Science victory impossible?

[master_dave]

No matter what I do. I build tons of campuses all upgraded to Research Labs, have tons of science, tons of Great Scientist points, there is ALWAYS an AI on another continent ahead in science without fail.

It just makes the game seem like a waste of time. No matter what you some AI is ahead in tech. Again, tons of campuses all upgraded to research labs, tons of cities but some AI on the other continent has already launched the Explonet thing. WTF. Seems like a waste of time. No matter what you do there is an AI ahead.

[SLG]

It depends on who play as and who the AI players are. Each civ has unique abilities, buildings, improvements, etc.

[Mennan]

Use your spies, sabotage their space center production. Claim research bonus city states.
Take out their major cities. I don't know how you've built your empire but usually fewer larger populated cities outperform many low pop cities.
Ai also receives their standard difficulty bonus modifiers and usually isn't that bad at city planning to get the district boosts.

There may be many victory types but a little war makes all of them easier.

[The14th]

What civ were you playing as and at what difficulty?

[Heau]

It's winnable, even on Deity. It's the default victory condition.

On difficulties above prince it's normal to be behind AIs for some time(lengthier on higher diffs) since they have starting bonuses but you eventually catch up and pass them with an adequate setup for scaling.

If you are stuck in an early war with a neighbor, and you are playing at a difficulty challenging to you, it's typically difficult to recover the "simming" without earning enemy cities through warmongering. But in a peaceful game or one with an easily defendable choke vs dumb AI, it can be done as pure sim.

Odds are you are trying to rush your yields too early and don't snowball your production enough. It's more important to get your cities up and going (i.e. builds settlers and workers to improve their tiles, possibly commercials/harbors first for internal trade routes for growth), than to get your campuses up early.

As with everything else in civ, everything is situational. But for SV, on online speed + deity, my benchmarks are

10-13 cities, hopefully 10 settled before T60
Full on empire development until T60-T70 depending on #cities and whatnot.
aim for ~300 science T80 spiking hard between t60-80
aim for ~1000 science t100 (rlabs, double gov cards, amenity efforts, work science specialists in tall cities)
aim for SV t125-135

the number of cities I stop at depends on civ, land, and the availibility of blue CS. If there is limited sources of science through those, I tend to aim more towards 13 cities. If I see early blue CS or have a civ that's conducive to very tall cities, or that has big science bonuses (e.g. reserve pedro, generic korea/arabia, good mountain or geothermal spawn) then I might stop on 10-11 cities.

[ChrizzyP]

hi, i only picked up the game 10 days ago,

i just finished a run on the king difficulty and won a science victory. (20 minutes before posting this)

i only had 6 cities and had an output of 480 science by the end of the game. no idea if that's good or bad.

however, i got lucky on a map with mountains that had two rivers (hills = mines, river/mountain = aqueduct. aqueduct + industry district = crazy bonus) along with the great barrier reef with two normal reefs next to it.

(make sure your civs are set to work in your campus, they auto fill into food or product first)

i only had 4 campus that were maxed. i think one was giving me around 32 science or something crazy.

i also go lucky that i was the only civ that had access to aluminium (the others had aluminium outside their borders) and i made sure the city states that also had it were giving it to me instead of the AI.
The other civ that was going science was always 20-30 science behind me per turn too.
( i had 150 stockpiled before i needed it too)

the biggest advantage i found was in the government district, i built the Tier 3 "royal society" building which allowed the builder unit to provide bonus production to a district project, once per city, per turn.

which meant i had 4 of my cities pumping out builders, moving to the two with space ports (each city had over 100 production each) via roads that had been pre-laid with traders in the early game.

I also had the policy card that gave +2 charges to a builder giving them +5 charges. Each charge gives 2% production = 10% production off the build time.
(each builder gets consumed using all of the charges, but this was reducing the build time by 2-4 turns per spaceport project)

I also had a 250 gold per turn income so i was buying builders at 1.8k at the start until they went up to 4k each! in the cities with the space ports to fill in the gaps.

but i made sure i had a bank of 15k gold an built big ben which gave me an extra 50% gold or something silly. so by the time i was buying builders i was at 33k gold.

(i also built the occasional builder throughout the game whenever i had a spare moment but left them at "1 turn til done" in each city then paid the gold price for a policy change halfway through the game to Create 6 builders in one turn (in each city) that all had +5 charges.... just before i unlocked a new government and got a free card change!)

any extra amenities i had i was selling in stacks of two to the AI for 8-10g per turn (throughout the game). as your civ can only use 1 copy of each.


