The scoring system in Civ 3 depends on three factors: Land area controlled, population, and victory date. I think that most people realise that to run up a large score you basically need to go to war early and often - it is possible to win by domination of conquest fairly early, and with a huge score by virtue of owning the vast majority of the map. Other victory types are almost guaranteed to come later (diplomatic or spaceship for instance) and to involve a lower land area and population, although it is possible to mlik the score by getting near the domination limit early in the game with wars, and then playing through to the end for a spaceship win. Not very interesting though.
So, how to balance the scoring system. And what are the odds of it being implemented in a later patch (given that it doesn't have to affect affect gameplay at all - the scoring system for the histograph could in principle remain unchanged). The obvious suggestion is to award scores for other achievements as well, such as no. of turns without war (as per Civs 1 and 2), scores for cities with high cultural levels (each border expansion gives a a score boost, or something similar, even if it doesn't gain any new territory), for attitudes of other leaders towards you throught the game, for building wonders, for capturing wonders. It's not hard to think of plenty of things that could in principle count towards the score.
The second alteration is to alter how much each factor is worth depending on what kind of victory you win. A military victory would obviously score most strongly on territory captured, wonders captured and so on. A cultural victory would score more strongly for cities with high cultural levels, building rather than capturing wonders, capturing cities by culture flips (unless you are Coracle
), and would score much lower (or even negatively) for captured cities, razed cities. The bonus depending on which year you finish could also vary for different victory types (I don't actually know if it does this at the moment), since obviously a spaceship launch in (for example) 1600 AD is somewhat harder than a diplomatic victory in the same year, due to needing more techs and more industrial output.
Obviously, this isn't a very detailed proposal, since a lot of testing would have to be done to try and get the scores more or less balanced. But is this something that people think would be a worthwhile change?