The truth about Military Rating

Published on August 5, 2008 By Mumblefratz In Metaverse

It's surprising how long one can play this game without gaining a true understanding of how certain things work.

Without going into any great detail I probably have about as much experience as anyone in maximizing the military component of my score and you'd think that by now I would have a good working understanding of how it works. However, I've just recently discovered that this assumption is totally wrong.

I've always worked on the basis that the military component of your score (like all other components of score) is merely the value of your military rating divided by the turn number squared summed each turn over the course of the game. There also may or may not be some "constant of proportionality" that linearly scales this value.

This is the way I believe military scoring works, which is the same as how the other components of score (income, population and tech spending) work. Basically each of the four components of score are the "front-end weighted", "area under the curve" as displayed in the population, economy, military and research timeline graphs under your civilization manager.

I've written about this many times before and to my knowledge this is consistent with how all the top players view the scoring system. But while I still believe that this basic framework is true there is an implicit assumption here that has been unquestioned for a very long time and in fact this unspoken assumption is *not* true.

This unspoken assumption is about how your military rating is calculated. Looking at the other three components of score it's very obvious what determines your income and population graphs. It's obvious that the value of each of these two graphs at any one point is simply your gross income and your total population. There is no scaling or other "calculation" required; the relationship is direct and one to one. In the case of your tech score it's only slightly more complicated. It's actually not the total income spent on research but in this case I believe that the value of the research graph at any one point is simply the total amount of RP's that you produced that turn which takes into account all possible sources of research bonus.

The natural assumption is that your military rating is treated as above, that the value of your military curve at any point is simply the value of your military rating at that turn. I still believe this to be true as well. However what is definitely *not* true is how we've been told our military rating is determined.

To the best of my knowledge I've always been told that your military rating is the sum of the attack value plus defense value plus hit points divided by 10 of all of your ships once all source of bonus are included. In other words:

Military Rating = the sum of Attack + Defense + HP/10 of all ships

While I do believe the above to be partially true this gives results that are wrong by orders of magnitude. Basically I've come to the conclusion that there has to be some function of the number of ships in the denominator of the above equation.

It's not so surprising that this assumption could go unquestioned for so long. The number and value of ships that people have at any one time is constantly changing. So are your weapons and defense bonuses which are usually different to further confuse the issue. Add to this having some ships in orbit around the Spin Control Center and just having some ships in orbit for the 25% bonus. With all these effects taken into consideration it's not surprising that no one has really taken the effort and tried to correlate some abstract calculation with the displayed value of your military rating.

Like most everything else in this game it's generally not necessary to know precisely how some equation works, it's usually enough to know that more is better. However when trying to maximize score sometimes it's important to know how much more. While more is always better it's generally not true that twice as much is twice as good. It becomes important to know these things so that you can determine where to best put your effort.

Anyway I don't yet have an answer to how your military rating is really calculated. I do think that I have enough data in the many different save games I have to make some kind of determination but I also believe that it's not necessarily an obvious relationship and so I would appreciate any possible help in understanding this.

I don't currently have access to all my data but I'll end this OP with a couple of examples that prove my claim that military rating is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of ships that you have.

My first example can be demonstrated with a screenshot that I'll post later but basically the method that I use to build and move ships to under my military SB array goes as follows. Each turn I buy ships at a number of planets which have been set to autolaunch to a rally point, but each turn I go into the governor and kill the rally point destination. I then wait 7 or 8 turns letting the ships sit next to the planet that built them until I have a full fleet of ships at which point I fleet them up and send them off to under my military SB array. This dramatically reduces the tedium of building and moving ships.

The point is that each turn as I build another 300 or so 1/1 fighters my military rating actually noticeably goes *down*. This proves that your military rating is somehow inversely proportional to the number of ships because as these 1/1 fighters are built they don't increase your attack/defense values very much (i.e. the numerator of the equation) but do increase the number of ships (i.e. the denominator). Then once these new ships are moved to under your SB array then your rating shoots up again because the military SB array dramatically increases the value of these ships offsetting the effect of the ship number increase in the denominator. The point is no matter how small an increase in attack/defense a ship is, if your military rating is not an inverse function of the number of ships then your military rating can *never* go down. It may not increase very much or may appear to stay the same on some larger scale, but it could never actually decrease as you build more ships.

