I think Ripticus is onto the right general idea. None of the counting methods we've tried till now have really been accurate; the opposite problem, as Dean points out, is being too accurate. The rankings screen once listed all your cities by name, which, as Haxus correctly decided, was too much.
Personally, I would measure empires by industrial capacity. Resource throughput is, in the end, the driving force of all Hazeron gameplay, though good strategy and creative dispositions are increasingly important with the new designer. But the strength of an empire is not measured by production cheese production. Instead, I would create a "standard" starship in the designer and determine how often each empire could actually fill that order.
Filling the order for one ship every day would be 100 "Industrial Units"; an empire that could fill the order every hour would have a rating of 2400. Perhaps the ship should be max volume, with a sensible all-rounder system allocation, for whichever Q gives a x1 effect on the Q curve (Q87?). Empires which haven't yet advanced to that production Q would be listed in their own "junior member" section, where calculations could be made on a junior scale, perhaps using a Q1 planet hopper. The game could either tally all the resources produced in your empire or it could try to simulate a fictional process at every city with an actual spacecraft factory, but the second option might be too demanding.
The details are just suggestions; but is that idea broadly workable? I'm worried that any system which takes military action into account will fall apart once people make alt empires, and restricting empire creation is not something Hazeron is ready for (if it's even desirable, which I'm not sure of). Simply counting worlds, pop or resources produced doesn't really determine whether those numbers are being marshalled for any useful purpose. Shipbuilding has always been a solid measure of an empire's infrastructure, since it's one of the most complicated and expensive in-game operations. My system may be more accurate than simply measuring actual hull volume produced, since, for example, it would have rated the US Navy in 1941 much more highly than its pre-war building schedule might suggest.
Final request: Could we please have a population counter somewhere on the standings page or elsewhere? It's a really useful way of checking if your empire is being hit by some catastrophe, even if it's useless for ranking. I was away from my computer for ages during the Oxygen Crisis last year, and I wouldn't have known anything was happening, if not for that page.
Personally, I would measure empires by industrial capacity. Resource throughput is, in the end, the driving force of all Hazeron gameplay, though good strategy and creative dispositions are increasingly important with the new designer. But the strength of an empire is not measured by production cheese production. Instead, I would create a "standard" starship in the designer and determine how often each empire could actually fill that order.
Filling the order for one ship every day would be 100 "Industrial Units"; an empire that could fill the order every hour would have a rating of 2400. Perhaps the ship should be max volume, with a sensible all-rounder system allocation, for whichever Q gives a x1 effect on the Q curve (Q87?). Empires which haven't yet advanced to that production Q would be listed in their own "junior member" section, where calculations could be made on a junior scale, perhaps using a Q1 planet hopper. The game could either tally all the resources produced in your empire or it could try to simulate a fictional process at every city with an actual spacecraft factory, but the second option might be too demanding.
The details are just suggestions; but is that idea broadly workable? I'm worried that any system which takes military action into account will fall apart once people make alt empires, and restricting empire creation is not something Hazeron is ready for (if it's even desirable, which I'm not sure of). Simply counting worlds, pop or resources produced doesn't really determine whether those numbers are being marshalled for any useful purpose. Shipbuilding has always been a solid measure of an empire's infrastructure, since it's one of the most complicated and expensive in-game operations. My system may be more accurate than simply measuring actual hull volume produced, since, for example, it would have rated the US Navy in 1941 much more highly than its pre-war building schedule might suggest.
Final request: Could we please have a population counter somewhere on the standings page or elsewhere? It's a really useful way of checking if your empire is being hit by some catastrophe, even if it's useless for ranking. I was away from my computer for ages during the Oxygen Crisis last year, and I wouldn't have known anything was happening, if not for that page.