The precise nature of military ranking, which is what is displayed in the curve, is not entirely known. I think Sole Soul probably has the best handle on it. However I can probably provide a bit of insight as well.

One slight confusion is the difference between military ranking and military rating. They're both measures of the same thing but they're displayed differently and are useful for different things. Military *ranking* is what is shown in the Military timeline curve and is also listed in the Stats & Graphs section of your Civilization Manager in the Military section under Abilities. Military *Ranking* is an absolute value that is proportional to the sum of the strength of all your ships.

Military *Rating* is also shown in the Stats & Graphs section of your Civilization Manager but is listed in the Military bar chart at the bottom of the screen. This is a relative measure of your military strength versus another selected AI.

The following screenshot highlights these differences.

My military *ranking* is highlighted in red and at the moment is 887. It's real early in the game, later on this will get into the millions and tens of millions. It's actually the military *ranking* that determines your final military score which is in fact the "front-end weighted", "area under the curve" of your military timeline graph (but that's an entirely different discussion).

My military *rating* is highlighted in yellow and in this case is shown relative to that of the Korx. Your military *rating* usually doesn't exceed 300 and I've never seen it exceed 800 no matter how many millions your military *ranking* gets. What's important in this case is the fact that I have a 4 to 1 military *rating* advantage versus the Korx. This totally defines how the Korx will treat me in trades and in their willingness to declare war or accept peace. The key ratios in the game are when you're less or about equal to a selected AI, when you have a 3 to 1 ratio or when you have a 10 to 1 or greater ratio. If you're weaker, an AI will demand tribute. If you’re merely stronger but not greater than 3 to 1 then the AI basically treats you as an equal. They won't be demanding tribute but otherwise your dealings with them will have no advantage. Once you hit a 3 to 1 advantage you start to notice that the AI will defer to you more than normal and you can push them around a bit. Once your ratio hits 10 to 1 the AI will cower in fear and you can pretty much get your way in *anything*.

Anyway, I know that I haven't directly addressed your question yet however the distinction between military *ranking* and military *rating* is one that a lot of people get confused about and it helps to define your terms carefully so that people understand what you're talking about.

OK so to answer your question what calculation is at the root of both of these measures of military strength? From what I've *heard* (and this is by no means absolutely verified although it is generally accepted to be correct) your military ranking is the sum of the attack and defense points of all of your ships plus 1/10th of the sum of the hit points of all your ships. Since value of your hit points is divided by 10, most folks simply ignore the contribution HP makes. The problem is that it's definitely known that your military ranking is also in some way inversely proportional to the total number of ships as well. The precise nature of this inverse dependence of military ranking on total ship count is not well understood, though as I mentioned earlier I believe that Sole Soul has the best grasp of what's really going on.

From a practical matter the point is that having large quantities of ships with low or no attack/defense values definitely hurts your military ranking. Having a bunch of constructors or scouts will do this and so if you're trying to build up your military ranking by using the SCC for example it definitely helps to keep a limit on your constructor production. Producing ships that have less than your current average per ship attack/defense value can actually cause your military ranking to go *down*.

As far as the SCC, it's is a very important tool if used properly. As I mentioned getting a 3 to 1 or a 10 to 1 military *rating* advantage over an AI will really make your life much easier, that's why I make the SCC an early priority and that early in the game, as Neilo mentioned, the only hull of decent size for ships to put in orbit around the SCC is a cargo hull. However I'm pretty sure that Neilo got the attack/defense thing reversed. IIRC you get a 25% *attack* bonus for ships in orbit and no defense bonus so you definitely want mostly weapons on your cargo hull. In fact I usually won't bother with any defense at all on my SCC ship unless I happen to have a little leftover space on the hull and I can't fit another reasonable weapon.

In any case my military *ranking* of 887 is due to three of the following ships in orbit around my SCC.

Thank you gentlemen. Mumblefratz, I had no idea there was a difference between military rating and ranking, lol. I most assuredly do now and I appreciate your patient primer. You always give such good information and I learn a lot from your posts. Good karma to you.

I now know that I was asking about military ranking. If I can impose just a bit further though I had several more questions for you.

1) What does IIRC mean?

2) You discussed in another post using a military starbase strategy to enhance your military score. You also suggested using 17,000 ships which is something I'm not too interested in investing that much time in, but I am curious about the strategy. What modules go onto these starbases and what is happening to the ships that make them score better?

