1) Yes but i had a lot of ships
2) Doom Ray and I researched everything
3) Most of my planets were filled up with banks and there were 4 or 5 that i used to build ships

Your military might or military ranking and how it relates to your final score is actually a very confusing topic. First off there are three different places where your military might or ranking is listed and it's actually listed in two different ways.

The following screenshot is from my most recent game where my final score was 924,500. Note that this was a DL game but all of this applies to DA and ToA as well.



In this screenshot of the Stats & Graphs area under your Civilization Manager, you can see the same information in two different ways. From your statement that your military might was 264 it seems that you're looking at the information from the military bar chart. You see this by selecting under the Military bar graph and then looking at the summary information highlighted in yellow.

This information is *not* your absolute military rating and can be very misleading. This is actually only your *relative* military rating when compared to the currently selected AI opponent, in my case the Terrans. This information can be important in and of itself. For example there are certain ways that an AI will act towards you dependent on this ratio being higher than 3 to 1 and then again at 10 to 1. But as far as your score this has nothing to do with anything.

Your *real* military rating is displayed by selecting the Military button under Abilities that's highlighted in light blue in the above screenshot. There are a number of things displayed here that are of interest. The first thing is your total number of ships. In my case it lists 19,471 ships. What's most interesting about this figure is that it's wrong. By looking at my Ship Yard display I really have only 17,037 total ships. This is not particularly important it's just yet another source of confusion.

The other pieces of information that are useful are how much you're spending on Ship Maintenance (in my case 3.6 million bc per turn), and the most important piece of information in terms of your final score is the Military Ranking (in my case 14.1 million).

I previously mentioned that there are three places your military ranking is displayed and the final place is really the most important when it comes to score. This is shown in the following screenshot that shows the graph of your military ranking over the course of the entire game. This is displayed under the Timeline tab of your Civilization Manager.



Basically your military score is determined by this graph. The short description is that your military score is based on the "front end weighted", "area under the curve". By "front end weighted" I mean that you get more credit in your final score for early values of military rating versus later values of military rating. By "area under the curve" I mean that your final score is dependent on having high values of military rating that need to be held for long periods of time. For example you could possibly achieve a very large military rating right before you end the game and you would hardly notice the effect it will have to your score.

Note that these same things apply to the other three components of score; population, income and research spending, but that's a different topic.

Looking at the military graph is very instructive. Basically everything related to score can be read directly from this graph if you know what you're doing.

Basically my military strategy involves building many thousands of 1 attack 1 defense huge hull ships to place under an array of 24 military starbases each of which give a 63 point bonus to each of my ships. The total bonus given to each ship by such an array is 24*63=1512. In my case I "build" about 300 such ships per turn for a period of about a year and by the end of that year I have about 17K such ships.

The stairstep action that you see early in the curve is due to how I go about moving my ships from the planet that built them to under my military SB array. To avoid having many hundreds of individual ships moving one at a time to my military SB array, I wait 7 or 8 turns leaving the ships sitting by the planet that built them. Once I have a fleet worth of ships then I fleet them up and send them off to under my array. That’s where you see the big jump in military rating.

But if you look closely you’ll see that while I’m building more ships that sit next to the planet that built them my military rating doesn’t just stay the same or increase by a little bit, my military rating actually *goes down* during this period. This brings up another very important point. Your military rating is determined in part by some function of how strong your ships are based on attack value, defense value and hit points. But besides that it’s divided by some function of the total number of ships that you have.

The reason that my military rating declines slightly is because while the ships are sitting by the planet that built them they are of a very low value. The low value doesn’t contribute much to the sum of attack plus defense plus hit points but it does increase the total number of ships and so the military rating declines. Once all ships are moved to under my military SB array then the military rating shoots back up.

Because of this, for maximum score, you want the highest possible military rating with the fewest possible number of ships. To achieve that once I get around 17 thousand 1 attack / 1 defense ships I then do a massive upgrade to the most powerful ship that I can build. Note that this is dependent on what kind of attack and defense bonus that I have which is itself dependent on the number of military resources that I have to mine. In most cases people usually have slightly higher defense bonuses than weapons bonus and so the upgrade ship that I use consists of 1 Black Hole Eruptor and then as many Zero Point Armors as I can fit on the huge hull. Note that this is why I initially build my 1/1 fighter based on a huge hull so that I can get maximum points out of my final upgrade.

From the graph you see the tremendous boost that I get in my military rating in one turn from this upgrade. In the case of this game my military rating was about 5.7 million prior to the upgrade and 14.1 million after the upgrade.

One final point is that the vertical axis displays your maximum military rating but only the first four significant digits are shown. However you can see the 1410 listed in this graph which correlates to the military rating of 14.1 million from the Stats & and Graphs page.

This is everything you could possibly ever need to know about Military Might and Metaverse Score.

Yep.

Actually it's going radically in debt for about the last three years of the game. If you notice my ship maintenance was over 3 million bc per turn. My income was close to 1.3 million bc per turn but there's no way one could even come close to 3 million bc per turn.

