The Full Research Comeback (Almost)

[Entrinzikyl]

Well, I got Civ 36 hours ago, and I've played for 18 of those, and for 24 of those hours I ate only Reese's peanut butter cups. So keep that in mind if this doesn't make any sense, along with the fact that I'm new on the forums (relevant? I don't know).

Anyway, I was playing on Noble as the Spanish and fell fairly far behind on technology. Fortunately, I was on a continent with only the Chinese and we were both Buddhist, so things between us were peaceful. I was the culturally stronger of the two, but I was falling behind both the Chinese and the rest of the world in score, mostly due to this lack of technology.

I knew I had to do something, so as soon as I could begin upgrading units to Infantry I converted all production to this type and began attacking. I took 3 cities from the Chinese and didn't lose any which I found odd in part because the Chinese had tanks and I thought they should've been able to take a city. Nevertheless, when I signed a peace treaty, I still had to pay THEM 500 gold.

So I was about to give up on the game... it was the early 2000's and I was still trying to get Democracy. During the war I had turned off research because I thought I was out of luck on that, but I had a brainstorm and put that back up to 100% and also Alt+Clicked every city on my continent to producing research. Instantly, I was getting a new tech every 1-3 turns. I managed to use a few of these to trade for others and this was enough to bump me two spots up from last place.

In 2039, I completed the United Nations (yeah, caught up AND built wonders) and though I don't yet know how democracy works, I think I would've been able to win that way since 3 of the 4 remaining civs (including the Chinese, thanks to Buddhism) were pleased with me. Unfortunatly, Mali launched the Spaceship, and I couldn't pull it off, but I did come to the following conclusions and the point of my post:

It is very, very possible to come back from a technology deficit in Civ 4. I'm confident that if I had started this method of attack 50 years earlier I wouldn't even have needed to try for the UN, I simply could've surpassed the AI in research and upgraded to new units and conquered by those means.

I'm starting to theorize that it might be worth spending extra time building infrastructure, sacrificing research initially, in order to be able to research a lot more effectively and make up for any lost ground and more. If anyone else has tried going with as much research as possible, let me know your thoughts.

 

[ritterpa]

You're right in that catching up later is easier, since any modifier you apply to research (such as increasing funding, buying libraries, etc) is going to have a huge effect.

The problems with that strategy are:

-Lagging behind in military tech, which will get you killed on noble even, but is all but guaranteed to get you killed at higher levels

-Lagging behind in economics: kind of hard to build up cities when you don't have access to the buildings

-Lagging behind in religion. If you go this route and don't land an early religion, you're left without one in all liklihood.

So it's kind of playing with fire. I suppose if you worked out a specific meandering through the tech tree that kept you both militarily and economically competitive but sacrificed a few of the "leads to" sort of techs, it could be a viable strategy to pull some off of research.

But the question becomes, really--what good is gold early on?

 

[Heroes]

But the question becomes, really--what good is gold early on?

Upgrade units?

 

[ritterpa]

Upgrade units?

Yeah, but if you're not researching you're not going to have a lot of new units to upgrade to! Besides, one great merchant is enough to cover upgrading pretty much an entire army. I've found that in every game I've played, I haven't had a hard time getting money to upgrade, and since there isn't much use for gold otherwise early on, I sure wouldn't cut into research to get more of it.