Explanation of the tie-breaker formula

[Pistol Star]

I know that in case of a tie in points the player who has the most open spaces on their estate at game end should be declared the winner.
In case of a tie on most empty spaces the tied player who was the last player in turn order at game end is declared the winner IIRC.
I don't think there are any more criteria to determine the winner but the formula uses even more criteria!?
I don't fully understand what other criteria is being used to determine the winner.

So why this formula at game end in case of a tie in points?

Are these ties being used in order or is the score of the formula determining the winner? I strongly guess the latter is true.

I guess in the end the formula score will be impossible to depict the wrong winner but I would be very interested in understanding how it works.

[Silene]

apparently the game developer considers being able to score the same amount of points with fewer tiles as more skillful. maybe the idea is they used their tiles more efficiently

[Pistol Star]

apparently the game developer considers being able to score the same amount of points with fewer tiles as more skillful. maybe the idea is they used their tiles more efficiently

I think a fair tie-breaker would be the opposite because I strongly consider less placed tiles to be on average the far stronger approach to the game. This is in my opinion especially true in the 2 player count but also true in higher player counts just to a lesser degree.

I consider buildings to be the by far worst of the 6 types of tiles especially when it comes to completing the whole colour and this makes sense because buildings are available in abundance. For that reason they should be on average the weakest of all types of tiles.

Pretty much every game the player who placed more buildings will end up with most placed tiles meaning that this player effectively started the game with negative 1 point because that player loses a game which is tied in points. I don't think this is fair when a player is forced by the other player to use a weaker strategy and still manages to finish the game with an equal amount of points to a superior approach and then loses. It should be the opposite.

The reason why I am so sure that buildings are on average so weak is that they need knowledge tiles (yellow tiles) to help them score at least alright or in a pretty rare best case scenario very, very well. Any other colour type doesn't usually need any additional help to score strongly. We also all know about the restrictions when it comes to building cities. No duplicate buildings are allowed which means we often need to take very weak buildings to finish our bigger cities. Surely there is tile 1 out there which let's us ignore that rule but it still costs us a lot of tempo (at least 2 actions; more with workers use) to get that non scoring tile into play and it might not even come up in a game or too late.

Some buildings are quite good like the Residential Building and the City Hall. All others are only situationally good/strong or very weak compared to most other tiles.