How do people get sub T300 science victories?

[vadalaz]

You catch up to Deity SV benchmarks by going wide and using Oracle for Secularism on lower difficulties. There's more space to settle and much less competition for CSs, wonders and religion.

 

[garmeth]

I actually do most of that stuff.

I still can't hit the benchmarks people are claiming. T110 Education seems only possible with Babylon.

I rush settlers and get 3 cities, but can't get the national college until around T110.

I'm thinking the whole "settle 3 cities and build the NC" strategy is too slow and doesn't even give you that much science.

I've tried the "settle 3 cities and build NC" strategy and I have never gotten Education around T110.

It may just be faster to build the NC and then settle later.

I think we can fix your problems pretty easily if you cant get NC until 110. What is the bottleneck? When are you finishing your last library? Perhaps you should play a 3 city opener and try to get your NC up at around turn 70-80 as it is much easier to manage than a 4 city opener.

With a 4 city opener you absolutely need to rush buy your last library unless all of your city locations are amazing.

 

[danaphanous]

...
I still can't hit the benchmarks people are claiming. T110 Education seems only possible with Babylon.

I rush settlers and get 3 cities, but can't get the national college until around T110.

I'm thinking the whole "settle 3 cities and build the NC" strategy is too slow and doesn't even give you that much science.

I've tried the "settle 3 cities and build NC" strategy and I have never gotten Education around T110.

Do you build/steal early workers to chop forest to speed out your settlers? Do you save/acquire gold to buy the 3rd settler? Do you chop your forest to speed the libraries and NC along? Do you buy the last library so you can build your NC 20 turns earlier then normal? Do you settle farthest out first and backfill so your last settler has the shortest journey? These are all standard practice for early NC.

Anyway, if you can't ever get education by T110 then something is wrong. The 3-city NC rush is the fastest way to get to education. It's been a while since I played that way as it's a bit boring to me these days, but I can get to education using liberty and making 7 cities on standard by T115, even though that is clearly suboptimal to fast tradition times and I don't play optimally. So I suspect there is still some early things you aren't applying. The best tradition players will actually have education by turn 100 and have all universities built in 4 cities by Turn 110 if they play someone like Babylon.

 

[poxpower]

Yeah I tried on emperor, slightly slower worker steals, but you can still get one from an AI and from a city-state before turn 20. It's reasonable.

The reason why a fast worker steal is great ( sometimes on deity you can get a guy before turn 10 lol ) is you get to hook up a luxury which you can then sell for 240 gold in peace deal with the AI. That's what easily allows the purchase of a 3rd settler instead of having to build it, which is really slow with tradition.

 

[MightySpice]

a lot of wishfull thinking in this thread.
the simple fact that your next to a warmongering civ that declares war while you are in the middle of your settler rush is enough to spoil the plans that i read immediately.

i'm testing a few of these suggestions right now. 3 workers within 20 to 40 turns? i met Milan at turn 10 and he didn't have a worker. The next civ i met was at turn 20 . . . . . no worker in sight. Moving on.

 

[Chum]

How do people get sub T300 science victories?

Honestly?

They come to these forums and ask for help and actually engage in conversation with people past a 2-3 post exchange. They post screenshots of their empire or upload saves so that people can tell them what they can improve on. They don't see the game as being something that is impossible or too difficult to master. They have the desire to improve and to conquer the game, instead of just complain about how starting next to the Zulu equals an automatic ragequit. Or how city states are always crowding them. Or how they AI must be programmed to always build wonders the turn before you do. Or how failing an 85% coup must mean the AI is cheating.

FYI, you already asked this question, and you ignored the helpful replies last time.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=545003

At some point, you need to take responsibility for your own play, and if you're just going to ask questions here and drop the mic and walk away until the next thing in the game infuriates you, you're probably going to spend a whole lot of time wondering what you're doing wrong, and we're never going to be able to tell you.

