Different formulas for defense team score and everywhere else. Defense considers guild completed task skill bonuses, everywhere else doesn’t. Before, defense considered guild skill bonuses, but not five star kingdoms, and everywhere else considered five star, but not guild bonuses.
As for the “why did they do it like this?”, I’m not really sure, but its probably a mistake. The score calcs used on defense now are the “correct” formula that have been “incorrect” for years, and the one on invade is still “incorrect”. But the end result is better gold spreads and less instances of matchmaking versus completely trivial teams (which some might see as bad, but IMO is a better long-term experience). If they “fix” our invade team scores to be correct like they did defense, we will likely go back to a state where we have semi-broken gold calcs and matchmaking at endgame, so I’m not exactly clamoring for this to be “fixed”.
It is a common misconception that stats affect kingdom power. Some things that add stats also happen to add kingdom power - and thats it. Pet bonuses, team bonuses in general, and weekly event bonuses affect stats but not team power. Leveling kingdoms to 10 affect score, five star kingdoms do (now) and completed guild tasks do (now). One instance I personally tested when I was parsing out how scores work post Unity was having a five star kingdom at not level 10. This five star kingdom would add 40 points to your team scores, but not raise your skill bonus at all.
Another common misconception is that masteries contribute - they don’t. Hero level does, and guild statues do (up to exactly 500 points total) but any other mastery source does not.
I did a bigger post on this somewhere, but basically every single point for a team’s score can be accounted for. It is more difficult when looking an enemy team, since you have to extrapolate for missing variables, but it still usually can be done. Hero level is the only score modifier that isn’t completely linear, you get less points per level as you have more levels, but that also means that post-1000, the score differences from hero level are relatively minor. Because only a few things actually affect the scores, when defense and invade teams use the same formula, most endgame players are going to very similar scores with only a few point divergences. It just hasn’t been this way for a while because its been broken for a long, long time.
Mine was, heres the whole thing to make it clearer:
The exactly 980 point divergence is explained by the invade team not getting credit for Guild Task completion (and they havent since we’ve been playing on Unity) while the defense team does (prior to this patch they did get the guild task bonuses didn’t consider five star kingdoms for score calc, which is 1320 points at endgame, which is why the huge sudden jump in what we are used to).