Scoring Questions

[arethusa]

After more than a year of playing only PBEM, I went back to play a game with the AI since my human opponents have been taking so long to return their moves. I found after almost 2 years of playing PBEM, my tactics are so much better against the AI than I'd been before.

Out of curiosity, I then tried to see if I could completely eliminate the AI in a game I picked. I was playing "Mice vs Marshals", which I vaguely remembered from a couple of years ago and had the feeling it had been a tough battle then.

Anyway, the game ended about turn 14 because I'd killed all but 2 AI units, which I couldn't find and I'd taken all the VH's.

The score ended up as a draw, 5055 pts for me and 3278 for the AI.

Me AI
men killed 56 464
artillery killed 0 3
AFV killed 6 55

VH's 20 0

My AFV's killed were: Panzerjaeger 38 - cost 63 x 1
PzkfwIVf2 ------- cost 106 x 1
StuG40 f/8 ------ cost 85 x 1
Marder II -------- cost 71 x 1
Sdkfz 251/2 ----- cost 52 x 2

Now some questions.

1) How does the score end up with 56 men killed for me? I added up all the men actually killed, plus all the crews in the destroyed AFV's that were killed, plus all the individuals killed from AFV and ATG crews, and I'd only actually lost 38 men.

2) How does the AI get a score of 3278? It had no VH's and I'd lost very little. When you add up the cost of my losses, it comes to 377 in equipment, plus 38 men at a cost of 1 each is still only 415. Where does the other side get all the rest of the points.

3) I didn't add up all the points I thought I should get myself because it meant basically going through the entire AI OOB. But the only units not killed were his HQ and one 50mm mortar squad, presumably 200 and 21 points respectively. I don't think though that the total would reach over 5,000 points since the VH's combined were only 1,000 points. So how did I get so many points?

Since I had saved the game at the previous turn (dinner was ready), it was easy to replay it and check the results. There were only 5 AI units remaining on the last turn and I now knew where they all were.

In one try, I lost another PzkfwIVf2 but killed all the AI units, including the HQ and the last 50 mm. The score was 5090:3940

Another try, AI lasted 3 more more turns and got the same PzkfwIVf2 and I got all the rest of the AI's. Score was 5106:3940

Another try, got all AI units turn 15 and lost nothing more. Score 5106:3278

So, some more questions arise.

4) How can the AI go from 3278 to 3940 by only killing one more tank? The tank was only worth 106 and the crew maybe 5.

5) If the AI goes up that much with only one more kill, why did I only increase from 5055 to 5090, or 5106 by getting his remaining units? The mortar was only a cost of 21 and the HQ either a cost of 200 or about 5 men. No combination works.

6) In the one try when the AI got another German tank but took 3 more turns to eliminate, the score went up to 3940 for the AI so I thought perhaps the AI got points for surviving a turn. :p But then in another try, the AI got the same tank but was eliminated in one turn and still got the same score. So where does the AI get 662 points for killing one tank? It isn't points per turn anywhere and the AI didn't find any hidden VH's because he had no more units.

Since the game was saved with so little left to do, it's possible to retry it lots of times to figure this out. But it seems from the data, that there's a lot more to the scoring than is obvious.

With so few losses and total anihilation of the AI, I would have expected a decisive victory. Okay, with the point spread as it is, just a draw is understandable but the point spread should have been greater if the AI and I were being scored the same way.

Does anybody know how this scoring works?

7) Do you get a lot more for a tank than you do for a groundpounder unit? What do individual men count for?

8) How are crews scored? Do you get more for a crew killed seperatly from killing the AFV or is the score the same? (You do get another tank emblem on your unit detail if you kill the crew seperatly from the tank.)

9) Do breakdowns and weapon malfunctions go towards points? (I had 4 immobilizations and at least 5 main weapon malfunctions)

10) Is there some kind of scoring for territory control apart from VH's? It just seems odd that the scores could vary like this with so little change from one iteration to the next. Especially when the AI score increases so much and mine doesn't.

While I still won, it raises the question of how the game scores in PBEM games as well. I'm sure we've all had games where it seems we've had a runaway victory and should have beaten our opponent by a lot (or lost by a lot :rolleyes: ) and yet, the end score doesn't seem to reflect this. Some people are going to say, "What does the score matter? A win is a win regardless of the points."