 

[danaphanous]

a lot of wishfull thinking in this thread.
the simple fact that your next to a warmongering civ that declares war while you are in the middle of your settler rush is enough to spoil the plans that i read immediately.

i'm testing a few of these suggestions right now. 3 workers within 20 to 40 turns? i met Milan at turn 10 and he didn't have a worker. The next civ i met was at turn 20 . . . . . no worker in sight. Moving on.

clearly your one experience trumps our successes then? It's not wishful thinking if we've already done it. And plenty of ppl have recorded doing it with helpful commentary. If you'd watched them you'd know stuff like only at high levels does the AI start with workers you can steal immediately and city states don't have workers by turn 10. I forget exact turn but I think it's 25. Deity AI starts with 2 free workers and 2 warriors to protect them. Without luck and waiting your scout can't snipe one without dying to the Warriors but your warrior definitely can. Only a few AI Rush as early as the settler phase and it's over quickly. If you start next to one you connect a lux and give it or some gold to the guy to attack someone else if you notice their early army building. Then you build a few archers or comps and a melee in your expos after library and you're ok. Settling a defensible border city helps too. If you can found a hillside or near a mountain or two or use river boundaries you can defend it against 4x or more your own force because the AI fight badly. Just choose your terrain wisely rather then throwing down cities in rich but easy to attack locations. This strategy becomes more necessary for a wide game but even tall it's good to think about defensibility as you settle.

The AI are NOT black boxes that cheat their way into troops and settlers, they follow the same rules you do but just at reduced costs on higher levels. They won't magically have an army able to take a city by turn 20. Even on Deity the earliest I usually see a city-threatening rush might by turn 40 and that is rare and easy to spot as it takes time for them to build up their military and you notice as you run by with scouts, or if they appear in demographics, and can prepare or bribe. If you are blindsided by an AI rush at all I'd say you weren't paying attention. There's warning signs galore. If you can't handle these rushes then by all means, play the lower levels where they rarely rush before turn 100 and you aren't threatened at all, but if you do, don't complain that you can't steal as many workers because you aren't playing the higher levels where they start with workers to steal. Pick one complaint or the other.

 

[poxpower]

a lot of wishfull thinking in this thread.
the simple fact that your next to a warmongering civ that declares war while you are in the middle of your settler rush is enough to spoil the plans that i read immediately.

i'm testing a few of these suggestions right now. 3 workers within 20 to 40 turns? i met Milan at turn 10 and he didn't have a worker. The next civ i met was at turn 20 . . . . . no worker in sight. Moving on.

So what you can do is reload the map and send your warrior straight to the nearest civ once you know where it is. That makes a huge difference as sometimes you'll just send the warrior off towards the coast and other times you'll get lucky and send them the right way and be able to get a worker turn 10 or sooner as the AI will still be improving tiles.

For city-states, they usually get a worker at turn 20ish, so at that time you want a scout to be back near the nearest city-state to your capital, ready to snatch a worker that will come to improve a luxury. Keep that scout in range of that same tile, but not touching the city-state border, and you will get a fresh worker every 15-20 turns.

Same goes for AIs. Once you steal a worker from a luxury, pillage it ( if you can survive ) and then park your warrior in range of that luxury waiting for more workers. On deity they have 2 workers to start I believe, so you can snatch both, and they pump out replacements like crazy. Sadly the AI often keeps all their warriors near their cities so it can be tricky to steal a worker without your warrior dying.

Once they are ready to peace out, you can even do a double steal sometimes with a warrior and a scout, and then you peace out.

Now the other war to get workers is to cruise around the map clearing barbarian camps. Those are the workers you get around turn 40-50 to round out your worker pool.

Is you can't steal at least one worker by turn 20, you've doing something wrong or are being very unlucky.
Getting two by turn 20 is harder, getting 5-6 by turn 50 is pretty lucky, but easy by turn 80-90.

=======

As for warmongering neighbors, it depends. Very few civs will rush you for no reason. That's mostly Attila, Shaka and Montezuma. Those guys might just attack you out of nowhere on turn 50-60 no matter what, so never forward-settle them unless you can settle a 1-tile choke point. That's the only way you'll defend against 10 battering rams on turn 70, other than bribing them to attack someone else.

