Points system for completing levels

[ccexplore]

If you look up the challenges thread, almost all challenges are about the amount of lemmings, almost only in case there's a definite maximum there are challenges considering the amount of skills used (mostly builders), and almost never time.

As the person that did most of the challenges, I need to point out that my criteria for challenges is really more about "interesting solutions" than any particular weighting of % saved, skills used or whatever.  Of course Lemmings being Lemmings, saving as many as possible is always interesting, hence most challenges are about that.  The no-builder challenges I think is somewhat started by LemSteven and I just kinda continued that trend.

So in other words the challenges are biased towards what I find interesting, which is really why (for example) time is not something I focused on as much (but that said, some time-related solutions are interesting to me, such as the one someone found for solving Mayhem 7 in under a minute).

[ccexplore]

On some levels yes, on others no, which is why this sort of thing should be left alone in my opinion. Ranking the skills in order of importance can only be done in the context of a single level, not the whole game, so assigning different points for each wouldn't work.

I agree.  That being said, I do think perhaps we can consider the idea of an extra bonus for each skill type that is left completely unused (eg. a builderless solution), for a total of 8 bonus opportunities.  Just a small bonus though (eg. I wouldn't want to rank the crazy builderless solution to Tame 20 as being "better" scorewise than the more straightforward and less fuzzy solution that does use builders).  The bonus would be same for any of the 8 skill types.

[Fleech]

Is that really relevant?

The way I'd written it, no...

What could be relevant though is how this logarithmic scaling of skills would compare against the time penalty (ie. it is no longer simply 1 skill = 10 seconds; the number of seconds a skill is worth [as if that's even meaningful to speak of] varies with the level]).

... but that's what I was trying to get at  :wink:

This to me would be over-complicated. Personally I'd much rather be able to just open up any level and know exactly what everything was worth without having to work it out.

Regarding the bonuses you suggested, I like the idea, but the only problems I can see is how you'd score it, and that it would remove the less-skills-is-better idea. Perhaps that's not necessarily a bad thing, but is say, a no-blocker so solution always going to be better than one that uses more skills but less in total? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and we're back to whole 'context' thing again.

Maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way though...