The other example is the one that actually caused me to question this in the first place and can make a difference in how you might decide to play the game. This came about in my quest to become the first to achieve a 1 million point DL game.

My normal course of action is to conquer the galaxy, build up my population and income, build a military SB array and then build about 17K 1/1 huge hull fighters for under the array and then end the game by upgrading all of my 1/1 huge hull fighters to 25/450 BHE/ZPA dreadnoughts. The reason for 17K ships is that on my machine that appears to be the limit to the number of ships that I can upgrade at one time without running out of memory. It's also a convenient point in that by the time I've built that many ships my population and income have pretty much reached their maximum and beyond that point system slowdowns become intolerable.

My problem has been that this has gotten me close to a 1 million point game but I've never quite reached it. In my latest game it appeared that this strategy would result in a game somewhere in the 850K-900K range. Again close, but no cigar. So I tried another approach. In the 2nd case I instead built about 32K ships, 17K that I intended to upgrade per usual and another 15K or so just to increase my military score above the "hump" (or so I thought).

However an interesting thing, or very annoying thing dependent on your point of view, happened. In the first case when I just built 17K ships my military rating was about 5.7 million prior to the upgrade and then 14.2 million after the upgrade. So an upgrade of 17K ships gave me an increased military rating of 8.5 million. In the second case my first indication was that with 32K ships my rating was only 9.2 million instead of the 10.7 million I would expect if military rating were linear. Secondly after the upgrade (in this case I could only upgrade 15K ships) my final military rating was only 15.7 million so the upgrade of 15K ships increased my military rating by 6.5 million. Again if military rating were linear then the upgrade of 15K ships should result in a military rating increase of 7.5 million instead of the 6.5 million actually achieved.

The whole point of this is that I spent a whole game year of building an extra 15K ships for a net increase of 1.5 million to my military rating and probably less than 50K increase to my score.

The point about really understanding how your military rating works is that this could result in a potentially better scoring strategy such as building far fewer ships (but perhaps earlier in the game) and then spending effort maximizing the score of some other component (like tech for example).

Anyway if anyone has any insight or experiences to offer related to the non linearity of military rating please contribute them. Also if I find out more detail from a number of data points, I'll try and figure out the true military rating formula and post it, because although what we've been told is probably true, it's certainly not complete.

Comments (Page 2)

Neilo

on Aug 06, 2008

Nice work Mumble and others. Kinda makes me not want to have to build all those att2 shills to gain planets in DA. Im at end of year 2 atm in my current game with all the sweetspots hit im now just building out my planets and finishing off the array. I do have though, some 200 or so shills left over from the war cycles that i bought back from the 2nd last AI so as to not have all those ships become pirates. Ill do a test and see what the mil rating is with the ships then ill save and reload and get rid of those ships and check the score again and see if it shows any difference.

And Livonya, I'm sure having Mumble, Mag and yourself discussing how the scoring works in the ToE forums would sure help the cause for a 2mill game....

Voqar

on Aug 06, 2008

A "top player" is one who specializes in artificially jacking up their score? Interesting.

Mumblefratz

on Aug 06, 2008

A "top player" is one who specializes in artificially jacking up their score? Interesting.

For all we know you're a "top player" as well, however no one could have any possible clue as to whether or not that's the case since you've never posted a game.

I have known people that I would consider "top players" that haven't ever posted a game. Kblore for one comes to mind. But without any kind of history that's a pretty tough determination to make. For example, I know that Kblore was a "top player" simply from the many in depth strategy discussions that I've had with him that proved to me he knew what he was talking about.

Perhaps if you shared some insight into the game as opposed to merely sniping from the sidelines then folks could come to a similar conclusion about you.

I do understand your point and obviously there's some merit to it, but without score then how do you know if you've improved? What's artifical anyway. Is scoring an "extra" touchdown in Madden Football artifical? Is conquering 100 AI planets in 4 turns versus 20 turns artifical?

Clearly some activities that generate score correlate less to skill than others but does that mean there's no skill involved at all? Building a military SB array by an early turn in the game may not directly correlate to an immediate win but doesn't it demonstrate a productive capacity that correlates to a superior production base?

If you look more closely at what you call artifical it's really not entirely clear which activity is and which isn't. Again I say, share some of your insight and educate us.