If you're not next to those guys, it also depends. Some civs are peaceful, like Morroco and Ethiopia. You can settle in their face and they won't do anything about it. But some are more much likely to hate you A LOT, like Japan, America and England. Don't ever forward-settle them because they'll build an army and send it straight at you and they will be hard to bribe, unlike shaka and attila who will declare war for almost nothing on anyone even if they don't like you.
England would take like 5 times more gold to bribe away from you if you forward-settle them.

But anyway, generally speaking, the AI is far enough that they don't bother you. Once you're done with national college, you can build 4-5 archers in the capital while you research education, that's usually enough to defend yourself and it has the bonus benefit that they can go clear barbarian camps for city-state quests and free captured workers.

 

[poxpower]

Sometimes though you just get flat-out ridiculously unlucky.
I'd reroll a jungle start for instance, there's nothing to do with that. It's just crap. It has 0 production, so you'll make 11-12 turn settlers AND you can only move 1 tile, so they'll take 10 turns to move in place. Not only that but it takes way longer to bring back stolen workers and it takes longer to hook luxuries because you need to research bronze working AND it takes 12 turns instead of 6.

Such total garbage lol, don't expect fast NC with that kind of start.

There's also times, especially on lower difficulties, where barbarians will just destroy you. I noticed that under Deity, every barbarian unit always attacks your units if they can, they'll ever run out of camps to do it for some reason. So that makes it more annoying to go around the map looking for stuff, not to mention that slower AI expansion means more barbarian camps.

And sometimes you just get a bad camp placement that like spawns an archer right next to your warrior who's trying to run away with a worker from an AI.

There's just a lot of those kinds of dumb things that can happen to mess with a fast start, just restart. You can always win a science victory with any map eventually, but if you want to get fast times, expect to restart if you have early problems that are mostly RNG.

 

[Nick31]

a lot of wishfull thinking in this thread.
the simple fact that your next to a warmongering civ that declares war while you are in the middle of your settler rush is enough to spoil the plans that i read immediately

This is good to point out as regards to a "perfect" early start, but doesn't necessarily hold you back from T275 Victory. It is important to remember that 3-city Tall NC opening is safer precisely because of its preparedness of an early rush.

Anyway, for those working on improving their game, it's encouraging to know that it's okay to not have perfect metrics at the beginning. Play a challenging map, play with challenging Mods, play with raging barbs, et al. Make the game fun. You can still go quickly for science if you work on your other components.

 

[garmeth]

a lot of wishfull thinking in this thread.
the simple fact that your next to a warmongering civ that declares war while you are in the middle of your settler rush is enough to spoil the plans that i read immediately.

i'm testing a few of these suggestions right now. 3 workers within 20 to 40 turns? i met Milan at turn 10 and he didn't have a worker. The next civ i met was at turn 20 . . . . . no worker in sight. Moving on.

You can't do it every game. Everything in civ requires luck. There was a post on reddit last week where a guy stole 2 workers from India before turn 4 due to an extremely close spawn and luck.

I've personally stolen 3 workers before turn 25 from a single siv a number of times, but the average is way less.

 

[poxpower]

Having tried a couple times on emperor, it definitely feels harder than deity to get turn <90 college. The AI is just so bad and so slow, they have no gold, no luxuries, no workers to steal and they only have one city so it makes them be quite far from you.
On top of that, they don't clear barbarian camps and leave tons of space so you get constantly harassed by tons of barbarians.

So yeah trying for fast national college is harder on emperor, you can't rely on the AI to boost you at all, they kind of stand in their corner like bags of bricks, waiting for you to inevitably crush them lol

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I don't know if it's faster on deity really.
On one hand you get more loans, faster trades and faster workers, but on the other you get any wonder, any religion and the AI is crippled and can't attack you.
You also get much more land to settle initially because the AIs only have 1 settler to start.

So I dunno, might be a toss-up. On emperor the AI will have enough gold eventually for trades, unlike even lower difficulties where the AI has like... no gold ever. On settler it's not rare that they'll be at -2 gold per turn for the first 100 turns somehow lol.

Deity is definitely much, much faster because not only can you get up to 20gpt with only three lucky strategics, you can also steal Workers and Settlers so much earlier..

