This is actually a complex question the answer to which is not totally known.

My basic guess is that your score is essentially the area under four curves shown under the Timeline tab of your Civilization Manager. The important curves are Economy, Military, Population and Research. These pretty much directly correlate into your Economy, Military, Society and Technology score (again I *think*). Really it's pretty clear for everything except the Society score. Population is definitely a major portion of the Society score but your Influence may also play into it, I'm not really sure, perhaps even social production comes into play as well.

One thing I am sure about is how the four components of score (Economy, Military, Society and Technology) contribute to your total score. One thing that used to mystify me is that the sum of the four components of score does not equal the total score. Also if you look at different folks scores including the four components you'll notice a very strange thing and that is that the "better" players will generally have a total score that exceeds the sum of the four components of score whereas the "weaker" players will have a total score that is far less than the sum of the four components of score.

All of this is supposition but it appears that each of the four component scores are "raw" scores and the total score is actually the integral of the four component scores each divided by some function of the turn number. This is very important. An extra 10 bc's of income earned in turn 1 are 100 times as valuable to your score as 10 bc's of income earned in turn 100. Put another way that 10 bc's of income on turn 1 are worth 1000 bc's of income on turn 100.

Basically to maximize score you need to maximize the four components of score; income, population, military and technology. Also the ealier in the game you can get any one (or more than one) component to a high level and keep it at a high level for a long period of time the higher your score will be. Income and population are obvious. Military is merely your military ranking that AFAIK is attack points plus defense points plus hit points of all ships. Note that all bonuses apply including bonuses from resource mining, military starbases (a big source of score) and even the Spin Control Center. Technology is simply money spent on research. How many techs researched doesn't matter. Or even if you are researching techs at all doesn't matter. If you keep spending on research after the tech tree is complete that still counts.

Finally the point is what kinds of values of score can be achieved from each of the four components. Basically, technology is a dead end. The values that can be achieved via Tech spending are very low compared to other areas and you are far better off ignoring it completely. I've tried building many multiple uber research planets each producing 20K RP's per week, totaling well over 200K RP's per week and gotten hardly anything out of my tech score.

Population is a good source but there's really not too much you can do about since the nerfing of the morale buildings. Basically getting all your planets into the 13B pop range with perhaps 1/4 of the top PQ planets to 20B is about all you can do. However where there is a big source of differentiation is in how early in the game you get your pop to the highest possible level.

Income and military is really where you can score big, particularly with the military. Building an array of military SB's and parking a whole lot of ships under it is key.

All of these thing are generally well known throughout the community. There really are no secrets, but what really separates the men from the boys so to speak is how early in the game can you accomplish these things. Even as recently as about 6 months ago I would look at my scores and wonder why they were so much lower than the top players. It was really frustrating because I knew I was doing everything that they did yet still they consistently outscored me. The key is that although I did the same things that they did, they simply did them far faster than I did and that was the difference.

Anyway as I said a lot of this is guesswork on my part and for what it's worth I hope it helps you.

no more than getting a rundown by Martin Luther (Mumble's avatar)

The biggest and most subtle thing is doing things early. I can't stress how much difference this makes and how difficult it is to convey in any strategy precisely how to do this. Basically it's a matter of gradually over time seeing ways of doing the same things that everyone does just a little bit faster and sooner.

People tend to look on a lot of score enhancing techniques such as a military starbase array as "milking" a game. There is a large amount of truth in this assumption while at the same time it's totally false. Believe me you cannot get close to a million points in a game without in some sense milking the score. However on the other hand you cannot take any random game and get anywhere near a million points simply by milking. There is always some point at which you reach diminishing returns. If you don't have at least one component of score that's dramatically increasing over time then delaying the end of the game gets very unproductive very quickly.

In my last 957K game I think I had about 400K points at the 4 year point. Yes I could have submitted it then for a very good score but 400K in these days of DA is rather ordinary. It was worthwhile to continue because I was still significantly increasing my population, income, military ranking and even tech spending. By the 5th year I was around 750K and at the end of the 6th I was 930K. The extra year to the 7th netted a measely 27K points and it was clearly time to shut it down.

I could have continued beyond that point and maybe if I held out another 3 or 4 years I could have squeaked out a 1M point game, however that's what I would call milking it.

Anyway, some would say that anything beyond the point that I first could have won the game, which was 4 year 400K points, was milking. They are welcome to their opinion. In my case I have seen many games in the 5 year 300K catagory that you could have extended 10 years and maybe stretched to 400K points. That's what I would call milking the score. In my own humble opinion what I did in my last game was to allow it to reach it's true potential. Yes I continued the game beyond the first instant that I could have won because it was clear that my score was still dramatically increasing. However once it was clear that I was at the point of diminishing returns it's just as clear that it's time to shut it down and get on to the next game.

In my last game that lasted 20 game years my population was still booming because I was killing off the other races by conquest and taking their planets. I had somewhere around 300 something planets and like 1.something trillion people. I was caught up in researching everything, I guess that's why it lasted so long, even though I'd had everything researched for at least a year or two.

But I'll take your advice, I'll do things faster and more efficiently. Not so much milk a score, but see what affect time has on my score.

Thank you very much Fratz. ^^

The prime reason everyone plays is for fun. Different people have fun in different ways. In my case what I most enjoy is taking the chaos formed by AI's colonizing planets willy-nilly with no (apparent) consistent methodology and converting everything into a nicely ordered universe. This involves taking each and every one of an opponent’s planets, usually in a nice linear order, and totally rebuilding them into how I think they should look.

I remember having an involved conversation with someone about defense and how I felt the best defense was a good offense and he showed me some screen shots of how he developed his space with specifically designed defensive fleets placed strategically along his borders with fast attack fleets and with a ring of military starbases surrounding his territory. It was quite impressive.

The point is that he certainly didn’t need all of this to win the game. It was simply how he liked to play the game.

Basically there are many ways to win the game and among all the different ways to win there are even more ways to play. Some people play until it’s clear they’re going to win and then they simply want to get it over with as quick as possible and start the next game.

In my opinion all of these methods are legitimate ways to play the game. Just because someone doesn’t have the score as a priority means very little to me, there are many excellent players that I’ve known that have never bothered to submit an MV game.

In any case the only point I want to make is that I while I do like to try and maximize score, I also never play *just* for score, I play for fun, and for me getting a high score is just simply a part of the fun.