Overview[]
At the end of each game — when the PC dies or otherwise leaves the game — that character will receive a certain score. Main contributors seem to be number of game turns spent, and the amount of piety, experience points and corruptions accumulated by the character. The score is further modified by the type of ending/win condition; Ultimate Chaos Gods seem to get the best score at the moment.
What is believed to be the exact formula can be found in the guidebook. It was somewhat modified in 1.2.0.
Details[]
Score is not influenced by equipment, accumulated stat increases, or the number of times game was saved. Spell knowledge and the number of items identified throughout the game seem to have a small effect. Certain quests and achievements — e.g. becoming head of thieves' guild, the dwarven quests — give a fixed amount of points. Visiting places and having intrinsics seems to add to final score.
Experience is added to the score at an approximate ratio of 1 score point for each 3.5 points of experience. If the character's final turn count is below 80000, 1000 points will be added for each turn below 80000 (which can make doing things like optional quests counterproductive when trying to maximise score). Each corruption that is present at the end subtracts 20000 points from the score. When increasing piety, sacrificing gold is effective at more than 1 point for 1 gp rate; there seems to be a hard cap on the amount of piety that can be gained, though, and piety also decays over time. Then, after these are calculated, the final score is modified/multiplied based on the type of ending achieved by the character.
Two main ways to maximize score are possible: either finish game as fast as possible, or ignore turn count and strive for every other point increasing method. In practice, employing the Archmage tactic to grind various point scoring things can (eventually) yield a higher score obtainable by speed runners.
The ADOM Hall of Fame has top scores for every version. However, the top score listed for 1.1.1 was achieved using the turn-reducing bug (as stated by the player); thus, these listings should be viewed with some skepticism.