It's surprising how long one can play this game without gaining a true understanding of how certain things work. 

Without going into any great detail I probably have about as much experience as anyone in maximizing the military component of my score and you'd think that by now I would have a good working understanding of how it works. However, I've just recently discovered that this assumption is totally wrong.

I've always worked on the basis that the military component of your score (like all other components of score) is merely the value of your military rating divided by the turn number squared summed each turn over the course of the game. There also may or may not be some "constant of proportionality" that linearly scales this value.

This is the way I believe military scoring works, which is the same as how the other components of score (income, population and tech spending) work. Basically each of the four components of score are the "front-end weighted", "area under the curve" as displayed in the population, economy, military and research timeline graphs under your civilization manager.

I've written about this many times before and to my knowledge this is consistent with how all the top players view the scoring system. But while I still believe that this basic framework is true there is an implicit assumption here that has been unquestioned for a very long time and in fact this unspoken assumption is *not* true.

This unspoken assumption is about how your military rating is calculated. Looking at the other three components of score it's very obvious what determines your income and population graphs. It's obvious that the value of each of these two graphs at any one point is simply your gross income and your total population. There is no scaling or other "calculation" required; the relationship is direct and one to one. In the case of your tech score it's only slightly more complicated. It's actually not the total income spent on research but in this case I believe that the value of the research graph at any one point is simply the total amount of RP's that you produced that turn which takes into account all possible sources of research bonus.

The natural assumption is that your military rating is treated as above, that the value of your military curve at any point is simply the value of your military rating at that turn. I still believe this to be true as well. However what is definitely *not* true is how we've been told our military rating is determined.

To the best of my knowledge I've always been told that your military rating is the sum of the attack value plus defense value plus hit points divided by 10 of all of your ships once all source of bonus are included. In other words:

Military Rating = the sum of Attack + Defense + HP/10 of all ships

While I do believe the above to be partially true this gives results that are wrong by orders of magnitude. Basically I've come to the conclusion that there has to be some function of the number of ships in the denominator of the above equation.

It's not so surprising that this assumption could go unquestioned for so long. The number and value of ships that people have at any one time is constantly changing. So are your weapons and defense bonuses which are usually different to further confuse the issue. Add to this having some ships in orbit around the Spin Control Center and just having some ships in orbit for the 25% bonus. With all these effects taken into consideration it's not surprising that no one has really taken the effort and tried to correlate some abstract calculation with the displayed value of your military rating.

Like most everything else in this game it's generally not necessary to know precisely how some equation works, it's usually enough to know that more is better. However when trying to maximize score sometimes it's important to know how much more. While more is always better it's generally not true that twice as much is twice as good. It becomes important to know these things so that you can determine where to best put your effort.

Anyway I don't yet have an answer to how your military rating is really calculated. I do think that I have enough data in the many different save games I have to make some kind of determination but I also believe that it's not necessarily an obvious relationship and so I would appreciate any possible help in understanding this.

I don't currently have access to all my data but I'll end this OP with a couple of examples that prove my claim that military rating is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of ships that you have.

My first example can be demonstrated with a screenshot that I'll post later but basically the method that I use to build and move ships to under my military SB array goes as follows. Each turn I buy ships at a number of planets which have been set to autolaunch to a rally point, but each turn I go into the governor and kill the rally point destination. I then wait 7 or 8 turns letting the ships sit next to the planet that built them until I have a full fleet of ships at which point I fleet them up and send them off to under my military SB array. This dramatically reduces the tedium of building and moving ships.

The point is that each turn as I build another 300 or so 1/1 fighters my military rating actually noticeably goes *down*. This proves that your military rating is somehow inversely proportional to the number of ships because as these 1/1 fighters are built they don't increase your attack/defense values very much (i.e. the numerator of the equation) but do increase the number of ships (i.e. the denominator). Then once these new ships are moved to under your SB array then your rating shoots up again because the military SB array dramatically increases the value of these ships offsetting the effect of the ship number increase in the denominator. The point is no matter how small an increase in attack/defense a ship is, if your military rating is not an inverse function of the number of ships then your military rating can *never* go down. It may not increase very much or may appear to stay the same on some larger scale, but it could never actually decrease as you build more ships.

The other example is the one that actually caused me to question this in the first place and can make a difference in how you might decide to play the game. This came about in my quest to become the first to achieve a 1 million point DL game.

My normal course of action is to conquer the galaxy, build up my population and income, build a military SB array and then build about 17K 1/1 huge hull fighters for under the array and then end the game by upgrading all of my 1/1 huge hull fighters to 25/450 BHE/ZPA dreadnoughts. The reason for 17K ships is that on my machine that appears to be the limit to the number of ships that I can upgrade at one time without running out of memory. It's also a convenient point in that by the time I've built that many ships my population and income have pretty much reached their maximum and beyond that point system slowdowns become intolerable.

My problem has been that this has gotten me close to a 1 million point game but I've never quite reached it. In my latest game it appeared that this strategy would result in a game somewhere in the 850K-900K range. Again close, but no cigar. So I tried another approach. In the 2nd case I instead built about 32K ships, 17K that I intended to upgrade per usual and another 15K or so just to increase my military score above the "hump" (or so I thought).

However an interesting thing, or very annoying thing dependent on your point of view, happened. In the first case when I just built 17K ships my military rating was about 5.7 million prior to the upgrade and then 14.2 million after the upgrade. So an upgrade of 17K ships gave me an increased military rating of 8.5 million. In the second case my first indication was that with 32K ships my rating was only 9.2 million instead of the 10.7 million I would expect if military rating were linear. Secondly after the upgrade (in this case I could only upgrade 15K ships) my final military rating was only 15.7 million so the upgrade of 15K ships increased my military rating by 6.5 million. Again if military rating were linear then the upgrade of 15K ships should result in a military rating increase of 7.5 million instead of the 6.5 million actually achieved.

The whole point of this is that I spent a whole game year of building an extra 15K ships for a net increase of 1.5 million to my military rating and probably less than 50K increase to my score.

The point about really understanding how your military rating works is that this could result in a potentially better scoring strategy such as building far fewer ships (but perhaps earlier in the game) and then spending effort maximizing the score of some other component (like tech for example).

Anyway if anyone has any insight or experiences to offer related to the non linearity of military rating please contribute them. Also if I find out more detail from a number of data points, I'll try and figure out the true military rating formula and post it, because although what we've been told is probably true, it's certainly not complete.