Science victory, when to start bulbing

My rule of thumb is to look at how many beakers I'd get from bulbing.
-If it's less than 6K, there's enough game left to be played that academies are still a good choice.
-If it's between 6K-10K, turn click GS's until they reach 10K
-10K or more, bulb away.(Which coincidentally is usually about 8-12 turns after all cities have labs.

2 other considerations are:

1.) How the game is progressing. If things are rough and particularly if I'm being DoWed upon when trying to turtle, I may bulb earlier to get Infantry earlier - makes em' behave better. If it's smooth sailing and economy is good, I may start saving earlier.
2.) How many cities I have. The above formula is for 3-4 city tradition, technically add 5% to all values per city over 4.

generaly u wan't to wait til 8 tuns ather labs but normaly u get forced to bulbe them in the turn the first player finishes manhattan project since he can settle a city near u and nuke your GP and then your so far behinde so u need to use them in the turn u se the first player finishing it expet if u got so good mapcountrol that u can provent a city going down and buying nukes

ShakaKhan said:

My rule of thumb is to look at how many beakers I'd get from bulbing.
-If it's less than 6K, there's enough game left to be played that academies are still a good choice.

Click to expand...

I disagree with this because the absolute number of beakers is less important than the number of beakers relative to tech costs.

Likewise, planting or not is really a function of how many turns left to play, not how many beakers.

Eight turns after Public Schools is good. Too much latter than though, then you might want to wait on Labs. No compelling reason to look at beaker output.

Eight turns after Labs, so long as you have been running science specialist and are not worried about loss to overflow, anytime is very good, and arguments can be made that sooner is better than later. Again, no compelling reason to look at beaker output.

Well, I played TSG122 and once again I left a lot of GS's on table -- in the form of faith this time instead of actual GS's. I totally stomped the AI's in science and faith and military and to a lessor extent culture, but I wasn't focused and played way too many turns. (I was ahead in diplomacy too, but Alex was keeping up)

I think I put too many policies in Commerce, trying to time the Rationalism finisher, then that put me late getting to Space Procurements. (then I had to wait for the first two parts to finish building after I'd bought all the rest)

@zxcvbob, part of your dilemma is that the GotM is at Prince. Your are bound to overshoot.

I am not the best players, so for SV, I like to beeline Rocketry after Plastics, pick up a few relatively low-beaker techs (that GS would be overkill on ), then Robotics (for the SS factories), then Ballistics (for SS Boosters, since there are three of them), then the two other SS techs.

This gives me pretty wide window to use Rationalism finisher for Satellites and I will have a GE for Hubble. I also try and sit on a Great Writer (or maybe two) so as to time the Rationalism finisher with closing out the research on Rocketry. I don’t pay close enough attention, so my usual problem is finishing Rocketry with two policies left in Rationalism. The pocket GW helps with that!

Finishing Rationalism relatively early means plenty of opportunity to faith-purchase and use GS. Working towards Robotics before Ballistics et al. means that that there is still a lot of the tech three to get through.

Pacing is such that I hard build four parts and only rush the last two.

Some games, the bulbing goes so fast that the bottleneck is building Apollo. But I guess that is a good problem to have?

I should have finished Rationalism quicker so I could start buying GS's sooner; it didn't matter what free tech I took. The Commerce finisher (the last policy I took) was nice but I didn't need it -- therefore I didn't need any of the left side of Commerce.

I don't entirely remember the details, but I was building Hubble in Memphis and Apollo in Thebes at the same time, then bought a spaceship factory in Thebes and started building 2 parts. I couldn't buy parts yet because I didn't have Space P (but I almost had it.) In just a couple of turns I had researched everything except Globalization, Internet, Stealth, and Fusion. Bought a bunch of parts with gold (Big Ben and Mercantilism really help with this)

But the most ridiculous part of this game was religion. The only religious wonders I built were Stonehenge and Notre Dame; I let the AI's have the rest. I didn't open Piety, and I only used 1 missionary and maybe 2 prophets. At the end I think I had 38 cities following Buddhism, and was getting about 100 GPT.