I haven't played since the Shadows came out. I'm noticing the game now is a lot harder to keep your score in the top 50%, especially in the early game. It's not unusual for me to be dead last in ranking in the first fifty turns.



Seems I have to resort to war to increase my score, taking a city here, another there.



Anyone else notice this?



The score in CiV seems basically to be a measure of 'how many wonders have you built'. How does it work here? Is it meaningful?

I think the score overvalues the amount of units you have. Honestly, the score is not really important or representative, so I try to ignore it.

I always thought the score was a mix of units, buildings and research so I used it as a general indication of my progress. Additionally, I guess the AI uses the same value (or a derivate of it) when choosing whether to attack you or not, and how to price stuff during a trade.

Well the score is basically a mix of everything from what I understand however it does seem to be heavily biased towards army sizes. In other words usually the player with the biggest overall score will have the bigger army but not necessarily be winning economically (or ironically overall)



This is why A.I. players will always zoom ahead of you in terms of score, because they prioritize units even in the early game which any good player knows is usually a bad idea unless you start right next to another faction.



So really is a problem that could do with fixing, as it would be helpful to see a more balanced overall score to look at rather then the current "millitary scoreboard".

icarus86 wrote:
I always thought the score was a mix of units, buildings and research so I used it as a general indication of my progress. Additionally, I guess the AI uses the same value (or a derivate of it) when choosing whether to attack you or not, and how to price stuff during a trade.

The AIs' attitudes towards other empire are indeed influenced by their overall score as well as their military power. It's something we're still tweaking (and will probably never stop tweaking): right now the AI's survival instinct is maybe a little too powerful, so it will tend to avoid attacking stronger empires. This means that AIs will not attempt to tackle a well-entrenched player.



We don't want them to be suicidal though, so what we really need is some mechanism for forming alliances in order to "gang up" on the leading empire. Unfortunately we don't have the kind of architecture in place that would allow us to do this: relations are evaluated very much on a one-on-one basis rather than alliance-on-alliance.



Something for a future game perhaps?



But sorry I'm derailing things a little. Any opportunity to talk about the AI you know

wilbefast wrote:
The AIs' attitudes towards other empire are indeed influenced by their overall score as well as their military power. It's something we're still tweaking (and will probably never stop tweaking): right now the AI's survival instinct is maybe a little too powerful, so it will tend to avoid attacking stronger empires. This means that AIs will not attempt to tackle a well-entrenched player.



We don't want them to be suicidal though, so what we really need is some mechanism for forming alliances in order to "gang up" on the leading empire. Unfortunately we don't have the kind of architecture in place that would allow us to do this: relations are evaluated very much on a one-on-one basis rather than alliance-on-alliance.



Something for a future game perhaps?



But sorry I'm derailing things a little. Any opportunity to talk about the AI you know

Thank you, this info is very welcome ! ^^

I can just hope that you'll succeed with improving the current engine as much as possible. Of course, a better engine altogether is meant for EL2 or perhaps ES2, if it's not too late already.

wilbefast wrote:
The AIs' attitudes towards other empire are indeed influenced by their overall score as well as their military power. It's something we're still tweaking (and will probably never stop tweaking): right now the AI's survival instinct is maybe a little too powerful, so it will tend to avoid attacking stronger empires. This means that AIs will not attempt to tackle a well-entrenched player.



We don't want them to be suicidal though, so what we really need is some mechanism for forming alliances in order to "gang up" on the leading empire. Unfortunately we don't have the kind of architecture in place that would allow us to do this: relations are evaluated very much on a one-on-one basis rather than alliance-on-alliance.



Something for a future game perhaps?



But sorry I'm derailing things a little. Any opportunity to talk about the AI you know

Soooo...you're saying we can look forward to this kind of behavior in ES2?

The things that push score up the most are Military (mainly through hp), Research and Cities. High dificculty AI will always have high score because they build early units, found a lot of cities they can´t defend even before turn 10 and get the research bonus.

Best way to turn the table if you care about score is by conquering some of their cities.

wilbefast wrote:


We don't want them to be suicidal though, so what we really need is some mechanism for forming alliances in order to "gang up" on the leading empire. Unfortunately we don't have the kind of architecture in place that would allow us to do this: relations are evaluated very much on a one-on-one basis rather than alliance-on-alliance.

Can you not script the AI to start forming alliances based on factors like score/borders/etc.? My knee-jerk is that you could at least have them start allying with each other & going to war with the score leader if the score leader gets ahead by a certain threshold. And then if that worked out, fine-tune the process so they prefer alliances with empires that share a border with the common enemy instead of some goobers on another continent.



Sorry if this is ignorant, don't know much about your AI.

GenericOctopus wrote:
Can you not script the AI to start forming alliances based on factors like score/borders/etc.? My knee-jerk is that you could at least have them start allying with each other & going to war with the score leader if the score leader gets ahead by a certain threshold. And then if that worked out, fine-tune the process so they prefer alliances with empires that share a border with the common enemy instead of some goobers on another continent.

Currently the desired diplomatic relation with a given empire is based only on said empire - third parties are not taken into account. There are "common ally" and "common enemy" attitude score modifiers, but it's not currently possible to go further in the scripting layer than the fact that there are shared relations: we can't currently query the precise states of said third parties. I will study the question.