Neilo

on Aug 07, 2008

That is a very nice way or putting it Mumble. I'm sure i could not have been so eloquent....I would have posted something like.."shut up fool" or "put up or shut up".

If i was to post on the matter at all that is.

Noctilucus

on Aug 07, 2008

A "top player" is one who specializes in artificially jacking up their score? Interesting.

Well, just 1 thing to say on this: personally I would have no interest in this kind of points farming, but be assured that a "weak" player could do as much points farming as he wants in a huge galaxy and still only achieve mediocre scores.
Yes, there are "top players" who don't do this, but anyone submitting scores in the range of 500K or more must have done a great job regardless of any artificial score increasing mechanics.

Neilo

on Aug 07, 2008

Well speaking about the shills i had and the affect a greater number of low attack ships can have on your mil score i ran two test. One with the 246 shills i had and left them and monitored the mil rating across two turns.

246 shills @ 39367 on Jan 8

Two turns later on Jan 22 it was at 41987

Now go back to Jan 8 and delete the shills and on Jan 15 had 40681.....

And on Jan 22 67695

So without a doubt less is more, these shills were 2att/2def and look at the drastic jump without them. all i have now are my 9 SCC ships, cargo hulls loaded with Psonics and about 8 large hulled 200/50 attack ships i used to claer out the last of the pirates.

Mumblefratz

on Aug 07, 2008

One thing that you need to consider is that the graph lags one turn from the actual value. The graph is very useful for seeing trends but for precise numbers it's best to use the Military Ranking number from your Stats & Graphs tab in the Civilization Manager.

The following are the Military Ranking from the Stats & Graphs tab and the corresponding Military Timline. Note that if you delete ships the Military Ranking will change immediately but the timeline won't change until the following turn and in fact will show the value based on the previous turn (i.e. the now current turn).

Note that the veritical axis only shows the first four significant digits of your military ranking. In the graph's case it shows a peak value of 6,183,000 which was achieved. There is a huge drop off in the graph but that is actually a display artifact which should be ignored. The military and population graphs "wrap" at about 6 million. This was fixed in some version of DA but still exists in DL v1.4x.

Anyway the point of the graph is the stair step action that reaches a local peak each 7 turns as all ships are fleeted and moved to under the array. In the intervening turns I'm building about 300 ships per turn which causes an obvious decline in the graph.

The Stats & Graphs page shows the actual ranking at the time of 6,093,980 which is a decline of only about 89,000 so the percentage decline is rather small but still for it to go down by producing *more* ships does prove some inverse relationship to the number of ships.

Some very specific numbers are needed to figure out what's going on. First the exact calculated attack + defense + HP/10 value for all ships, plus the corresponding military rating and the number of ships. Then once a good percentage of these ships are deleted these same three numbers are need again; calculated ship values, military rating and number of ships. This is one data point. With four or five of these in some reasonable sequence then we have a chance to figure out the underlying relationship.

At the moment I don't have the time to extract this exact data but I will get to that sooner or later.

Neilo

on Aug 07, 2008

As my array flushes out and the ships increse in number under it, i wil take a screen shot of the mil rating, like you showed, each turn. there will be a lot of pics but we could pick a certain time to start tracking the score....Either way the data will be there. I have 6 mil resources using Yor ARC.

BarneyStinson

on Aug 07, 2008

A "top player" is one who specializes in artificially jacking up their score? Interesting.

Vogar had a question mark at the end of that, and I think he's implicitly questioning the validity of the statement. I don't think he meant to say "this is the case".

Mumblefratz

on Aug 07, 2008

Vogar had a question mark at the end of that, and I think he's implicitly questioning the validity of the statement. I don't think he meant to say "this is the case".

Whatever. It's hard to discern a whole lot of meaning from a single sentance but it's also hard to interpert "artificially jacking up their score" as other than derogatory.

In any case I don't think my response was particularly harsh, in fact I think I gave him the benefit of the doubt and acknowledged that there was some merit to his comment but suggested that while the purposes of some activities may only be to increase score that doesn't mean that they don't also demonstrate some skill in the game.

The point being that if I can build up 600 or so constructors to put together a military SB array and build 17K ships to put under it and can do so before the end of reported year two then that demonstrates that it is extremely likely that I can out produce and therefore win against someone that is unable to do the same. Yes the construction of such a thing is artifical but the productive capacity required to build such a thing quickly is *not* artifical.

