Civilization – How is the “Soldiers” demographic in Civ 5 calculated

The patch released on 15 December 2010 change some values, the values for non-standard map sizes are not updated

The mouseover for your own score helpfully shows from which categories how much of your score originates.

I've experimented a bit and my preliminary composition of the score is the following:

             Score
             Duel    Tiny    Small    Standard  Large
City         21      13      11       10        6
Population   6       4       3.5      4         ~1.5
Land         2.11    1.35    1.15     1               (water tiles don't count, the city hex does)
Technology   4       4       4        4         4
Wonder       40      40      40       25        40
Future Tech  ?       ?       ?        ?         ?

These results are from the start of a game, I assume they don't change but I can't be sure yet. It seems some things count for fractions of a point, so the numbers here may be rounded. The numbers also seem to be always rounded down, not to the nearest number.

Units and Gold do not seem to have any effect on the score.

Wonders count for a lot at 40 point per wonder. But also new cities (at standard map size) result in 19 points (10 for the city, 3 for 1 population and 6 for the land). Technology seems to be rated pretty low at 4 points, you have to research 5 technologies to get more points than one new city.

Start with a bigger world? If all you want is room to spread out. In Civ 5 there are actually reasons not to want to spread out so much, if you want to go for culture instead. 4 cities with decent resources is plenty to get you to the modern age, with the added advantage that you'll have 4-5 more social advancements than your rivals. Just don't alienate everyone, so that you're able to trade for aluminum and uranium.

Remember that on difficulty higher than 4, the AIs cheat. They will have more settlers, workers, and military much faster than you do. You can't beat them in the early game just by outbuilding them, you need to out-think them as well. This is where diplomacy can come into play; if you can trick the AIs into starting a war with one another, it does hurt their economy (not as much as it would hurt yours, but a little).