I keep hearing experts "dare" less experienced players to try Gigantic games at the highest difficulties (mainly when such less experienced players are complaining about the lack of AI challenge). Yet Frogboy has stated that he thinks the AI offers the greatest challenge on Medium galaxies.
So my question is: why does Metaverse scoring reward playing larger maps, which are in fact easier to beat? Note that I'm assuming standard star density and planet quality settings.
As far as I can tell, the game experience "scales" pretty well with map size: you do not need to do anything drastically different on a Gigantic map than a Medium one, except perhaps know how to prolong your colonization phase. If this is true, all that a Gigantic map adds to the challenge is that there's just more of the same stuff to do, one could say more micromanagement.
So essentially Metaverse scoring rewards players that are willing to make a biggest time investment. I like my games to be skill-testing, not just long. But this preference will probably never be reflected in my Metaverse score.
I'm by no means a great player, but I think that if I the top Metaverse scorers would play Medium/Large maps like I do, I could in the near future post scores that are competitive with theirs. Unfortunately (for me), they have no incentive to do so since bigger maps means bigger scores.
Please forgive my ignorance if there's something I'm missing: I've only been playing the game for a couple of months, and just recently became interested in the Metaverse.
