1 No.
2 Not that I have seen.
3 not in my opinion. I play Neutral but from what I have seen Evil appears to score more.

So are as I can tell scoring is derived from the area under the curve divided by some factor (geometric?, definitely not arithmetic) related to the number of turns you have played.

From reading some old posts from around the time of AW Tresspasser, it's some factor of turns squared.

Since the integral (area under the curve) essentially puts a factor of turns in the numerator the net effect to score is average value divided by number of turns. There's also probably a different "constant of proportionality" applied to each of the four scoring categories.

The net effect of this is that high values of any of these categories just at the end of the game don't really do much to increase your score. You want to have large values of pop, gross income, research spending and military ranking over long periods of time.

Clearly all of these things increase over time so it's inevitable that they will be at their highest only towards the end of the game, but the true high scoring strategy is one that attempts to maximize these categories throughout the game, not one that, for example, wins the game first then tries to crank out a few extra fleets at the end just to pump up the military ranking.

I beleive there is more than one scoring point as well. Specifically those that finish under ~5 yrs score high. The next point appears to be between 12 and 15 yrs.

I understand nothing of the math you mention Mumble but perhaps there are two different formulas for the two different time periods.

perhaps there are two different formulas for the two different time periods

Not necessarily, the same formula could account for both behaviors.

Knowing (or more accurately assuming) that scoring has a 1/turns relationship still leaves a lot of different behaviors due to the potential of additive or multiplicative constants in both the numerator and the denominator.

This is just a fancy way of saying that you know just as much about this as I do.   

Has anyone ever managed to get their tech score over 100,000 points?

Yes, but it was a *lot* of work and I think the effort could have been better spent building more ships. The only way to get your tech score above about 30K or so is to keep spending significant amounts on research even after the tech tree is completed.

This really makes no sense from the games perspective since once the tech tree is done there's really no sense doing research. Perhaps if tech is set to "very slow" but that wouldn't be much different since I usually use "slow" anyway.

Yes, I meant final score and not the rating during game.

I have to confess I don't pay much attention to the ratings during game as I am mostly doing whatever it takes to win for the first 2 years, and can't worry too much about the ratings. I often fall way behind while putting 100% of my resources into just one category. I will often go as long as 7 weeks where I am spending 100% on social output, followed by a period of 100% military or 100% research depending on what is necessary to deal with the current situation. And once my economy is booming I completely stop spending on social output and instead just buy all my buildings directly.

After I finish the tech tree I usually convert all research buildings into stock markets, but maybe it would be a good idea to leave them producing tech... bizarre.

My current goal is to get a score over 400,000 just to see if I can do it.

I have a good idea of what to do, but the tech score is the one area I am confused about.

In the later part of the game I am desperate to spend money each turn to get my surplus under 20,000 BC so maybe continuing to pump resources into research would be a good idea.

if I built a 100+ economy star bases then I could probably keep my military score high as well as my tech score.

Lots of food for thought here.

I'd like to ditto Mumbles remark about joining an empire. All welcome as Diplomats. Even if you decide not to join the empire we have a rather active forum that covers just about everything. You can follow the link Mumble out up.

Yes, I meant final score and not the rating during game.

Final score for the game I am just now posting...

Social. 133667
Tech. 224380
Econ. 282847
Mil. 226871

Total MV Score is 322750.

I have a good idea of what to do, but the tech score is the one area I am confused about.

I have revampes my entire game based on a few things I accomplished this game and my research will certianly be alot less next time but I think my over all score will be higher.

am tempted to put 100% into research and just buy all planetary updates and ships directly.

Do you think the military score is based on ships in existence or on BC spent on military production?

Military score is based on attack points + defense points + hit points.

Also military starbases increase the attack and defense values of ship within their sphere's of influence and therefore increase your military score.

The best bang/bucnh is using the Black Hole Erupter whether on a lage or a medium ship brobally doesn't matter that much.

Edit: I did try building all non black hole ships my last game and then attempt a massive upgrade to a maxed out black hole version after I had built a few thousand. A 47 Million BC upgrade

Unfortunately, the game crashed with an exception every time I tried it. It was a bit much to expect it to work...

Can one get decent scores by playing the smaller maps and not purposely dragging out games for the simple reason of score?

I see that you are playing huge maps. I played huge maps, abundant all for quite a while. I was breaking 200K in five years, but I was also dragging it out a bit. At the time, I could have probably finished most of those in three game years to give you some idea.

To answer more directly, I think you can probably reach 100K+ on huge, abundant all, if you simply play the games out to Dec 22nd, of any given year. You will probably need to build more ships though...

Upping difficulty does help the scoring a bit.

There are some things you can do to stretch the abilities of your computer. I haven't seen them in a while, but there used to be some threads on this that you might be able to find through search. Off hand:

Reduce, or eliminate the background star pattern.
Change the point at where the screen goes from 2D to 3D and always back out to 2D before hitting the turn button.
Instant battles.
And, I hate to say this one, but relatively new video drivers sometimes help...

Most important, Always play for fun!

Wat,

I see you joined the Galactic Diplomats. Be sure to hop over to the galactic core and register.

http://www.thegalacticcore.com/

Let them know you are a Galactic Diplomat and they will give you access to our private section as well...