[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Scoring?

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> But what qualities does a winning Civ have? More people? More tech? More
> units? Those are easy, sure, but how much do they matter?

A good heuristic is how much battle power a civ can develop.  That is,
assume tax set to the max, assume it will be used to buy only units,
sum the total battle power that can be produced+bought per turn.

A simpler heuristic that doesn't pay attention to technology or max tax
rate is the total possible shield production per turn (including buying
power), that is, Demographics->Production + Demographics->Economics/2.
This is what I use in practice.

> Maybe some description would be good -- if you're playing a [winning] game
> of FreeCiv, how are you doing at 1000 BC? 0 BC? 1000 AD?

Looking at http://civserver.freeciv.org/, I think you'll notice that
Economics and Production are the relevant stats for telling the relative
strength of nations.  Number of cities is also a good indicator.

> Finally, I have to mention this: The term "techlevel" is used to mean 
> different things in different places.   The server option "techlevel" is the 
> "Number of initial advances per player", and it goes into the variable 
> "game.tech", while the server option "researchspeed" corresponds to the 
> variable "game.techlevel".  This is confusing to say the least, but that's 
> another story.

Not to mention that 'researchspeed' is actually inversed, a higher value
gives a lower speed.  Biut how to correct it without causing even more
confusion?

-- 
Reinier