Having only two Workers at T50, one you had to build yourself, or having four or five, all of which were stolen makes all the difference for finishing times.

Good Deity players regularily steal from at least 2 AIs and 1 Worker from a CS.

I don't always manage that, but sometimes getting even more is conceivable.

On the Ottomans NQ Map Consentient posted I built zero Workers and ended up with 7: 2 from the same CS, 2 from Greece, 3 from Spain and 2 AI Workers captured by barbs.

In a recent game I managed 1 from CS, 3 from direct neighbour France and 1 each from western and eastern neighbour. It didn't even affect diplo all that much.

Worker steals are easily the biggest exploit in Civ V, even more important than lump sum trades or 1 strategic for 2gpt or cheap bribing..

 

[Acken]

I don't know about "much much" faster. One of my fastest game is on Prince with Spain at T187 or so sub T190. Free ride on wonders, city states, all expansion spot available and 0 AI threat somewhat compensates.

You can still steal workers, I did in that game. And it's even very easy to walk around stealing from everybody, most AI don't even have military units. It's mostly the first one that you may have to do yourself.

It's possible emperor is kind of that awkward difficulty where the AI is annoying enough without the benefits you can leverage in deity.

 

[inthesomeday]

It's possible emperor is kind of that awkward difficulty where the AI is annoying enough without the benefits you can leverage in deity.

That's why we use it in multiplayer, to discourage human interaction with the AI

 

[Iamteehee]

I don't know about "much much" faster. One of my fastest game is on Prince with Spain at T187 or so sub T190. Free ride on wonders, city states, all expansion spot available and 0 AI threat somewhat compensates.

You can still steal workers, I did in that game. And it's even very easy to walk around stealing from everybody, most AI don't even have military units. It's mostly the first one that you may have to do yourself.

It's possible emperor is kind of that awkward difficulty where the AI is annoying enough without the benefits you can leverage in deity.

If you are talking about This map, I think you could get a faster time on Diety. You'd still probably be able to get GL and ToA thanks to KSM and you'd have all the upsides of playing on Diety. The only thing you wouldn't be able to do would be forward settling Sweden for the Gems tile.

 

[MightySpice]

So what you can do is reload the map and send your warrior straight to the nearest civ once you know where it is.

you are kidding right? you also reload if a neighbouring civ takes a few of that early cities you just build but couldn't defend because you have no army to defend it because your priority was building settlers and libraries?

i know an early science victory is possible, but only if you neglect everything else. a national college so early in the game means you have no army. not at all. you are a sitting duck waiting to be shot.

 

[poxpower]

It's possible emperor is kind of that awkward difficulty where the AI is annoying enough without the benefits you can leverage in deity.

I tried a bunch, the AI is just bad.
They don't start with workers so they're mostly useless. At turn 100 some of them still can't buy a luxury or even sometimes a frickin horse.

Almost all the city-states were not allied to anyone by midgame and most of the armies I could see consisted of 4-5 warriors.

The AI on Emperor is just a punching bag. Every time after I build NC I just made 4-5 composite bowmen and took the nearest capital without opposition. Didn't even lose units :O

It definitely feels harder to get going without all the free gold/ workers, but I didn't play the game through because it was too boring.

 

[garmeth]

you are kidding right? you also reload if a neighbouring civ takes a few of that early cities you just build but couldn't defend because you have no army to defend it because your priority was building settlers and libraries?

i know an early science victory is possible, but only if you neglect everything else. a national college so early in the game means you have no army. not at all. you are a sitting duck waiting to be shot.

You don't need an army on any difficulty for the first 100 turns unless you're very close to Zulu/Huns/Mongols. Diplomacy will curb the need for an army so you can focus on building infrastructure. Many games you can make it through without an army for the entire game especially if a warmonger is on the other side of the map where you can bribe him to war your neighbors sometimes for as little as 1 gpt.

 

[MightySpice]

strange. in my current game the celts and byzantium declared war on me long before that. And i need units to fight them of. the reason they declared war was a lack of units on my part because of the suggested gameplay in this thread.

again . . . wishfull thinking. it might happen that you can fight them of with diplo or otherwise, but it probably will not.