[raynor]

Your score is calculated based on a number of factors but the tonnage of your ships is weighted more than all of the others. In particular, the game uses your ships that are active. So, if you wanted to, you could either scrap or *mothball* half your fleet, and your score would go down considerably.

Similarly, I would guess that you could use mothballing to keep your empire from ever becoming Evil Empire.

This is an old, old issue. But the score is sorta unrealistic because folks discovered they could build tons and tons of empty bases to over-inflate their score. Since a comparison of your score to that of the AI's plays a big part in surrender...

Recall the tournament to see who could get the highest score in 150 turns. They figured out that you could get all the AI opponents on the map to surrender to you in about 20 turns using the cascade surrender. It was a combination of building empty bases to inflate the score while simultaneously blockading the AI planets.

Another interesting point is that the game doesn't seem to figure units into the score calculation. But they can be just as effective at defending your empire as ships as well as almost effective offensively. By focusing more on units, you can avoid MEE altogether until you are so powerful that it doesn't matter if they all band against you.