiley~

Maybe I am wrong but why must you turn off alliance and tech victory? I understand for cultural but not for the others.

.

I'm terribly sorry if i gave that impression, and I apologize...that wasn't intended.

But couldn't you win military victory with all victory conditions turned on ? I realise that there would be a "danger" of getting a cultural victory, which is of course a problem. Then maybe that needs to be fixed.

[Message Edited]

No you cant, not according to the options anyway, if you click them all off it then tells you that you are on a 'military' victory.

Military Victory is always on, no matter what is checked.