I just finished Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven. It was my first entry in the series and I feel quite proud of the deed, taking in account that it's certainly one of the longest games I ever played.

Anyway, I guess that my final score has probably been quite dissapointing, I'm curious to know how good other people usually do, and how does the game calculate it.

I'm aware of those crazy scores after finishing the game in 1 week, but I would be rather more interested in more 'mundane' plays.

Score is based partly on how much in-game time you use and partly how many quests you complete. Since a week goes by every time you train up a level, it's better to win with lower level characters if you want a good score.

I always try to win in as little in-game time as possible, but not training gets too meta, so by playing normally I got this score:

And did you do all quests? It must be quite challenging to finish so early with characters close to level 100.

Just finding Nicolai in the circus made me to waste several months of the first year doing irrelevant tasks rather than focussing on the Council ones.

There is a quick way to get the runaway back home, if you want it. It uses gate masters in April (f you don't have Town Portal yet).

I never do the Find Nicolai quest. It's too annoying and has no real benefit, IMO.

As to score, probably my lowest was when I played four Knights. It took me the longest in-game time, by far. But it was also a satisfying game - especially as I leveled up, I just sliced into everything with too much ease.

Don't remember if I did all the quests.

The key to cutting down on time is to get Town Gate and Lloyd's Beacon as soon as possible, to cut down on travel time.

Isn't that what happens in MM7 and MM8? In MM6, a week goes by every time we train up, but we can do lots of levels in one go during that week.

Yep. In VII, you have to be careful on training time if you want to do some of the early quests that have a time limit or if you want skill points from the lamps.

Yes, now that you mention it, that sounds right. I was kind of wondering how a got lvl 98 characters in less than a year...

Incidentally in some of the earlier M&M's a day went by every time you visited a shop or temple.