(i know a fair amount due to watching a couple of "youtube plays" before picking up the game, which definitely helped my game for sure)

hope these small things help you with your next attempt

[🅺🅴🆁🅸🆅🅴🅽]

Originally posted by master_dave:

No matter what I do. I build tons of campuses all upgraded to Research Labs, have tons of science, tons of Great Scientist points, there is ALWAYS an AI on another continent ahead in science without fail.

It just makes the game seem like a waste of time. No matter what you some AI is ahead in tech. Again, tons of campuses all upgraded to research labs, tons of cities but some AI on the other continent has already launched the Explonet thing. WTF. Seems like a waste of time. No matter what you do there is an AI ahead.

Thats because you gave up too early due the AI's lead without thinking how to win. I'm playing on Deity only at this point and science victory is my fav, and I can tell you from personal exp that you can beat it even if its 3 eras/science projects ahead of you. Btw, what you mean by "tons of cities"? How many? You should aim for at least 10.

Try to be the suzerain of most of the science city-states (you can get from them up to 15%/5% science boosts). Use war/pillaging to catch up. If you are playing with Heroes & Legends use Anansi if you get it early on to boost your start ahead of everyone else. If you need to catch up at some point and you got Sun Wukong just start a war with some civ and pillage its districts/tiles with Sun+Raid/Sack/Total War policy cards for science boost. Use spy to sabotage their Spaceport. Boost your science/space projects with GP.

If you play on difficulty lower than emperor you should be able to beat the game without any problems, make better research and do not give up early on due the AI's insane lead.

[amunisi]

Just pillage their university or sabotage their project!

[grognardgary]

When I won with trajan I think I had like fifteen cities 1 of which was the original capital of Summeria 4 or five of which used to be British including their capital.

[Broken War Horse]

If the AI is winning attack. In my current game I am behind Scotland and I wiped them out, with two cities left for Scotland, and got a good space port and faster launch time for the first space mission. And now to see if I can pull off the win. :)

[Heau]

Originally posted by ChrizzyP:

i only had 6 cities and had an output of 480 science by the end of the game. no idea if that's good or bad.

That's probably enough top end scaling for emperor, even possibly to scrape by immortal give or take how early you hit your ceiling.

[grognardgary]

Originally posted by Heau:

Originally posted by ChrizzyP:

i only had 6 cities and had an output of 480 science by the end of the game. no idea if that's good or bad.

That's probably enough top end scaling for emperor, even possibly to scrape by immortal give or take how early you hit your ceiling.

Must be some really good adjacency bonuses in there.

[ChrizzyP]

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Originally posted by Heau:

That's probably enough top end scaling for emperor, even possibly to scrape by immortal give or take how early you hit your ceiling.

Must be some really good adjacency bonuses in there.

just reloaded the save from two turns before i triggered the victory.
also had the +100% campus policy card active.
along with 20-25 pop in each city

capital: 10+campus, 6 lib, 12 uni, 30 research lab. (space port) (113 p/t)
2nd city: 8+ campus, 6 + 12 + 30 (respectively) (great barrier reef + pingala + mausoleum at halicarnassus + oxford university) (188 p/t)
3rd city: 4+ campus, 5 lib, 10 uni. +24 research lab (space port) (92 p/t)
4th city: 8+ campus: +6 lib, +12 uni, +30 research lab. (95 p/t)
5th city 0 campus, +5 lib, +10 uni. (32 p/t)
6th city: no campus. (16 p/t)

overall science per turn +553.3

[grognardgary]

Cool I do need to pay more attention to policy cards

[🅺🅴🆁🅸🆅🅴🅽]

Originally posted by ChrizzyP:

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Must be some really good adjacency bonuses in there.

just reloaded the save from two turns before i triggered the victory.
also had the +100% campus policy card active.
along with 20-25 pop in each city

capital: 10+campus, 6 lib, 12 uni, 30 research lab. (space port) (113 p/t)
2nd city: 8+ campus, 6 + 12 + 30 (respectively) (great barrier reef + pingala + mausoleum at halicarnassus + oxford university) (188 p/t)
3rd city: 4+ campus, 5 lib, 10 uni. +24 research lab (space port) (92 p/t)
4th city: 8+ campus: +6 lib, +12 uni, +30 research lab. (95 p/t)
5th city 0 campus, +5 lib, +10 uni. (32 p/t)
6th city: no campus. (16 p/t)

overall science per turn +553.3

Very nice! If you want you can go check in my screenshots how a quick conquest (before and after emergency screens)+couple culture/science policy cards can boost both of them almost 3 times in no time. More towns is always better.