I will, by building a spaceship before getting "all the technologies except Nuclear Fusion".
I didn't ask about Spaceship victories. I'm asking if you are going to be able to fend off an enemy who has GDRs while you only have Modern Armor units.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I've always enjoyed playing peaceful games. About half of the focus should be put on military development, tactics, and strategy; war has had a significant impact on quite a few civs in real life.
If you find yourself in constant war, then yes. A lot of your focus should be on building enough military units to fend off enemy units. If you are able to make peace with 'said' neighbor, then you should do so as soon as you are able to.
I'm not talking about real life here. I'm talking about Civilization V, and how it presents a huge imbalance in favor of war over empire building, which was essentially the best aspect of the Civilization series.
The GDR requires Nuclear Fusion, a very late tech. A technology victory is supposed to symbolize dominance in the tech race. The rocket should be ready by the time other civs are advanced enough to build GDRs, even if they beelined Nuclear Fusion. If not, your empire should be very close to getting the rocket and have the military might (and wile) to hold off the GDRs until it's done (note: GDRs can't defend and have a penalty against cities, and 5 archers with logistics can kill one in one turn until G+K comes out. Come to think of it, I think those stealth bombers you were talking about can do the same).
Point taken.
Yet for all it's glory, the Modern era still feels unfinished. Basically it's comprised of gaining new military units, rather than spreading Corporations or building up Culture like it was in the previous iteration.
If anyone has a real reason why Firaxis proposed putting in the GDR, I'll be delighted to hear it.
A civ that isn't that far ahead should consider going for a cultural or financial (UN) victory, or, heaven forbid, learn Nuclear Fusion, then finish the spaceship tech line while building GDRs. I wouldn't know about any of that because the only time I had military trouble in a science victory, it was from Gandhi eradicating my entire militarily-lightweight civilization in the span of 4 turns with nukes, sans my capital, which built the last part just before falling.
Unless I was at war I saw no reason to be building late-game military units or Nukes while building spaceship components at the same time. Then again, your opponent might have a dozen Nukes that could easily destroy most of your infrastructure and city population.
Trying to do both is just asinine. If you want Conquest, then build Nukes, if you want to be ahead in the technology race, then build up your science output.
For the record, Gandhi shouldn't even be considered being a war-monger. I strongly considered him to be a powerful ally and a leader whose main focus was to build infrastructure and stay on top of the technology race. The diplomacy AI is just terrible in Civilization V. Too many people have already explained why it's bad, so I'll stop here.
It just so happens that Civ 5 does have somewhat of an imbalance, but to me it has nothing to do with the GDR. It's imbalanced because the AI isn't very good in combat (though with the patches and NiGHTS or VEM it's a lot better than it used to be in some ways). Therefore, if you find yourself scoring low, no problem, declare war, take a city. I prefer to lay back on Prince and not start (first) wars, but a good warmonger game on a higher difficulty is fun once in a while. But anyway my point is that GDRs are fine.
It's not somewhat of an imbalance. It's a huge imbalance.
This is the first Civilization I've played where improvements and infrastructure don't seem to matter much. It tries to be slick in introducing a form of combat previously not seen in other iterations. Yet like you said, the combat AI is ridiculously stupid.
The only way I can have even a little bit of fun is if I decided to conquer every other civilization in the hopes that I gain a Conquest victory. I think it says a lot when people claim that 'Emperor' difficulty is about as easy as 'Settler-Chieftain' was on Civilization IV. I don't want a game that is a breeze to go through, I want a challenge that is fulfilling in more than one aspect of game play.
There are no slider bars, no graphs showing your line of progress. The victory screen is downright awful. Furthermore, Civilization V just feels unfinished.
...and if I want to add more content to the game right now, I'm forced to pay money for DLC that isn't available for all players. That stuff really adds up, and should I ever hope to gain all DLC content, I would of spent more money on that alone than I did for the initial release of Civilization IV and it's two expansions.
I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree. GDRs are only there because in my opinion, Firaxis couldn't come up with a better option for the late game.