There are a number of ways to look at this and the table that I presented before is just one. Bascially there are two effects going on. The first effect is that your MV games depreciate over time. They depreciate by 5% a month until they reach 65% of their initial value. The second effect is how a new game initially contributes to your current score and how much adding a new submission degrades your old score simply because it's now divided by a bigger number.

My chart in reply 1 of this thread ignores the 5% per month depreciation and just focuses on the effect of your submission count going up.

To see this a little more clearly your current metaverse score is:

MV(n) = SumofDepreciatedScores/n^0.4

So now you play a new game (game n+1) which has a score of NewScore and your Metaverse Score is now:

MV(n+1) = (SumofDepreciatedScores + NewScore)/(n+1)^0.4

But rearranging the first equation gives:

SumofDepreciatedScores = MV(n)*(n^0.4)

Replacing this into the second equation gives:

MV(n+1) = MV(n)*(n^0.4)/(n+1)^0.4 + NewScore/(n+1)^0.4

In words this says that if you have a metaverse score based on n games and you play another game with a score of NewScore then your new Metaverse score, (MV(n+1)), will be the sum of the old metaverse score multiplied by n^0.4/(n+1)^0.4 plus the score of the new game multiplied by 1/(n+1)^0.4.

This is what the columns listed in my table mean. So the last entry list in reply one says that if you have a metaverse score based on 50 games and you submit a new game then your new metaverse score will equal 99.2% of your old score plus 20.7% of the score of the new game. What this precisely means is not totally obvious. Looking at this another way says that by submitting a 51st game you are giving up 0.8% of your current score for 20.7% of your new score.

This sounds like a no brainer but it is possible that this actually loses you total points if

MV(n)*0.8% > NewScore*20.7% or

MV(n) > NewScore*20.7%/0.8% or

MV(n) > NewScore*25.8

This means if your current MV score is 1 million your score will actually go down by submitting a new game whose score is less than about 38K. This is most likely not an issue since most people with MV scores of a million didn't get such a score by posting a lot of 38K wins but you need to be aware of this effect. Actually note that I previously said this couldn't be the case and that was incorrect.

Anyway, continuing my chart from above (and skipping some values) gives the following. I've also added a third column which is the percentage of your MV score that a new game must be worth in order for it to not make your overall MV score go down.

n - Old Score Percentage (New Game Percentage) Minimum New Score Percentage of MV total

50 - 99.2% (20.7%) 3.8%
75 - 99.5% (17.7%) 3.0%
100 - 99.6% (15.8%) 2.5%
125 - 99.7% (14.4%) 2.2%
150 - 99.7% (13.4%) 2.0%
175 - 99.8% (12.6%) 1.8%
200 - 99.8% (12.0%) 1.7%
300 - 99.9% (10.2%) 1.3%
400 - 99.9% (9.1%) 1.1%
500 - 99.9% (8.3%) 1.0%
600 - 99.9% (7.7%) 0.9%
700 - 99.9% (7.3%) 0.8%
800 - 100.0% (6.9%) 0.7%
900 - 100.0% (6.6%) 0.7%
1000 - 100.0% (6.3%) 0.6%
2000 - 100.0% (4.8%) 0.4%
4000 - 100.0% (3.6%) 0.3%
8000 - 100.0% (2.7%) 0.2%

So even up to 1000 games you get the benefit of 6.3% of any new game you submit and 4.8% at 2000 games. I think this goes down forever but never reaches zero.

When you say you just plop down colonist and don't build up the planet's industry, do you mean you just build a starport or you don't build anything? Are you building/buying colony ships on those planets or colonizing just from your homeworld?