AI is winning scientific victory - advice?

[Ogaw]

I am playing a game now on a tiny map.

Me (Rome), France and Brazil are all on one continent. Russia got their own continent.

Now the situation is that Russia is progressing extremely fast with Science (far ahead of all other 3). With my Spy I can see that Russia has space project sites built already.

Is my only option at this point to try to invade Russia? See attached screenshot.

 

[Frank327]

Probably yes, unless you're getting close to cultural/religious victory. Also use spies for sabotage.

 

[fickle]

I wouldn't risk it(and it may depend on your difficulty level), but in the AI battle royal... several AI had all the tech they needed and still didn't try to finish the science victory for about another 100 turns, they got halfway through and stopped to work (defend?) on religion and culture.

 

[Acken]

Ive once been 30turns behind an ai that already did the moon landing. Then it never went further.

 

[discord_ian]

See if you can buy/surge the great leader points and get the great people by building campus/industrial projects.

Or you can always nuke their space districts.

 

[CultureManiac]

If you declare war, you don't need to capture any cities, just pillage their spaceports. If you descend on one city with, say, 15 units, you overwhelm the defences. Pillage as much as you can, move on to the next city. Destroy their spaceports, industries, science centers, food. They don't recover.

 

[HoboCop]

I've been using spies to disable the other civs spaceports.. they don't seem to ever rebuild them. I've also never seen them be very aggressive about finishing the mars pieces, I've been way behind on science and come back to win. I've not done it on deity, but that seems to be true up through immortal.

 

[GreatDantone]

I had the same thing happen on immortal where the AI would not rebuild it's sabotaged spaceport. Which is sad

 

[Deaga]

Sabotage the spaceports with Spies, as others have already suggested.
They're also not THAT close to winning yet, so don't get desperate. In my experiences, due to the insane beelines the AI does, they can do the moonlanding before having any of the techs required for the Mars projects. Which means they still have to research those AND invest a ton of production into the projects. So you still have quite a few turns left to win before them... Or to murder them, if that'sp preferable.

 

[GreatDantone]

There's always the nuclear option

 

[johnny_rico]

There's always the nuclear option

I can't wait to get the launch codes! haven't had a lot of time to play so I'm still on my first game which has been a cake walk on King. but it's allowed me to experiment with a lot of the new mechanics in the game without being bothered.

That's pretty the sad the AI gets amnesia on its path to victory and stops trying. Reminds me a lot of the ciV release; the AI was abominable then also. almost as if the devs don't know what direction to go in until they get a bigger data set (i.e. us - the players) steamrolling game after game and lauding our ability to decimate the AI on forums. So keep the meta coming and in turn we should be rewarded with a stronger AI in time.

 

[CyrgonXYZ]

I had Rome and Russia get moon landing very early (Emperor difficulty). But then they stopped progressing. Rome hadn't researched Archery yet, so it went back to get tech it hadn't researched yet...

To be safe I just nuked both of them, and then also nuked England and Scythia for fun. My warmonger stats were quite negative after that, and about 1/3 of the map was contaminated.

Keep in mind that after moon landing you need 2,500 + 3,000 + 3,000 production/hammers to finish the Mars project. That's a LOT of hammers to produce.