That's true but this scoring seems to be so out of proportion here that perhaps wins haven't really been wins. Or perhaps VH's don't matter and one should dispense with them if the score for a kill can be more than 600 popints for one tank. Compared to 50 points for a VH, why bother with the VH's.

[Jim1954]

Sometimes the VH's can be on a value per turn basis and if they are hidden at the start, (sneaky designers) you may never see them and not know the enemy is getting points all along unless you get close enough to "unhide" them.

You could open that scenario up with the editor and see what's what I suppose, or play it from the other side and see what shows up.

[Voriax]

Hmm..those AFV's you lost make 25 men killed. So you lost only 13 others? When a tank dies its whole crew is counted as casualties, regardless of how many of them bail out. and yes, if those bailed crews are killed to the last man you get another kill marker.
True troop cost affects somewhat, but not enough for such a high AI score. Imho.
If you go to the final roster and add all red numbers under 'Dam' column, what do you get?

Voriax

[arethusa]

Sometimes the VH's can be on a value per turn basis and if they are hidden at the start, (sneaky designers) you may never see them and not know the enemy is getting points all along unless you get close enough to "unhide" them.

You could open that scenario up with the editor and see what's what I suppose, or play it from the other side and see what shows up.

No, these VH's are a straight 50 points each at end of game. So not enough to make any big difference.

As far as hidden VH's go, I tried the game again and just let it run through another 5 turns without killing off the last Russians. No change in score so it doesn't seem to be hidden pts/turn VH's for the AI.

[arethusa]

Hmm..those AFV's you lost make 25 men killed. So you lost only 13 others? When a tank dies its whole crew is counted as casualties, regardless of how many of them bail out. and yes, if those bailed crews are killed to the last man you get another kill marker.
True troop cost affects somewhat, but not enough for such a high AI score. Imho.
If you go to the final roster and add all red numbers under 'Dam' column, what do you get?

Voriax

Yep, all tolled, I only lost 13 other men.

All except one of the 13 were the Romanian allies. They just advanced to some dead ground behind a gully and waited for the Russian tanks with their molotovs. They only had to take on 3 Russian tanks since most of the Russians were dealt with at long range by the Germans in the south. Even then, all except for a couple of the Romanian casualties were the result of friendly fire. The Russian tanks that did get through to them barely got a chance to shoot since they were right in the middle of the Romanians before they were seen, and then they became suppressed.

I added up all the Russian killed and destroyed points and it came to 6214 points. Plus the 1,000 points for VH's adds up to way more than what the game gave me so that's not how the scoring is done either.

Besides which, in the retries I made where I lost another PzkfwIV, the AI score was increased by over 600 points so that doesn't seem to be how it's done.

[Jamminji]

the scoring is somethong that would really be nice to figure out more then just saying we all know who wins. I would think that the SP designers had a reason and plan for what they did. I made a thread not to long ago about this same issue. I will bump it up so this threads can be together. Anyone know how to tie two threads together? I don't know how.

jam

[arethusa]

Another strange thing I noticed while adding up the points for Variax's suggestion, not all the destroyed tanks were given the same damage value.

For instance, most of the destroyed T34-m41's had a value of 117 points but there were two of them that only had 6

Most of the T-70's were worth 70 points but one of them was only 2

Most of the KV1-m41's were worth 126, but one of them was worth 6.

I thought perhaps that was where the crew had bailed and the tank was destroyed by spiking later, but there had been no abandoned T-70's. They were all straight kills.

Even so, it doesn't seem right that a tank destroyed by gunfire would be worth 126 but a tank destroyed by abandonment would be worth only 6 plus the value of the crew, especially when there were no listings for destroyed crewmen.


In other words, no matter which way I have looked at this scoring yet, there's no way it has seemed either fair, accurate or consistent. Can anybody figure out how this works?

Try the same scenario yourself and see, or else try some other scenario where you think you can destroy all the enemy so as to give yourself a blank slate with which to decipher the scoring, and my bet is that the scoring won't make sense.

[arethusa]

the scoring is somethong that would really be nice to figure out more then just saying we all know who wins. I would think that the SP designers had a reason and plan for what they did. I made a thread not to long ago about this same issue. I will bump it up so this threads can be together. Anyone know how to tie two threads together? I don't know how.

jam

Yeah, I remember your thread from a while ago jam and that's one reason why I decided to look into it myself. The deeper I got into it, the less sense it seemed to make.

I'm sure a lot of the people playing PBEM games would like to know since in a lot of games, it could be close enough that perhaps the one who FRED decides is the winner (by say 200 points), might not actually have been the real winner.

