Ive been toying with the idea of holding a tournament for this game and adding a scoring system that would allow players to score points based on several rounds of games and indicate some level of difficulty of each game by tracking missed cylon activations and missed jump opportunities.

I was thinking of something like this

In a human win each human scores 10 points plus the value of the highest resource remaining.

In a cylon win each cylon scores 10 points plus 4 points for each resource in the red.

Prior to the sleeper agent phase each player scores 1 point each time its their turn and they are not a revealed cylon or in the brig or sick bay.

During the sleeper agent phase Each cylon player scores 2 points as above humans score 1 point

ie this requires identifiying which loyalty cards a player recieved during each phase and keeping track of the number of turns the character plays)

In addition

Each time a crisis card (not super crises or revealed cylon crisis) card appears that does not advance the jump track 1 point is scored for the humans

Each time a cylon activation is missed due to no base stars 1 point is added to the cylons score

Each time a jump is activated with no cylon activation 1 point is deducted from the human score.

(ie keep a running total for humans and cylons in addition to the individual scores)

The humans and cylons add this number to their scores.

This is just a rough cut at what I think might work the actual scoring numbers will probably need some work and possibly score points based the type of cylon win or actually sending a cylon to the brig.

The big thing that can effect the game outcome is some anomolous sequence of crisis deck activations and I wanted to represent this by giving a bonus score (or penalty) to represent the greater obstacle.

Any thoughts.

This all seems very complicated and will likely bog the game down significantly. Certain things like humans scoring more based on the highest resource rewards play that is usually bad. For instance: if morale is high but everything else is really bad, it rewards humans for passing crises that would reduce morale, instead of just sacrificing the morale to make sure the other resources will stay high.

Instead maybe score multiple categories very simply. Keep track of everyone's win/loss ratio, and whether they were human or cylon. You can have a 'best player' who has the best win/loss record overall, the best human (best win/loss when human) and best cylon (best win/loss when cylon.

Additionally you could add a couple ones that really tie into gameplay, but less directly. For instance, you could award a 'best cylon detector' to the person responsible for brigging the most players who turn out to be cylons (but only if they are actually cylons at the time!). You can also award the best hiding cylon, by tracking how many times you get brigged as a cylon, and how many turns it takes for it to happen.

Maybe something for kicks like 'best pilot', but tracking how many raiders you destroy is probably no fun, and limited to only a couple of the characters.

I think I would say add the highest resource but subtract 1-2 points for each rescource in the red.

The idea with keeping track of missed activations and jump track advancements is so as to determine how easy of a time the humans had of winning.

I was hoping to keep it simple tallies of things that happen so as to not bog down the game too much.

Knowing that the game is heavily in favor of the cylons there should be some indicator of how much easier it got.

All in all it was just a rough cut at an idea. And what I was really looking for was areas where the game could be determined to be easier or harder based on some of the more random events.

Otherwise ones game play would result in the rest and we could measure that.

aammondd said:

<sigh> This game is not heavily in favor of the cylons. That's entirely a newbie concept. Once you've played enough you'll see the win/loss ratio even out.

I don't see any way to run a tourney beyond a win/loss ratio, but even that seems problematic. This is a co-op game. One player can't decide his fate on his own. I can appreciate that you enjoy the game and want to sponsor some sort of event to spread the word, but a tourney just doesn't seem workable here. As timonkey already pointed out, any scoring system you set up is just going to skew the actual gameplay itself and make a mess of things.

EDIT : The evil double post demon returns.

Im very familiar with how scoring systems influence play.

I think if any bonuses would be given it would have to reflect the difficulty overcome that was not directly under the control of the players.

Thats why I think that the game gets easier for the humans when they have lots of quick jump track advances harder when you have fewer and really hard when you get multiple fleet cards.

Early or late cylons make a difference as well.

I wanted something that would reflect that a game that skewed towards human win would not score the same as one the skewed away but was still won.

This game has many factors that skew the difficulty for one faction or the other to win.

When I said its heavily wieghted toward cylons I meant that its easier for conditions to skew that way than the other.

Example no jump advances, early cylons (revealed or not), multiple fleets, high difficulty crisis, leader cylons all skew the game toward cylon win and are not under the control of the players.