3) When to end the game? I've generally maxed out my population by the end of the second year and have finished my research as well. Does it make sense to keep the game in play past that point to build up more military? I understand the area beneath the curve concept and have started using it to make my games much more effective from a scoring perspective, but I just don't have a handle on when to knock out the last AI planet.

4) My influence generally blankets the galaxy by the end of the second year....if I wait several more years to maximize score, what stops that last AI planet from flipping to me due to my overwhelming influence?

Thanks!

 

Hi!

It should be

sum (all ships' attack) + sum (all ships' defense) + sum (all ships' hit points / 10).

Just don't let it mislead you. The only thing that really counts is the design of your ship vs. designs of your intended opponent. In TA I've eradiced whole races, that had 50+ ships, with just a few ships of mine, not losing a single one. The catch is in proper ship design, not in brute force the mil score is at it's base.

BR,  Iztok

For what it's worth, Mumble, I never noticed a difference in military ranking or rating due specifically to building scads of constructors.  It seems to be only attack ships.  That said, your point about not having weak ships is perfectly valid.

I still haven't gotten around to nailing down the depreciation formula, nor even clarifying the strength formula, but they're on my list.

If I Recall Correctly.

Basically weasel words to cover your butt when you're pretty sure something is right but you don't want to look stupid by insisting something is correct that you're not absolutely positive about. Pretty much the same as AFAIK (as far as I know). You can usually google terms such as these and find what they mean pretty quickly.

I've talked about military SB array's in many threads so I'm not sure precisely which one you're refering to, not that it matters that much, but given that you ask about starbase modules then I assume it wasn't Available modules for a starbase where in reply #2 I posted a list of all modules applicable to the different SB types.

You need to be a little careful in making a distinction between "ship assist" modules that can only be placed on a military SB and which give an attack or defense bonus to ships within the SB's Area of Influence (AOI), versus modules that give the starbase the ability to attack of defend itself which can be placed on *any* kind of starbase. In the table in reply #2 of the above referenced thread the "ship assist" modules are shown in the first section of the table. These are the modules that provide an attack/defense bonus to any of your ships within it's AOI. It's the potential bonus of 1512 points (54 attack plus 9 defense (yes it says 10 but it's really 9) times 24 military SB's) *per ship* that enhances your military rating and thereby increases your score.

Like I said there have been many threads about the topic but I think the thread that contains pretty much everything you could want to know on the subject is How do I build a military starbase array?.

As far as building 17K ships that's a play style choice that's obviously not for everyone. I find the actual production of that many ships takes about 1 game year once I have my economy cranking and it doesn't take all that much effort. Also while it is a bit cheesy, if you don't do it then how do you differentiate between your outstanding 500K point game that doesn't use the technique and someone's else's 500K game that does use it? The way I differentiate my game is by using it and instead of scoring 500K points I score 1M points. In any case I don't expect everyone to agree and have always maintained that people should play the game the way that's most fun for them, not how they think someone else thinks that they should play.

This is an easy question to answer. You end the game when it's no longer worth the effort to continue. Basically I, and most anyone else that I know that considers a high score as part of the fun, will set themselves up in a winning position and then continue while trying to build up the score. Once you're set up to win the game in a single turn then each Dec 22nd you save the game and then end it to see what your score will be. If you're all set by the end of the 2nd year then great. It's doubtful that your income, population and military will be maximized at that point but just go ahead and end it to see where you are.

Dependent on many things your score will be all over the place but I'll give you some representative numbers to illustrate my point. Let's say you end the game at your earliest opportunity and your score would be 300K. OK that's good information but not yet enough to know what to do. So you wait another game year letting your pop and income increase while building up your military. The next Dec 22nd comes around and again you save the game and end it to see what you'd get. In my games I would expext that my score would probably have doubled to 600K. OK so I got an extra 300K by extending the game 1 year. Seems to me that it's still worthwhile to continue. So I wait another year and check again, this time I get 750K so my score increase basically halved but an extra 150K isn't chicken liver so it's still worthwhile to continue another year. Another year and my score is 825K, a 75K increase.

