Critt3r said:
Hey fellas.
I am playing on Warlord and am still unable to win a space race.
I've read many other articles about having cottages early so you economy can handle the research. Apparently I haven't figured out the magic formula yet.
Any advice is appreciated.
I recently played at Prince level, got 15,000+ score on a Space race victory and ranked as Caesar. Even in that game, my tech percentage is only around 80-90% for most of the game so I don't understand why you suddenly fell behind in Industrial age. Usually, by the time I get Liberalism (as the first player), I leave the AIs so far behind there's little point in doing tech-trading with them any more. I won that game with Elizabeth but I also won a space race at Monarch level with Mao-Tse-Tung.
A few useful things to do:
- build cottages early and USE those squares to make them grow into towns. For a normal square, that's the best source of gold.
- build all research buildings: libraries, universities, observatories, and labs. Any cities which have decent number of beakers (say 80+) should also have an Academy (unless it is already too late in the game for it to matter)
- concentrate on a super-science city. The first Great Scientist should go to this city to build an Academy, nothing else is more important. All subsequent Great Scientists should also go to this city as super-specialists unless you have a BIG tech that you absolutely have to get and the GS helps. And build the national wonder that doubles the tech output of this city. If you use all your GS to discover techs earlier then that might explain why you have an earlier lead and slow down later. I think my SS city produces about 400 beakers per turn.
- If you do have a good number of specialists then you should also pick the Representative civic. It's the best for a relatively small civ with a few main cities.
- make sure you don't have happiness problem and your citizens refuse to work later in the game

. If you leave everything to the city managers then you might not realize that

.
- if you see the AIs start building parts for the space ship first, don't panic. In my first game which I did play to the finish and didn't know the rules on how to build the spaceship, the AIs started building parts more than 30 turns before I did but I still beat them by a long shot in the end since I had most other techs except Rocketry and the Apolo program while that was all the AIs got. They always take the shortest route to Rocketry to build the parts.
Other than those points, I'm lost as to why that happen to you

. In my own experience, the tech lead always snowballs into a bigger lead later, never reverses course.