The ones that skew toward the humans are less likely to occur. Few Fleets, low difficulty crisis, late cylons

Briging and other choices the players make dont really count for these purposes of determining if the game was difficult for one faction to win or the other.

Not all games are of equal difficulty for each faction is basicly my main point.

I was trying to figure out a way through simple tallies to get some idea of the difficulty inherent in the randomness.

I think you're going to have a hard time tracking everything that can make the game harder. How close together hard things of the same type will probably be the hardest.

When you lose because you got 3 attack crises in a row, and it put down civvies on top of 6 raiders, will you track that?

If all the cards that decrease X resource are stacked together so you hit all of them, will you track that?

If you get an uncharacteristically high number of heavy raider launches and activations will you track that?

Will you track how many times the hidden cylon admiral boned you on the destination deck? Or Roslin screwed you on the crisis card?

My point isn't to say to account for everything. You have to assume that on average the game will deliver about the same difficulty every time, but have enough games that everybody plays that it evens out if you get an outlier or two.

I see what you mean I was only trying to concentrate on the most statisicly anamolous.

For me it would be just tracking the fleet appearences between jumps regardless of which ones they were.

Or the number of cylon ship activations that show up with no cylon ships.

Cylon leader started the game

No cylons started game

Jump tracks activations vs total number of crisis cards.

Crisis difficulties.

In many ways parts of this game play like Diplomacy however in others it does not and its the does not that skews the difficulties and makes it hard to compare games.

I know many of my posts give the impression that I think the game is unbalanced but thats not my intent.

I think the game is remarkably well designed and balanced and has lots of hidden nuances to strategy etc. What I have seen however is that the overall difficulty of any particular game tends to skew one way or another. Due to the variables in characters and loyalties it would be near impossible to compare 1 game over another and say that player x played better because he won consistently over a series of 3-5 games if infact he just happend to be on the skewed side

Or like what happend to me in a game where there were no cylons till sleeper stage. I was admiral and made the jump from 3 to 6 then became a cylon. it was 4 players before I could reveal and they jumped early to 8 losing no pop (risked1) with very few threats. The other cylon remained hidden for 1 round hoping to cause more havoc and suspected a diff player of being cylon with population at 5-6 when they became able to jump again they did so. Again with little or no threats.

So in my opinon this game was skewed against the cylons for a couple of reasons and the humans earned victory more by luck of the cards than by good game play. Would you reward this win the same as a win that came in a game with a cylon president from the outset and required 6 jumps to make 8.

The game skews itself each time Im just trying to see if I can measure the more dramatic random skew issues through simple tallies.

timonkey said:

This might work if you can run a 6 round tournament, but that's an all day affair. The real reason you need a scoring system is that you aren't likely to have enough rounds to just differentiate on win/loss records: you'll need some sort of tie-breaker. Some gauge of how difficult each game was for each side makes sense in that capacity. Now, you can quibble about the details of the proposal, but I think some system is necessary if you are going to run a tournament.

Of course, I'm not sure this makes a great tournament game, largely because of game time and number of players. But that's a different argument...

Why not just count the number of crisis cards that came up? If the game made it easy, there should be fewer. If hard, more.

Yes this would be true to some extent but its more important to show the difficulty that results from them.

Long periods of Cylon ship inactivity results in more difficulty for the Cylon players

Frequent jump tracks help the humans long stretches without hurts alot.

Early cylons vs Late

Simply counting the number of crisis cards is like saying how many turns did it take.

I think counting crisis cards is a step in the right direction. Things like cylon reveals are NOT a part of the randomness of the game, and dice rolls can always be mitigated by taking other actions and/or strategic planning. The scoring system should be able to be done by *only* looking at the crisis cards.

Trump said:

I really, really, don't think that's the case. I've played well over 40 games and the Cylons have a significant percentage advantage.

F50 said:

I agree that a simpler scoring system that looks at the crisis card deck post-game is preferable to a more complex one that requires record-keeping during the game. People forget to do things like draw skill cards in their haste to accomplish some vital action: expecting them to remember tournament record-keeping seems likely to fail.