BTW, for those who haven't seen it, FRED is the AI. (F*%#$&@g Ridiculous Electronic Device to spell it out)

[Voriax]

Those tanks worth couple points are ones that aren't really destroyed, just abandoned. They suffered 6 'damage dots' or 2 or whatever before the rest of the crew bailed.
As for the T-70's, it sometimes happen that tank is hit, crew bails and is also destroyed with a single hit..especially with HE as the splash effect can fry the bailed crew. Or if the scenario was large you had ran out of slots. So the crew did bail but as there was no space in the roster they vanished immediately.

This is of course just my interpretation.

Voriax

[arethusa]

Voriax
It's possible you're right about the T-70's but not likely. There seemed to be lots of slots left for crew units and often when I hit other tanks, there was a bailout and abandonment. I added up all the units on both sides at the end of the game and I think combined it was 233 units.

Definitely NOT the case that the '6' value units were just abandoned. I made it a point to set an idle unit over top of each abandoned tank for a turn or two until their status changed from 'abandoned' to 'destroyed'. (Something you learn in PBEM for sure when you have to kill the same Tiger 3 times in one game :rolleyes: ) To check, I went over the list after the game and all of FRED's Russian units were indeed listed as 'destroyed'.

[WhiteElephants]

My two cents for what it's worth.

I was playing Germany from 39 in a generated campaign. My second battle I thought I had smashed Poland after having killed their HQ, broken their force morale, and captured all the victory hexes, but at game end it was a draw with the score being ~10,000 to ~5,000. Given my core force was only worth ~2,000 points I thought this was odd, but went on to the next mission. This time I faced off against the French and nearly the same thing happend except the score was roughly ~3000 to ~1000 granting me a decisive victory.

I don't remember the mission types, but I'm thinking they were advance both times. I just can't seem to account for the huge point difference in the games. If I had the saves I could look into it more, but I don't. Anyway, not sure this helps, but I wondered if anyone else had similar experiences.

[gnoccop]

Points you gain from a kill dipends on unit quality (exp, morale...); so I think AI made a lot of points because your killed units were elite units.

You can also try to check the cost of your unit when you buy your army: if true troop is on, there isn't a standard cost for the same kind of unit, but the cost changes for each one (i.e. two pzIVe have 2 different cost).
When true troop is on the cost of the unit is different from the cost listed in the encyclopedia (quality of the unit is taken into account).

Hope this helps.

(and I hope you can understand my poor english )

[arethusa]

Everybody seems to keep missing the fact that I said at the beginning that the game was a premade scenario, "Mice vs Marshalls". That's why I thought this would be a good spot to start the discussion on scoring since everybdoy could test it out for themselves.

There was no choice for units, no buying, no costs etc. Any of you can play the exact same setup and see for yourselves what the scoring is like.

The unit I lost and that made a 662 point difference when I replayed the last turn was (GO), Capt. Hoffman. It doesn't look like it was elite other than that it had 12 kills to it's credit.

Even so, 662 points for one kill seems to an awful lot. And there seems to be no way to calculate what the score would be.

[Jim1954]

Look in the opening text of the scenario and see who created it. Chances are he belongs to this forum. Try sending him a pm and ask him if this is a designed intent.

[gnoccop]

IIRC it's possible to assign a value multiplier in scenario creation.

Pheraps your troop have such kind of multiplier that make your casualties very expensive...

[Gary Tatro]

One of the things to consider in you game is the amount of point awarded for kills is based on the experience/moral and skill of the troops killed. Say for example you have one German SS squad in 1943 exp/moral/ skill are 80/90/75 is a cost of 26 points to purchase, but this is not necessarily the value give to the squad if it is destroyed. If you do a quick test in a battle deployment you will see that that same squad is worth anywhere from 29-32 points if it is destoyed.

So taking this idea to its fruition. The computer or your opponent could easily gain a lot of points for killing off your elite/crack, units. While you only getting less points for killing off raw recruits. This variance increases with the value of the base purchase cost of the unit. Hope this helps.

[chief]

Just to add info to this question, refer to page 6, item 103, & 108 (notation) of the manual update (pdf) in the game.

[arethusa]

Look in the opening text of the scenario and see who created it. Chances are he belongs to this forum. Try sending him a pm and ask him if this is a designed intent.

Good suggestion. I've done that now. The creator BTW was 'Redleg'.