I agree that players high in research scores deserve kudos.  However, those of us who have captured cities will always be a bit disadvantaged in research score compared to our actual research completed.  I'm not complaining about this, just saying that there are some who have more research completed than it "looks" like.

I have an idea ... maybe people could compete with armies.  I wonder what that would look like.

If you build up 10 towns from the ground up and get all their tech it is currently impossible to get rank 1 with it. If you lose whole cities and have to regain the tech in restarted cities, you can get much higher.

So if you're up high it either means you have 10 cities and have them maxed on tech, or it means you had many cities in the past that got completely destroyed or captured. 

As Rill says, if you capture towns, you already have research in them, meaning you can obtain less. The actual researching is what gives you points. So capturing will lower your max score. 

Research is nothing more than a waiting game in general. Same is true for magic, which is just a matter of having a magic tower up and having it up for long (so it reflects total game-time mostly). The oldest players have the highest magic score, especially if they had their 10 towns very early. Same is true for research with the added issue of capturing or losing and rebuilding towns.

but im no score 'hore

I was referring to making use of one's armies on the battlefield in a test of strategy and skill.

Bumping your trade score will do nothing for your overall score since you're already nr 1. You have the highest possible trade score contribution to your overall score. It cannot get higher even though your tradescore will. 

So if you want to go up the overall ladder, work on other ranks. Most likely, you will have to go all the way past Scott in Attack since you can't speed up research and magic (both in which he almost has the highest scores possible, like you have with trade). Then there's defense, in which he also has a sizable amount etc.

The reason I am so close to him is because i have similar attack and a much larger diplo score to offset his magic advantage. My tech and pop are also similar. Our trade scores are almost 0 because they are compared to yours (percentage-wise). Your 92 billion makes scotts 8 billion and my 1 billion worthless as a part of overall score (it is based off of the nr 1 player)

It is pretty much mission impossible for you to pass him unless you completely change your playstyle and have a year or so off work :)

It is quite hard for me too. All I can do is attack. I can't negate his magic advantage, though it will drop over (a long) time, in relative terms (which is what overall uses). So it is more of a matter of who gives up playing Illy like a crazyman first.

You could put some armies on some mountains and try to get people to attack you, thus increasing your defense score.  Or you could siege someone; that would practically guarantee that they would attack your siege camps.  Or you could get someone to siege you.  Siege engines give really good experience, so it would help your attack score.

/me is just full of helpful suggestions like that

Yes very helpful

umm I am already nr 1 in attack lol.... I guess I could stage some fights where people attack squares i am camping on. To get some defense score. Anyone interested in smacking my armies?

Luna

Luna

and would it be possible to get weekly progress updates from the devs, dont have to be long just we have worked on this or we have done this, working on that now :) we know you work but for us we never see it until we get it all 

Nope, sorry. It would serve to only confuse and frustrate everyone if we told you what we were doing all the time. Priorities change quickly and often and we need to stay flexible without freaking out the community in the process. :)

Luna 

Actually, that's not twilight's alt...  ;)

And if, by chance, the measurement is borked from the get-go, does it really matter if it makes the scores without meaning?  

A false hypothesis yields... what again?

Of course it would be cooler if there was some kind of skill involved, but concentrated effort and single-mindedness can be admired as well :)

I think I might have tried the same if I wasn't playing only 1 account and if I didn't already know tradescores will be reset.