Science--Why is it so crucial in Civ 5?

joncnunn said:

The Visitor Center will provide more tourism if your capital has an airport than if it doesn't. (Similarly internet will provide more tourism if all your cities have airports than if they don't)

Hotels & Airports each increase local great works tourism by 1 each. (On top of giving tourism bonuses to any cultural tile you may have)

It also seems that from Radio that The Internet is much further away than Radar is.
(Radio mentioned because it's always my first Modern era tech [Oxford])

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valid points but they don't change my mind. I've played a lot of games both ways, and internet before radar just seems faster for me. The boosts from visitor center and internet just dwarf what you get from the airport. Plus sometimes you don't need the airport to win, but you do always need visitor center/internet.

chazzycat said:

valid points but they don't change my mind. I've played a lot of games both ways, and internet before radar just seems faster for me. The boosts from visitor center and internet just dwarf what you get from the airport. Plus sometimes you don't need the airport to win, but you do always need visitor center/internet.

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I've actually won two cultural games before reaching tech for Internet. Once as Brazil, and the other as France. In fact one of those times, the National Visitor Center was still under construction.
In both cases I had Hotels & Airports everywhere.
In a third case, (Sacred Sites) : I won a cultural victory then than 5 turns after reaching the Internet.

Yeah, I have done it a couple times too, but those are usually special circumstances like sacred sites, a super-powered start, or a low difficulty level. On immortal it's generally a necessity, unless you get lucky with the culture leader dying in a war or something.

chazzycat said:

Yeah, I have done it a couple times too, but those are usually special circumstances like sacred sites, a super-powered start, or a low difficulty level. On immortal it's generally a necessity, unless you get lucky with the culture leader dying in a war or something.

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Getting rid of the culture leader (or just slowing them down) is always an option. Shaka, Alexander and Atilla are always happy to lend a hand for a few dollars. You kind of have to anyway, because the culture leader will charge you an arm and a leg for Open Borders.

sure, but bribing an AI to attack someone is by no means a guarantee. Relying on that too heavily is risky.

chazzycat said:

sure, but bribing an AI to attack someone is by no means a guarantee. Relying on that too heavily is risky.

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Sure, but if you get the attacks started early enough (Renaissance/Industrial) just the harassment factor can slow them down enough. It all depends on who is located where relative to each other.

that's true, if the price is right I will keep them attacking each other all game. It can help for sure. But to me "I can just keep bribing them, I won't need internet/visitor center" is a very dangerous line of thinking. That was the original context of the question - whether internet/visitor center is necessary. At the time you are planning this out, you generally won't know how effective your bribing attempts will be. Because of this uncertainty, it's best to plan conservatively in case things don't work out as planned. If your bribes ARE successful then it's a nice bonus, and you just win faster. To me that is a sounder overall strategy. But maybe I just have a more conservative style.

chazzycat said:

that's true, if the price is right I will keep them attacking each other all game. It can help for sure. But to me "I can just keep bribing them, I won't need internet/visitor center" is a very dangerous line of thinking. That was the original context of the question - whether internet/visitor center is necessary. At the time you are planning this out, you generally won't know how effective your bribing attempts will be. Because of this uncertainty, it's best to plan conservatively in case things don't work out as planned. If your bribes ARE successful then it's a nice bonus, and you just win faster. To me that is a sounder overall strategy. But maybe I just have a more conservative style.

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Depends which level you're at. I don't think I have ever needed the Internet on Emperor if I was targeting a CV.

good point. I play mostly on immortal

joncnunn said:

Personaly, I think it's mostly one unit per tile.
Under stack of doom, you could have a stack 30+ very ancient units overrun a city defended by 2-3 modern units.

But a second cause is ease of gold rushing in Civ V. In Civ IV, a high science / high gold / low prod empire had a much harder time constructing units. In Civ V, just buy it. (In fact because cash rushing wasn't allowed at all until a fairly late game civ in Civ IV, a hammer poor empire would have a hard time staying good at science when it took a very long time to construct Universities)

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Isn't this a poor argument? Gold is still finite. If you're spending it to make up for your shortcomings, you're not spending it to get ahead... You're throwing "just buy things instead" out there as though the money was just burning a hole in your pocket. That is very short sighted, or simplified.

You could be using that money to be getting culture/food/piety boosts throughout your empire, which are generally better than any one building or a couple units will get you. Hammers are just way more efficient for putting things on the map. You can supplement this with gold when needed, but unless you have big ben and mercantilism you probably shouldn't make a habit out of it; you're sacrificing much in doing so.

Science is essential to win the game, of course. Science should be an advantage, it's to be expected.

The thing about science in Civ5 is that you get it off high food high growth strategies. And such a strategy is going to give you a ton of population anyway, and high population tends to give you tons of everything (like gold, or production).

Compared with Civ4, where you had to make big trade off on whether a city can make alot of science, versus production.