As some of you know, for the last couple of years I've been working on a Civilization building game. It's been about 6 months or more since I've playtested it, and I've begun to think of ways to change the game around. One area that has always been a problem has been coming up with a robust scoring system. The main difficulty is that I want the game to reward actions beyond simply grabbing up a lot of territory; in fact, I want many different strategies to be viable, because the scoring concept I'm working off of is that every so often, an Historian emerges and writes about the empires that are currently on the board, paying out VPs based on the players' rank in 4 different categories (and those categories have changed a lot of times). The idea being that these categories are supposed to represent the kinds of things an Historian would write about or consider noteworthy.
This has worked reasonably well, but I have been thinking about what it is that I really want the scoring system to capture. In a sense, the “ideal” would be something like an actual historian generating a narrative about what each empire had done during the last interval -- e.g., “Publius Maximus, emperor of Rome, reigned during a time of great plenty in his empire, presided over successful military campaigns in Greece and Carthage, reduced unrest, built many wonderful monuments testifying to his own greatness”, etc. Now, this is well and good, but even if you could generate this, how do you compare one player's "narrative" with another to say which is better? The obstacle, then, is converting this concept into a quantitative system.
To this end, I am considering a scoring model based around something I’m going to call “Exploit” cards. Each Exploit card would list some accomplishment upon which the game confers points, e.g., “Won X battles”.
Now, my initial thought was to simply award the card to the player who had most superlatively accomplished the Exploit (e.g., the player who won the most battles gets the card, and the VPs), but this leaves a lot of players sans points, and that’s not very sporting. So instead, I am considering a model whereby each card will have its own mini-scoring track. Something like this:
“Won X battles”. X = 1 2 3 4 5+
receive 1 2 4 6 8 VPs.
Something like that. So, at the start of the game, several Exploit cards would be revealed, and as you accomplished certain Exploits, you’d place your marker on the appropriate card, and move it up on the card's scoring track as you accomplished the exploit more and more. Then, when a Historian emerges, the Exploit cards pay out VPs to the players based on the location of their markers on the cards' scoring tracks, and then a new set of Exploit cards are revealed, which will pay out at the next Historian. The kicker is that I think I’d restrict the number of markers you have available, so you have to choose only a couple of kinds of Exploits you’ll pursue, and you’ll have to follow through on that to the next Historian, at which point the current Exploits will score and new Exploit cards will be revealed.
Now, this has some pluses and minuses. On the good side, there can be some variety in the kinds of things that are rewarded. On the down side, it makes the game a bit more tactical, since you have to play to the Exploit cards that are shown, but I think if there’s a limited pool of possible Exploit cards you can follow a general strategy and have good confidence that it will be rewarded on at least two of the game's three scoring rounds. And of course, there’s always the issue of having to balance a new scoring system, which will no doubt be a pain. The key problem as I see it is identifying a way to award incremental progress without a need for more state-tracking. For example, there could be an Exploit that says “Lowered Unrest by X”; but this requires knowing what the Unrest was at the time the Exploit card was revealed.
I don't see a way to get this to the point of being truly narrative, in the sense of "he fought many epic battles with Carthage, but was unseated from his horse in the great battle and was trampled to death by an elephant; his last words were 'Long live Rome!'". But it's a decent approximation (maybe?).
Anyway, it’s just an idea, but I think it could be a scoring model that could work well in the game. I welcome any thoughts that anyone has!
Jeff
![Syndicate content](/misc/feed.png "Comments for \""Narrative" scoring concepts for Civ game\""){kind=small}
If all the civilizations are happening at the same time you can have the catagories you mentioned, military, trade, building etc. and just rank them against each other.
In this way in a 4 player game, one could be fourth in military, but first in building and still win.
And if you aren't going to have civil unrest "destroy the reign" or allow leaders to be murdered you can break it into X amount of rounds which equal X years. In this way you can change the narrative of, "In his younger years King Herus was a brash leader prone to violence, but later on in his reign changed his ways and concentrated on buidling strong trade routes and monuments to his honor." If you score after each round and then at the end "read the tale" of each player.
Just a thought.