Research in Prince and higher..

[allhailIndia]

I only recently moved up from Noble to Prince..won a couple of diplomatic victories, lost one space race by 1 turn and am currently trying a conquest game on pangaea normal..

However, I am under attack and way behind on tech. The latter is a common feature in ALL my prince games and I never catch up on tech until way past Rocketry. WHat is worse is that the AI refuses to trade with you unless it is positively sure of the benefit or that you won't catch up on tech.

How the hell does one maintain a healthy tech lead in Prince and above..What is the necessary starting strategy to get the lead?

I once had a SSC with 550+ beakers, and barely managed to catch up just in time to lose space race.

 

[Rast]

I don't play the ssc mode but I have gotten pretty good at Prince. It IS possible to NEVER fall behind in tech on prince, you just have to focus on beakers the entire game, start to finish.

Cottages + Financial is your friend. Cottage all the grass as soon as you can and alternate building units and libraries in the early game - skip the Obelisk and build a library in your new cities once they're available.

Later on as you start to take more land from your enemies, build (rush-build if you can) libraries and universities. They give you tech AND push the border out - rush the library at least, university should be the last culture building you build though because it's expensive. Also build monestaries when you have the chance in all your cities. They give you more beakers and you can use them to spread your religion so you can build more monestaries.

Don't be a buildaholic - if you have a city that has all the buildings it needs, and you don't need military units, build research. More beakers is more beakers.

If you do this throughout the game and keep the expansion up, you can enter the modern era pushing 3000 beakers a turn and still have plenty of cash left over for rush building, which puts you head and shoulders above the AIs in tech development, so you can march on to domination victory, or science if you like peacemongering