Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Winning and Score

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

The purpose of this page is to explain the win scenario for this game and some of the basic score calculations. Any game needs a win scenario and our win scenario is based upon highest score.

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Winning:

The object of this game, the winning scenario, is to get the highest score of all of the camps competing during the round. Because of starting values, you will begin with a score of around 71 to 75. It is your job to play the game and increase your score until you are at the top. At the end of each round, we will post the score results from that round and declare a winner. We will also give the dubious honor of destroying the world once again to the camp that builds the most nukes. Winners in both overall score and other ranking types will receive trophies to attach to their accounts. Trophies can only be carried over from round to round if the camp has a DailyWheel account.

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Score Calculation:

A very large number of things go into the score calculation. Your total population, land, buildings, stored resources, money, research, army units, special ops units, militia, weapons, missiles, victory score, and many other parts to the game make up your score.

Most of the main things you will be dealing with during the game, population, stored resources, etc., will NOT give you a full point per unit. These typically will give you far less due to the ease with which you will be able to get them by the end of the game.

Score will not increase or decrease automatically (with a few exceptions), but will trend upwards or downwards depending on what you do in your camp. Usually your score will be increasing because you will be doing things that increase your score (like constructing new buildings or winning a battle). Occasionally your score will decrease (you get rid of certain buildings in your camp that give you higher score for things that give you lower score due to management decisions or you lose a nuke due to ops). Either way, instead of losing or gaining all of the associated points at once, you will gain or lose them gradually. This means tactics like dropping your score by dumping 1 million points worth of mechs on the Trade Market will not work, nor will attempts to jump score by saving up excessive amounts of gold, uranium, and population to build up quickly or pulling those mechs back off the market on the last day of the round. The amount you increase or decrease each turn will vary by a percentage of the difference, and depending on the size of the change, may be higher or lower. For example, building 4 nukes in one turn will increase your score by more each turn than building 2 shelters (all other things being equal, of course), but you will usually gain all of the points for the shelters before the nukes. The amount of increase or decrease will always be less than 50% of the difference, so eventually there will be a diminishing point for each one (once again, all other things being equal). Usually, you probably won't notice any diminishing increase or even necessarily a difference in how long it will take to increase completely because most of the time your score is going to be changing with each successive turn. The only times you will see your score increase or decrease fairly automatically is after a battle. Your score will be adjusted more than would normally occur with trending in order to move you up or down the ranks appropriately so that you stay in the range that you should be in.

Victory score and focus path related score will be your primary boosters. Victory score can either be positive or negative. If you win, you will get a positive victory score based on a number of things including how many military units you lost and how effective you were against the other camp. Picking on a camp you have already decimated will get you a much smaller victory score, and have other side effects. If you lose, you will lose score accordingly. The three focus paths, nuke, econ, and military, all have their associated score boosters with the ability to build nukes, gold palettes, and gaining a boost in max. victory score as well as the ability to build mechs for the appropriate path.

It has been suggested before that we put certain caps on how much of an increase in score a person can get each time to make things a bit more fair. While on the surface this sounds good, in the end it would really hurt overall play. Basically this would guarantee that the person who started the earliest and was able to consistently hit that cap every single turn would win, hands down. We will not put this type of cap into the score calculation.

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Other Ranks:

There are other ranks that you can compete for throughout the round besides the primary rank of score. You will be able to compete for highest victory score, most nukes, most gold palettes, highest military path score, most offensive victories, most defensive victories, most victories with special forces, most money, most population, most land, most turns used, total research, highest mini-game score, highest number of people killed, highest number of air victories, highest duster usage, top merchant revenue, and top alliance total score. These results will be published at the end of the round and available for view later. If you are curious about these ranks for previous rounds and cannot find something for a specific round, this may be due to limits that existed during that round or the fact that we were not yet ranking camps according to these statistics. Not all of these stats will receive trophies.

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