Science: Can't keep up.

[tamperpr00f]

With civ 4 I got used to being miles ahead of everyone in the tech tree. Now I know this is a different game, but I was wondering if anyone had any pointers for getting out front and staying out front in terms of science and technology. Is there something I could be overlooking?

 

[Brota]

1. Sign research agreements with AI;
2. Population = Science once you have buildings such as Library, you can also add specialists to those buildings;
3. Go for wonders that give free technology

 

[qyll]

Granaries, libraries, and farms alone can carry you through to the mid-late game.

 

[SeptimusOctopus]

From the brief time I've spent with the game I'd say keeping your population high is a good way to tech. This requires keeping your happiness high as well since you take a rather significant hit to growth if your civ is unhappy. So luxury resources are your best friends early on.

Also, Great Scientists are extremely powerful since you can now pick the tech they bulb (or I guess we should start calling that "flask" now). So once you get libraries built you get 1.5 beakers per population and you get slots for scientists which give great people points toward Great Scientists.

 

[Earthling]

You can massively outexpand and generally outplay the AI at least up to Immortal without ever falling behind in tech; you can also tech the tree well within the 500 turns. Not sure how the numbers will end up comparing to civ4 in the end on the latter part (since civ4 would see tech trees finished in about half the total time, and I never got how people could not finish the tech tree by 2050 except for completely new, settler-level players).

Great Scientists are incredibly powerful, but simply having more land/population/improvement/cities goes most of the way. The weaker AI are far less able to "catch up" in civ5 as well since they can't trade/peacevassal techs away for free.

 

[Celevin]

My advice, without needing anything else including libraries, is just open up the liberty tree and spam / capture cities as fast as possible and build as many happiness-producing buildings. Even on Emperor you'll beat out the coms. No special gimmicks, just raw population. Most of the time happiness buildings are even better than libraries.

 

[cembandit]

If you got the delux, use nebby and make 2 cities science cities. Assign the specialists to library/university/great library and lightbulb techs like crazy.