This is very typical. Once your income and pop stop growing and the support of your ships starts to cut into how fast you can continue to build more, your score growth will slow down very quickly. So in my example is another year at 37K worth it? That would put me at 862K and I'd most likely do it, but from that point am I going to go another whole year for another 18K? No way. The values here really have no meaning it's just determining when you get to the point of diminishing returns. Your game will let you know when it's time to end it.

I always pick a PQ3 and build the Re-Education Center and another cheap wonder or super project like the Secret Police Center and then gift the planet to the AI of my choice. The Re-Education Center prevents the planet from flipping and the Secret Police Center prevents the AI from building a Starport so that they can't build any ships to annoy me. I then kill all the AI's ships and take all his other planets except for my specially prepared PQ3 and the galaxy is safe from the chaos of a messy AI. Obviously I also disable all but military victories.

Exactly.

In DL v1.4x they did. I just checked my current DA game (v1.80g) and they didn't so you're obviously right, I guess I just didn't notice the change (come to think of it I couldn't have noticed the change since I hadn't built a DA constructor until just now).

Also remember the question about whether or not the military ranking listed in the Military section under Abilities in your Civilization Manager dynamically changes as you move ships in and out of your military SB array's AOI? I'm still not to the point of knowing in my current DA game (been real busy at work lately) but it definitely did instantly change in DL v1.4x.

Mumblefratz, thanks for being so unbelievably helpful! I wish the search function worked so I could do a better job of finding this stuff myself. Since it doesn't though, one last teeny question regarding ending the game and checking the score every Dec 22. I assume when you do this you elect NOT to report the score to the metaverse until you have the score you like?

Thinking about this made me realize that there is probably some protection built into the MV reporting engine that prevents one game being reported multiple times? I hope so. Otherwise people could be winning the game at year two, posting the score, reloading a save, playing until year three, winning again, posting the score, etc. Please tell me that isn't possible.

Interesting. Do you then get bonus for both of the two modules? Sounds like this is a DA only issue since it wasn't in DL V1.4x and not in TA. Too many different revs though. I assume you're on v2.whatever.

As you probably know I'm still on my first DA game having just recently upgraded only as far as I could go with SDC (DL v1.50, DA v1.80g, TA v1.96). I'm still not ready to install Impulse nor do I feel any compelling reason to do so. I have always felt that Stardock was a little too quick to rev the game and we could have done well without a number of the intervening revs but who can really complain about free updates.

I think Sole Soul pretty much answered your questions. You just escape at the metaverse login prompt if you aren't submitting. You can resubmit once which replaces the previous submission and if you reset the character that a game was started under than you won't be able to submit that game.

The only thing that SS left out is that there is possibly a problem with a resubmitted game being counted on the AltMeta. The resubmit works fine for the regular MV but I don't think the AltMeta automatically picks up the resubmitted game. However in general sooner or later I think Kryo needs to poke the AltMeta for one reason or other and the new game does eventually go through to the AltMeta, but it does take some manual intervention.

As far as the character reset then game submission it actually makes sense. The justification goes like this. When a character is reset all evidence of the characters previous games are cleared. If a game started before the character was reset is allowed to be submitted then the system doesn't know if this is an original submission, the 1st (and therefore legal) resubmission or perhaps the 10th resubmission (obviously that would require multiple intervening character resets). 

The other point is that if this were allowed then someone could "cherry pick" which of his previous scores to save. This in essence is actually what I was trying to do. I needed to "clean up" my main character because of a number of earlier low scoring submissions along with a MVL league game mistakenly played under my main character and so I reset my character with the knowledge that I would lose all previous scores.

It was a bit regretable because AFAIK I had the only four legitimate DL games ever to score more than 900K and two of them were lost with that reset (the others are the only DL game to achieve 1M+ that I have under Toshiro Mifune and another 900K+ game that I have under Bruce Lee). Note this is DL specific, there are a handful of 1M+ DA games with Livonya's 1.45M game the top scorer and a single 1M+ TA game by Magnumaniac.

But then I thought that since I have the EndGameSave.sav file from each of my previous submissions and I had never resubmitted any of them that I could resubmit those two games and get a great "running start" on regaining the #1 MV position with that character. That's when I discovered that you can't do that. Oh well. No big deal. It actually meant far less to me than an 875K game that I couldn't submit because I had uninstalled SDC which erased the GC2 serial numbers from my registry without my knowledge. These things happen and you just move on from there.