The upgrade costs trillions of bc's and you can never recover from it. The 17K limit comes from how many ships I am able to upgrade at one time on my PC without crashing. It's primarily limited by the amount of RAM in your system, how many processes you normally have running and how much memory they use. I'm running XP and keep my processes to a minimum and have 2GB of RAM. I don't think that having any more than 2GB of RAM helps and I know folks that run Vista have done a similar upgrade but the exact number that you'll be able to do will vary from one machine to another. Also having a bunch of ships that you're not upgrading reduces the number that you can upgrade.

For example in that last game I was really trying to hit the 1M mark and I tried playing out the game three separate ways. In one case I built a total of 34K ships but because of that could "only" successfully upgrade 15K ships. Add to this the diminishing returns that you get to your military ranking due to the increased number of ships and it's not surprising that in this scenario my military ranking went from 14.1M with 17K ships to 15.7M with 34K ships.

Additionally because it took longer to build the extra 17K ships this delayed the upgrade by another year. The net effect is that 34K ships with a military rating of 15.7M actually scored lower than 17K ships with a military rating of 14.1M. Not a whole bunch less but clearly spending another game year building ships to have your score go down however slightly is not the direction I want to go.

But as far as finishing the game in debt, the only way to do this is to set yourself up so that you have everything you'll need to finish the game. You need enough ships and transports to take out the last AI. You also need to start out with a relatively decent morale, I shoot for around 80%, because being in debt gradually decreases your approval.

Towards the end you'll need to lower your taxes during the 1 week of elections and possibly at the very end you may even need to lower taxes to avoid losing pop, but if it comes to that you may as well lower taxes and thereby lower your income because if you don't you lose people which will lower your income anyway.

Just tell them you need it to conquer the Drengin.

But AFAIK the 2GB memory is a limitation of 32 bit addressing which is intrinsic to the game itself and is not a hardware limitation.

Certainly having less than 2GB of physical memory may limit it further but extending physical memory above 2GB provides no benefit.

Um I'm not sure about that, there must be some issue then with DL ship maintenance costs versus those of DA.

Note once I did the upgrade my ship maintenance costs were 3 million bc per turn. There is no way to produce fully built up ships whose maintenance exceeds your income which in my case was 1.26 million bc per turn. That probably correlates to a total of 7K powerful ships. Plus as you get above 3.5K ships upgraded you're down to less than half your income available for further upgrades and ship builds. There seems to be some serious discrepancy in ship maintenance between DL and DA that you're not accounting for.

Looking back on the other thread I don't notice ship maintenance costs listed. In my games 17K 1/1 fighters are costing me close to 200K per turn. And 17K 3000 point ships once upgraded are 3M per turn. If you had 44K 3000 point ships then in DL that would cost 7.7 million bc per turn so something is definitely different here.

Certainly the diminishing returns are more obvious with many ships of low power but it still exists even with powerfull ships.

Note that my final military might exceed yours with far fewer ships. Again a post of your military timeline to compare against mine would tell pretty much everything in regard to the effectiveness of upgrade versus continued building, although maintenance costs are still a huge discrepancy.

This is not that different to DL. I use a huge hull to maximize the upgrade but a 1/1 huge hull maintenance in DL is 8 bc.


Yeah. This is totally different and obviously skews things between DL and DA. Calling it 440K for 44K ships implies only 10 bc per ship per turn. In my case I spend 215 bc maintenance per turn for my upgraded ship which was a 25 attack/490 defense ship that with my weapons/defense bonus was worth 3766 per ship including my SB array bonus. This is a bit misleading as well because it's only because I'm going into complete bankruptcy that I would choose a defense based ship over an offense based ship.

If I was upgrading along the way I'd use a 425 attack/10 defense that's worth 3158 per ship but costs only 90 bc per turn to maintain. Still paying only 10bc per turn for maintenance for a 3000 point ship skews the equations dramatically.

Still I do believe that the fact that you are building and upgrading ships as you go imples to me that your military timeline is basically linear. You might be able to start building earlier than I do but given that your final military rating is less than mine and I reached my final military rating 3 years into the game and then held it for 5 years whereas you reach your final value only in the last year, there is no doubt in my mind that you will do better with an upgrade.

Also if you're using a tiny hull for the upgrade and getting 3000 points out of it even including the 25 SB array then you most likely have more military mining resources than I have.

As far as a screen shot that would be nice eventually. I just use the Print Screen button. If you hit Alt-Print Screen (above the insert key) then that copies an image of the active window into your clipboard. If you just hit the Print Screen button that copies your entire screen (or multiple screens if you have two monitors).

From there you go into Paint (Start/Programs/Accessories/Paint) and ctrl-v to paste the clipboard contents into Paint. From there just Save As a file type *.jpg and then go to http://www.imageshack.us/.

Upload the *.jpg file and highlight and ctrl-c (copy) the direct link to image and use the "insert image" button to put the image into your post. In any case this is something you should know how to do on general principles so it's worthwhile to learn.

Of course on both counts.


No rush, but it's good practice and of reasonable interest.