Comments on PiecePackingPirates

# 2 Comments. # I just played this for the first time and find the scoring confusing. I had 40 booty buried and 42 booty aboard my ship and ended the game next to my treasure chest. As a last action I was contemplating how much more booty to bury. And I found this single decision can dramatically change your score. My initial instinct was to bury 40 more. That would have made 2x80 = 160 points (for that part of the equation, not calculating the rest of the score). If I had not buried anything more it would have made 42x40 = 1,680 points. That's more than 1,500 points more and quite a huge imbalance in the scoring mechanism. Did I misunderstand anything or did I do anything wrong?

-- selfthinker 2019-09-28 21:05 UTC

The scoring system strongly incentivizes players to increase whatever is lowest of buried booty, booty aboard ship, and notoriety i.e. incentivizes one to pursue a balance of buried booty, booty aboard ship, and notoriety. Ship size and crew size seem to be secondary goals and number of turns seems to be a tertiary goal which can serve as tie breaker between games but are otherwise relatively unimportant compared to increasing a balance of buried booty, booty aboard ship, and notoriety. This is easiest to see if you look at your logged score: log (score) is approximately log (buried booty) + log (booty aboard ship) + log (notoriety) and hence doubling one of those three terms is just as important to one's score as doubling another term i.e. any doubling of notoriety is (approximately) just as valuable as any doubling of buried booty or booty aboard ship. -- TrevorLDavis 2019-09-29 04:42 UTC