Victory condition gives too low a score?

[Cralle]

I am kind of an old-school player, who likes to beat a good high score, but that makes absolutely no sense in Civ5.

In an attempt to beat my previous high score, I started a game on King difficulty on a huge map. I fought my way through the game and ended up with a scientific victory.

In anticipation of having achieved a great high score, I was looking forward to find out what my final score was, but was very dissapointed to find a score that was more than 1000 points lower than one of my defeats on Warlord difficulty!

I then made an experiment, starting a duel map on chieftain with 4 citystates and the fast gameplay. Within a couple of hours I had won a scientific victory and had a score 3 times as high as the one on the huge map. I experimented a bit with the victory conditions and found out that the domination victory gives a higher score, whereas all other victory conditions gives the same score.

I just thought is was outright wrong to be able to loose a game, and still score almost double of a won game, so I would think that in order for the scoring to make sense, victory conditions need to have a much higher score than they do now.

What is your experience?

[Martin_K]

in my experience, the score system is pretty much broken. on the one hand you can win truly epic games (like one city challenge on a large map where everyone else has 50 cities) and get a silly 1,3k score; on the other hand you start a north vs south duel map in future era, rush the other civ with your start units, conquer their capital after 10 turns and a ridiculous 100k score.

the score was never very important to me, but as it is implemented now, the game would be better off without a final score at all.

[Swordfishtrombone]

Yeah, the score doesn't really reflect the level of challenge in the achievement of winning - I don't think it did in Civ4 either. To take an example, in Civ4 (and I EXPECT that this is true for civ5 too) playing a once city challenge and winning was quite tricky, but inevitably led to a very low score. (As you had just one city)

OCC should be scored differently from a regular game, and a cultural victory, which is arguably the most difficult kind of victory, should give a score boost to compensate for having a small empire.

[TheAntika]

Time has always been and still is the main factor to get a good highscore in civ games. Win fast, get many points. Win slow, get few points. It seems to be that simple. The problem is, that you normally cannot win huge maps very fast. This is really imbalanced. But I agree to Martin_K, score never was very important to me...

[MadDjinn]

ok, rehashing an old thread, but yeah. points don't matter.

see here for the obvious reason.

I played a duel future era game, because someone said it was so awesome (at modern), but I did it one better and went future era!! Game was over in 39 turns. (would've been sooner, but I wanted to verify something)

wow, look at my awesomeness!@!@ 14128 points for a domination victory!! woohoo... (sarcasm intended)

next best game is a chieftan large map game. and so forth.

I've only got 2 huge map (deity) wins above 2500 points. (#11 and #12) With 11 of the 15 games above 2500 points being Deity level.

So yeah, points don't matter, and even if they did, they aren't scaled properly for map size and difficulty level.

[jpbar81]

Awesome. One more thing that is broken with this game.

I thought the scoring was a little wack thru my limited number of finished games (actually, just "games" period) when I used to play.

At least they reduced the ridiculous victory point value of wonders. Though, it looks like the whole scoring system is still garbage. As the OP, high scores are usually one of my incentives when playing singleplayer Civ games too.*sigh*

[Shiggs713]

in my experience, the score system is pretty much broken. on the one hand you can win truly epic games (like one city challenge on a large map where everyone else has 50 cities) and get a silly 1,3k score; on the other hand you start a north vs south duel map in future era, rush the other civ with your start units, conquer their capital after 10 turns and a ridiculous 100k score.

the score was never very important to me, but as it is implemented now, the game would be better off without a final score at all.

+1, the score isn't an accurate depiction of difficulty or achievement anyways, so why bother?