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[Kahryl]

One thing about innovation that's never felt quite 'right' is the scoring system. To qualify for an achievement you need age * 5 in score. But not only do card points get more valuable as you go up in age, you already have score from previous ages to buffer your score. To qualify for the NEXT achievement you just need 5 points, which gets easier and easier. This makes the score system start to feel really broken somewhere around ages 5-7.

I know the ages are supposed to be get faster paced over time, but the way you score cards becomes more powerful as well as the card values. There's no need to make the score thresholds even smaller compared to card value on top of that.

I wonder if the pacing would feel better if you needed two cards "per age" to score. That is, 2 points for age 1, 2+4 for age 2, 2+4+6 for age three and so on. So it would be like:

Code: [Select]

Age Vanilla New
1 5 2
2 10 6
3 15 12
4 20 20
5 25 30
6 30 42
7 35 56
8 40 72
9 45 90

Do you think the vanilla system's crazy scaling was intentional, or just that it's easier to play by multiplying by 5 in your head rather than looking at some chart?

[Kirian]

The ways to break down your opponent's score pile also get easier and easier as the game goes on.  Very, very rarely do I see scores over 60, which makes that inflated scale seem silly; often, players will end the game with scores near zero!

[dondon151]

2/6/12 for Ages 1/2/3 also makes those really easy to achieve.

[timchen]

I think it all depends on what you figure as 'right'. In the original scoring system, there is a crossover from age 1-4 to age 5-7 where early on a score lead leads to achievement lead whereas in the middle ages it's easier for both players to have enough score and tempo becomes more important. In the way you purposed score probably is the bottleneck all the time (except in the first few ages) which may or may not be more interesting, even though you may think it is more 'right'.

On the other hand your system is probably not that much harder to remember. To achieve age n you need n(n+1) points.

[Awaclus]

A lot of things are broken in Innovation, that's the reason why it's so fun.

[theory]

I don't think the scoring system is broken as-is, and I think your scoring system is a lot more "broken".  I mean, with yours, if you start with Agriculture you can just immediately claim an achievement.

[AngelKurisu]

Funny story -- we actually tried a scale like that very briefly.  It was not good!

[Drab Emordnilap]

To qualify for the NEXT achievement you just need 5 points, which gets easier and easier. This makes the score system start to feel really broken somewhere around ages 5-7.

Don't forget you still need a top card of that age or higher. A lot of times, that's the actual choke point.