How? John Curtain wins a science race neck and neck with me.

I'm just confused. I had 2 more spaceports than his 6. There were no engineers to be bought to enhance his turns.I was suzerain of all Science and Production city states.My Science was 912 and his was 336 per turn.we started off on the same turn and I was 9 light years per turn to his 6 when all of a sudden I mysteriously lost 30 points of science and my 9 years per turn dropped dramatically to equal his 6..But i thought I got this right?..he only has 6 stations. I have 8! I have almost tripled his science output.!! yea?...He won..literally the turn before I would have.

 

oooh I see now...like 5 other civs had declared war on him..he was prolly clicking out a build per turn for those 6 stations. Thats dumb.grrr/(Why i NEVER declare war on him.)

 

Always feed your builders to your space projects. Takes max ten turns to win after you launched the exoplanet expedition. No AI can beat you to it.

 

Shooting Lagrange laser cost a lot of power and one of your spaceport cities was probably underpowered.

 

The Lagrange (orbital) laser station requires a bunch of Aluminum.

It's the land based stations which consume I think 3 power units each, so yeah, it sounds like a power shortage.

 

Right I confused the two projects.

 

Ok So I can feed my builders to the project? I didn't realize Ii could do that. I thought that was just military engineers. and only certain civs. All of my stuff was powered too.. I read somewhere else you only needed to launch once cause the building after was what needed the power and the was no need to spend all that aluminum over and over and over,...?..Is that right?

 

You have to build the royal society (3rd tier GP building) to be able to use builders to speed up city projects. Science victory end strategy is something like:
- get to the 3rd lvl government to unlock Royal Society
- boost science with campuses, science building and science projects (and all other sources of science you can find) to get all the sciences needed for the exoplanet + boost projects
- build a lot of builders close to your cities with space ports
- 'feed' the builders into your space projects as much as possible
- get GP that boost the projects if you can

(@All: did I miss any crucial parts?)

There's many more optimization steps you can take, but using projects and 'feeding' builders is something that makes a big difference. And it's something that takes some 'getting used to'.

 

Starting exoplanet at the same time despite having triple his science is the suspicious part... You should have beaten him to the start by 30+ turns.

 

thats just it..he used engineer charges to catch up and when i noticed i went to look to see which were up to be purchased There were no more. However i did go back and check his declared wars..he had 5