Thanks for providing this background information, YG. I now understand better what you’re aiming to accomplish. I don’t have a specific solution to recommend that might work for your group, but here are a few questions you and the other people in your group might want to consider. The answers may provide you with guidance on what kind of point-scoring system might best suit your purpose. Fundamentally, the question to consider is: what kind of accomplishments do you want to reward by awarding points? Here are a couple of aspects of that question:
First: do you want the rewards to be incremental (round-by-round) throughout the game or do you want them to be based only on the final outcome? Under the first option, it doesn’t matter so much whether a player controls X at the end of the game; all that matters is how often he controlled it during the game. Under the second option, the reverse would be the case. Each option has its upside and its downside. For example, under a final-outcome-only system, a player who controlled X throughout the game but lost it on the last round would be in the same unhappy position as an investor whose stock portfolio did wonderfully for decade after decade but then crashed in value just before he was planning to sell it to finance his retirement.
Second: Assuming you choose an incremental system, do you want to reward consistency more (or less) than changes? Example: Let’s say that I’m the Soviet player and that I manage to hold on to Moscow for the whole game. Objectively, this is a desirable state of affairs (just think of what Stalin would have done to Zhukov if he’d lost Moscow in late 1941), but if the point system only rewards changes (i.e. the achievement of a defined goal), then my success in holding my capital doesn’t give me any points. Now let’s say that I’m the Soviet player and that, in an 8-round game, I lose Moscow 4 times and regain it 4 times, and let’s say that the point system rewards gains without penalizing losses. In that scenario, I’d gain 4 points – so I’d be further ahead point-wise than if I’d managed to successfully defend my capital from capture for the whole game. That would sound bizarre to me. One partial way to address this problem is by having both debits and credits: giving points for successes and deleting points for failures. In such a system, losing Moscow 4 times and regaining it 4 times would have the same zero-sum result as simply holding Moscow. But here we’d face a new question: should two such different situations really translate into the same number of points (in this case zero)? Or should the point system reflect the view that one of those scenarios demonstrates superior generalship, and hence should be rewarded? (Personally, I’d argue that the general who holds Moscow for the whole game is doing a better job than the one who keeps losing and recapturing it.)