I also acknowledged that not being concerned about score nor about posting games doesn't necessarily imply any lack of skill, but that failing such external evidence the only thing we have to go by is discussion of the game and again a single sentance that at least appears to be sniping doesn't provide much of that.

In any case my intent was to provoke discusion that could possibly draw out a little more than an obscure single sentance that leaves folks scratching their heads trying to figure out the intent.

BarneyStinson

on Aug 07, 2008

then that demonstrates that it is extremely likely that I can out produce and therefore win against someone that is unable to do the same.

Fine. But why do it, aside from the only possible explanation, which is to boost your score?

Yes the construction of such a thing is artifical but the productive capacity required to build such a thing quickly is *not* artifical.

Again, fine. But why do it, aside from the only possible explanation, which is to boost your score?

Mumblefratz

on Aug 07, 2008

This is both too much information and not enough information.

The screen shots themselves are a waste of time and effort. Like I said an individual data point consists of reported military rating, the number of ships *and* the precise calculation of the sum of attack + defense + HP/10 for all ships all at the same instant of time. A second data point would need the same three items; reported military rating, number of ships plus the calculated attack + defense + HP/10 for all ships.

Note that the attack + defense + HP/10 must be calculated inclusive of all bonuses. So if you have ships orbiting the SCC, or under a military SB array you need this precise calculation including the SCC and/or military SB bonus plus of course any effect due to military resource mining (or planetary starship bonus, or the effect of any wonders/super projects).

Simply reporting number of ships and the military ranking that corresponds to it is totally useless unless accompanied by the *complete* attack + defense + HP/10 information inclusive of all bonuses.

Mumblefratz

on Aug 07, 2008

Here's an example of a single data point.

Military Ranking: 232,689

This is from the Stats & Graphs Tab under the Civilization Manager.

Total Ships: 476

Note this must be summed from all of the ships listed in the Ship Yard. There is a total Ships listed under the Stats & Graphs tab but this number is *wrong* in my case it lists 514 ships when in fact I really have only 476. The more ships you have the more wrong the number listed in Stats & Graphs is. For example when I have about 17K ships it tells me I have 26K.

Now as to the attack + defense + HP/10.

I have 6 - 1602 attack/44 defense/75HP ships on the way to my array.

This gives 6*(1602+44+7)=6*1653=9,918

Plus I have another 18 under a 24 SB array which gives 18*(1653+1512)=56,970 where 1512 is the array bonus.

Plus I have 237 - 1 attack/1 defense/75HP ships under the array but with my bonus they're really 3 attack/4 defense.

This gives another 237*(7+7+1512)=361,662.

The remaining ships (476-24-237)=215 are 3 attack/4 defense/75HP not near my array.

This gives another 215*(3+4+7)=3,010.

The grand total is 9,918 + 56,970 + 361,662 + 3,010 = 380,280.

So in summary the three numbers needed are:

Military Ranking: 232,689
Total Ships: 476
Total Ship value: 380,280

This is a single data point and implies that 380,280/f(476)=232,689 or f(476)=1.63 where f is the function we're trying to discover which is the function of the number of ships (in this case 476) that divides the calculated ship values to get the Military ranking.

Mumblefratz

on Aug 07, 2008

then that demonstrates that it is extremely likely that I can out produce and therefore win against someone that is unable to do the same.

Fine. But why do it, aside from the only possible explanation, which is to boost your score?

Yes the construction of such a thing is artifical but the productive capacity required to build such a thing quickly is *not* artifical.

Again, fine. But why do it, aside from the only possible explanation, which is to boost your score?

To prove I'm a better player than you.

BarneyStinson

on Aug 07, 2008

So doing extraneous stuff makes you better? I mean let's face it, you're a numbers machine and probably one of the very best that play this game. My curiosity simply lies in how I can achieve a several hundred thousand point game without doing the SB array crap or that kinda stuff. I guess my first problem lies in the fact that I mostly do medium sized galaxies when I'm not ZYW-ing.

I may not be godly like you, Neilo, Motti, or the other dominators (even including some of those strange cat folks

), but I'm pretty damn good at this. I guess I need to just start up a huge all abundant and start kicking ass and see where it takes me. My only problem is this: Once I start a game, I am compelled to play until it's over. Which means I'm up til 5am lol.

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