I don't think anyone knows (except the devs) exactly how the final score is calculated. In any case, to score well you need to do things big and do them early, i.e. big military rating, big overall population, big economy. Of course, finding ways to accomplish that is what mastering Metaverse games is about.

Thank you for your reply, Neilo, and I'm flattered by the invitation to join an empire, but for me that's a long way off. I coach high school softball and I know what it's like to have someone on the bench you have to send up to bat and put in the field knowing the results are going to be awful.

Well it's really not exactly like this. Certainly there is some sense of competition but there is also willingness among players to help other players progress and improve their game.

The Metaverse is not for people to prove how much "better" they are than others because that's really a no-win strategy. In the end this is a single player game and the metaverse is merely a high score list. The only true winners are those that progress and improve in the game. And those that do so are winners regardless of what their current rank and difficulty level happens to be.

In any case there certainly is no pressure to join an empire or to post games to the metaverse. The only thing that you need to do is ensure that however you decide to play the game is fun for you, because if it isn't fun then you're really not going to stick with it.

This is a very complex game to master that has many different ways to win and many subtle variations on those many different ways. Any advice that anyone gives you will be of a general guideline variety but the devil is in the subtle details like how to balance colonizing as many planets as possible with being able to develop them.

This is only the tip of the iceberg and the best someone can do is give you a pointer here and an example there, but you will have to take those pointers and examples and incorporate those that fit into your current knowledge of the game and the stlye that you've developed. There will be many things that you won't get at first and won't work for you however a few months later after you've developed your game futher something will click and now you will be able to use them.

Joining an empire is one way but you can ask for advice here and get as good advice as any you'd get in any empire. There really are no "secrets" in this game but there are so many different ways to play.

Anyway the basis of metaverse scores are the scores your get in the game so these two topics are not all that different. Although there are some specifics to how cumulative metaverse scores work the following does have some pretty specific detail about the scoring of an individual game. See the Basic Metaverse scoring questions thread.

Also there's stuff like this scattered all over these forums that a little bit of searching will reveal.

Thanks for an interesting post. But isn't a big part of the empire concept to have tournaments and competitive scores between teams of players who all play the same custom game?

I'm ranked 2574 on Metaverse. That tells me something about what wuld happen if I played in a competitive game. I like my butt right where it is, thanks.

After looking at some Metaverse logs of scores, I feel something like I did one time when I played a couple of games on an arcade game while I was waiting for someone at Blockbuster. By the third game I seemed to have gotten the hang of it. I played what seemed to be a decent game and scored somethng like 14,300 points, and felt a little satisfied with myself. Then a teen age kid took over and I watched him score something like 93,800 points.

This game is so *not* your kid's XBox. It requires a lot of intelligent thought and strategy. I play those arcade style games every now and then, but usually get bored with them pretty quick. This game always keeps my interest.


In DA, I mainly run 1 farm but will run 2 on higher class planets that can spare the tiles for a few VRC's. Higher overall population does seem to improve the society score, but to what extent, I don't know. Economically, higher pops versus more stock markets seems to be a wash.

Yes, at least in gigantic games where you usually have 6 plus or minus morale resources. Basically I build 1 farm per any planet PQ10 or less because they don't get the 10% approval bonus. For PQ11 and above it really depends on exactly how many morale resources I get.

It actually gets rather complex on how I decide to go for one or two farms on PQ11+ planets. Basically I have a spreadsheet where I figure out how many tiles I need to give up to have acceptable approval at 20B and then calculate the difference in income between the higher pop with fewer stock markets versus the lower pop with more stock markets. I then go with the higher pop as long as it doesn't lose me noticable income. It sounds complicated but it's simply a comparison between the square root of the population multiplied by the number of stock markets in the two cases. Certainly there are constants involved but they're the same in each case.

Usually with 6 morale resources I need 2 VRC's to achieve an acceptable approval rate with two farms. With less morale resources then I need more VRC's. I also need to consider the bonus tiles when figuring how many tiles are given up to achieve 20B. For example with a 100% approval tile and a 100% food tile it (usually) only costs one tile to control at 20B versus 13B. Clearly planets (above PQ11) with food/approval tiles almost always go to 20B. All in all I usually get about half my planets to 20B.


Basically from the above I maximize income and then get the biggest pop I can without lowering my income.

My social score (pop) is usually appreciable but my economy generally tops out around between 1.2B and 1.6B for 4~5 years so clearly my economy score is bigger than my social score.

Getting those values high early in the game absolutely can't be emphasized enough. Where my games are at now, shaving even a couple of months of my time results in huge point boosts.

Yeah. There's a thread around The Death of Morale Buildings by Wyndstar that goes over this. The conclusion is that in DA it's not really ever worthwhile to have planets at 20B versus 13B. However one thing that treatment neglected was the effect of food and approval bonus tiles. These were neglected because Wyndstar didn't want to consider having to do different things on different planets based on bonus tiles. However a single 100% bonus tile does change the math by quite a bit. Say for example that to have 13B requires just a farm and to have 20B requires an extra farm and 3 VRC's. This is actually a fairly typical example. So normally you have to give up 4 extra tiles to have 20B versus 13B.

In this situation in DL then for the extra income that is lost by having 4 fewer stock markets to be compensated by the extra income from the extra 7B population there needs to be 13 stock markets or more left on the 20B planet. This implies that this is only worthwhile to do on planets of PQ18 or above. With a single food/approval bonus tile instead of 13 stock markets only 9 are required which lowers the PQ requirement for this to be worthwhile down to PQ14. Take it one step further and consider planets that have both a food and an approval bonus and 9 stock markets goes down to 5 which only requires PQ10.

The bottom line is that you really don't have that many planets PQ18 and above and so you might think that it's not worthwhile to bother but once you include planets PQ14+ that happen to have either a food or approval bonus tile then there are actually quite a few more planets that qualify.

Note that the relationship of planet size and bonus tiles to whether its worthwhile to be at 20B versus 13B is specifically based on the DL income calculation but the principle still applies to DA. It's just that what changes in DA is that due to the cap you may have to give up more tiles in DA than you would in DL. The above example is not that unrealistic for DA because in DL in a gigantic galaxy with 6 morale resources it's more typical to only require an extra farm and 2 VRC's not 3. In DL you only really need the 3 VRC's if you only get 5 morale resources. The 3 VRC's situation I described above is actually very applicable to DA.

You need to remember that in DA it's actually the "approval" that's capped at 100% on the effect of all global sources of morale ability. By having a larger population you actually effectively get a larger cap. At 13B, base morale is approximately 0.6 so to reach the approval cap of 100% only requires a 167% morale ability, however at a pop of 20B base morale is 0.4 which means the morale benefit is capped at 250%. This means that if you only try to keep pop's at 13B then it's only worthwhile to have the equivalent of 4 morale resources to mine whereas if you try to get 20B it's worthwhile to have the equivalent of 6 and a half morale mining resources.

Certainly the morale cap of DA makes it more severe than in DL but there still can be situations in DA where higher pops are both achievable and practical.

I think Purge once said on large or greater maps with planets common or greater, he passes (at least early in the game) on researching the extreme colonizing techs. Instead he favors letting the AIs colonize them and in the process over overextend themselves. He picks up the colonization techs when he invades the AIs.

Mumblefratz, during the colonization rush on a large or greater map with planets common or greater, do you bother researching the colonization techs?

Mumblefratz is still playing DL at this point (which doesn't have colonization techs), but if you want my input, I pick them up later when I actually start to build the planets I've conquered. Initially, I'm not colonizing extreme worlds myself.