I do think that a record of how many Cylons were "created" in the Sleeper phase (as opposed to when the game began) is also important. But most people remember whether they started the game as a Cylon at the end of the game. They often don't remember whether there were ten or fourteen turns in a row with no Cylon ships on the board; at least, not with any accuracy.

I dont think its too much to ask to keep a running tally of

Was there an Icon but nothing to activate. (you could even use tokens to represent this)

The rest can be totaled at the end of the game.

Im not sure how I would reflect Crisis cards chosen by Revealed Cyllons or Super Crisis cards.

If you really want to do that, then just use multiple discard piles for the crisis cards. One is for these 'wasted' activation icons.

That sounds reasonable too. In fact you could learn a lot about how the game played out by simply arranging the cards in the discard piles like that you could even orientate them for pass or failed skill checks but that wouldnt be the most usefull bit.

In the skipped activations pile the number of jump trak icons could be telling vs the numbers in the other stack.

I think Im going to start doing that and start keeping some statistics on my games

Also the early vs sleeper cylon bit is also a key to the type of game you have.

I dont know of a rule or a reason that would prevent the identification of when specific loyalty cards were received. I dont know that the additional information gained by knowing when it was recieved skews the game too much or not.

Not sure how I actually feel about the need for a scoring system (turns the game into going for points over just trying to win -- look at the scoring diffrences in the Arkham Horror league fo examples of people playing for points as opposed to just happy to win), but here are a few ideas I think that could make scoring easier:

Destination Cards: Players should get points based on how many destination cards they used. We played a game the other night where only 3 Destination cards were pulled, and the humans won. The more DCs, the more points for the humans, as the game dragged out longer. Conversely, the fewer cards the more points for the cylons, as they really kicked fast butt. For example, humans get +1 point for each DC, cyclons get a set number of points, reduced for each DC card.

Resource Levels: This is perhaps the best place to find points, as it shows how well the humans managed the resources, or the cylons worked against them. If the humans win they should get +1 point for each resource left, not just the highest. This also won't skew risk taking for points. Having the cylons receive a flat +4 as you already suggested is perhaps the most fair way without having to hassle alot of math.

Other points can be awarded based on how many opponents you beat, say 3 points per opposing player. In a six player game with 2 cylons and the Sympathizer being on the human side, if the humans win they get 6 points each, the cylons instead get 12 points each for a win. Or, perhaps the cylons only get 2 points per human player, earning 8 points.

Just some rough thoughts.

I like a lot of this, but I *hate* the per-turn points. What exactly is that supposed to mean? Also, what about cylon attack cards? IMO that is one of the things that makes the game a lot harder. Shoudn't the humans score for getting those as well? Also, I agree with JerusalemJones' comments.

I was thinking of having a base score for winning and that score be modified by the calculated difficulty of the game.

I think you should get some points for losing a game that was too heavily skewed against you.

Cylon attack cards can be totaled easily. You would only have to keep track of if the 33 card came up more than once or was shuffled into the deck again.

Destination cards are also important but its more important to know what the admiral didnt choose and if they were a cylon at the time or not.

This can be done by looking at the bottom of the deck after the game.

All in all I dont think the scoring system should be something that the players can play to over actually playing to win. I wanted to just be able to guage the difficulty of the game in order to award points for a win or loss appropriately.

I mean its entirely possible for the humans to lose with no cylons before the sleeper phase.

Its also entirely possible for them to hang on till the sleeper phase then a single revealed cylon beats them.

Niether of those games should penalize players or reward cylons inappropriately compared to those who have to actually work for their vicories.

The winner of the torunament should come from among those who played the more difficult games and won.

aammondd said:

The problem with that is two-fold.

One, winning/losing is very dependent upon who you play with.

Two, what if I and someone else are both just as good, and win every game, but every game I'm in is 'easy' and every game he's in is 'hard'. He wins because I played 'easy' games? That's gonna short change someone. And he's apt to be bitter.

Knowing that games are scored by difficulty at the outset should leave noone feeling shortchanged.

The likely hood of winning a number of "easy" games is less than winning overall so it should be understood from the outset that game difficulty is

"Yea, but I didn't have the chance to play a hard game. That's not my fault." More whinning...

People prone to whinning are going to whine no matter what.

Just have plenty of cheese handy