How's the best way to use Babylon to close out the game.

[Shikabane屍]

I've been testing out civs and I tried to use Babylon. I've been hesitant to use him since the 50% science debuff seemed extreme but i felt i knew the tech tree well enough to give it a go. Immortal Difficulty, Continents, no game modes.

It started off rather phenominal. Using his free building i went immediately for a holy site, spawned near chocolate hills so thats a great holy site. managed to get a monumentality golden age and by the time i was at 5 cities Julius declared a surprise war, but i had speedran my way through the early tech tree and easily routed him with crossbowmen vs his archers, horsemen and warriors.

His early game it was incredible i unlocked mars colony by turn 190 but... i hit a snag, when i went into the game i thought the gimmick of babylon was to skip techs and jump ahead in the tree, but once i realized to unlock spaceport i didnt JUST need sanitation but also the military tactics and Square rigging i skipped cause i was never building a spearmen or musketmen in my game.

My strategy was simply to NEVER research until this point, pooling science to save it for techs that were either too tedious for Eurekas or lategame techs that are only boostable via Spies aka impossible to boost. However at that moment i made the horrible realization of how utterly SLOW this game was going to go from then on...

Combined Arms, Advanced Flight, Advanced Ballistics, Nuclear Fusion Chemistry, Radio, Electricity, Combustion Guidance Systems ALL had to be hard researched...

I did manage to eco my way into 2 drones for lasers and 3 tanks for composites and got super lucky with a great scientist to grant me robotics.

by the time i launched the mars colony on turn 249 it wouldnt be until turn 302 that i actually won the game because i was only generating 450 science per turn. when on any other civ, i would have double that. I feel like there was something i was missing, i had 14 cities, with full decked out campuses all working campus research grants. Sadly i missed out on Hipatia, Isaac Newton AND albert einstein because Korea was in the game and she slurped them all up really early which cost me alot of science.

Overall i dont think i played badly, but i feel im fundamentally missing something when it comes to closing out the science win with Babylon. i cant help but feel he's kinda a bait civ for science and he's better at something like Domination since you can rush really stupid early things like cavalry and bombards and just wreak havoc on the ai. but idk. Any advice on what im doing wrong? how to close out the game? all appreciated.

[Lemurian1972]

The point of Babylon isn't to skip techs, it's to speed up your trip through the early tech tree, while still building a solid Science/Production infrastructure. Maintain tech advantage for attack or defense, but make a decision early about how you're going to handle the Eureka Wall.

Once you reach the point where it requires Spies or Great Scientists to boost, Babylon has to either wait for someone to catch up so they can steal boosts, or have enough infrastructure to keep rolling at decent speed despite the malus. For my money, the second option is the only real one. I take out my scientific competition early so I have their infrastructure and monopolize Scientists.

Just like most civs, the ability is meant to give you time and let you make a decision, not outright win the game for you. Full Domination bores me, but I enjoy targeted takeovers so I do that and pivot to Science to close it out.

[Sstavix]

Yeesh, i have yet to win a science game before turn 400. The fact that you managed to get it with Babylon on turn 302 is pretty impressive, in my opinion.

[plaguepenguin]

It is true that Babylon has the luxury of not needing to build campuses early, because all of the ancient and classical techs have eurekas that aren't too far out of the way, if not things you are going to do anyway. You have so many priorities in the early game that being freed of what is always for every other civ a high priority, campuses, is very helpful.

After those two eras, though, more of the scavenger hunts you have to go on to get eurekas tend to become increasingly more difficult and out of the way. It becomes handy to have research points coming in to get the techs with research that are more trouble than they're worth by getting their eurekas. Then, as you point out, by the late game, there are many techs, ones that you need for a science victory and for the last tier of military units, that have no eurekas at all, and have to be hard-researched, and at that point, you have a 50% penalty in research points to overcome, and these techs have huge price tags in RP.

As a general approach, you have to plan ahead for this late game crunch and start to develop your research point yields even before the current game requires that. While you certainly don't need nearly as many campuses early as any other civ, there is this bottleneck that can develop at getting universities later in the medieval era that makes it attractive to at least consider having a campus as your first district, or at least very early. Education, the tech that unlocks universities, has as its eureka getting a great scientist. Well, by the time you get to Immortal, great scientists get scooped up very early, so your best bet is to get a very early campus (the library's free!) and start piling up the great scientist points. You may still have to do research grants, or spend gold or faith to close the gap and buy a great scientist before the last Classical era one gets scooped up, but there's only four per era, and after the Classical they just cost more and more great person points.

Babylon is a natural at bringing in production to help his science effort. You can think of Babylon's approach to getting techs as offloading what every other civ can only do by building campuses, onto these scavenger hunts. All the hunts require a city to produce something, so as Babylon you're using production points to replace RP. You want high production cities so that you can toss off whatever the scavenger hunt requires with the least disruption of what you want to produce to advance your strategy in other areas. Luckily enough for Babylon getting ahead in production, it can get apprenticeship in the early Ancient era, allowing it to get an instant extra production point on every mine, and to build Industrial Zones in the ancient era. Build 2 IZs, and you've got industrialization which gives another production point on every mine, and lets you build factories. You don't need IZs in every city, because those factories have an area effect, but, the more you have, the more of a monopoly you are gong to have on great engineers, so why not put one in every city? Of course you get the Mausoleum, to give all your great engineers an extra charge.

Once you have a production advantage, you can use it to spam campuses. The RP are nice right away to fill in those techs that don't have convenient eurekas, but the great scientist points are the real kicker. Several of those great engineers that you're going to monopolize are wonder builders, and you can use them to build science wonders, and to build Kilwa, if you have any scientific city-states you can suzerain.

The increased production from all those IZs, plus the wonder builder great engineers, can help with any victory type at this point, by allowing you to get the appropriate districts and wonders more easily.

If it's a science or domination victory you're after, though, on higher difficulty it is still going to be difficult to match those boosted AI yields in the later eras, what with your RP handicap. Optimization within an empire no bigger than all the AI empires is probably not going to cut it. What you need to make your path to science or domination victories smooth is early conquest, so that you can get 2-3 times the land you are entitled to early enough to optimize it.

Luckily enough, apprenticeship, beside unlocking extra production for mines and IZs, also unlocks the man-at-arms. They're expensive to produce or upgrade with an ancient era economy, but you only need two of them to conquer your first victim, at least if you can get started on your career of conquest in the ancient era. More of them, plus crossbowmen, may be needed later on, but Babylon can usually manage to take down a neighbor or two or three before the end of the Medieval era. At that point you can choose between continuing your conquest until the last AI is gone, or optimizing your conquered land for any other victory type.