Which course of victory should I try to Pursue ?

[VoiceOfReaon]

Hello everyone, I'm a relative new player and I'm playing on the 'prince' lvl. I normally try to play cultural or with citystates. This time I decided to try something new and start playing with a civilization I had nvr played with before; Korea. They seemed to be the best to try to win a scientific victory.
Because once again, the ai (au) played, for my norms, very aggressive and started a war with me I was forced to focus on building my army. I defeated them, but they still remained very annoying, sending missionaries, spying on me, and settling new cities litterly a few places from my borders. I thus started a new war against them which is still going on.

Surprisingly for me, thx to this, I have know the strongest military in the world. My value is 146,178. Average is 85,834. On literacy (I assume this about science?) I'm only number 3. With the exception of crop yield and land (6 on both of them), I'm number 1 on the remaining stats.

It's turn 262

Now my question is, what road should I take? Should I still try to win the scientific way? Or should I shift towards trying to gain a military victory?

ps. I hope I've posted this in the right forum.

 

[Civ4Pengbo]

I am guessing you neglected your military early on which is why you got drawn into a war.

Even so on prince you shouuld still be number 1 in literacy playing Korea. As it is You have everything you need for a science win provided your bpt is 400+ if it isn't you need to 2 things I would think.

Find who is first and 2nd in literacy and use the military superiority to bring them to heal at the same time pouring everything you can into science to get those beakers up. To do this go for growth. Finish rationalism if you haven't already. Start Order next and go down the middle of it and puppet everything in sight probably starting with your annoying neighbour as you march on numbers 1 and 2.

Even if you go for domination you will find you end up being able to win science as it takes a while usually to dominate everyone.

 

[VoiceOfReaon]

I'm getting around 244 science per turn now which is the reason I haven't started with the rationalism tree yet. I think I might have started to late with founding new settlements as I usually play with very little of them even at the end of the game. I currently have 5 settlements.

That's why I'm wondering, if I should shift from science orientated, to focus on military victory.

 

[Civ4Pengbo]

5 is more than enough but it does depend on when you settled them. Are you running specialists in every science building? this is why I said go for growth. Getting those cities up as high as possible gives more science. High food yield means more specialists = more science. If you think that you can't pull that off then you have answered your own question as science win may not be on the cards now. However I have found that even though it looks like the AI is winning sometimes they have bypassed crucial techs and they can take a long time filling in those techs to get the last spaceship parts but your bpt is not that good for the end game. Although it is a while since I played on prince so it may be possible.

I am not saying you shouldn't try for domination but you can work on both as if you are behind in the tech race the likelihood is you may struggle to pull off a domination win with 5 cities and older units especially if the other 2 civs accelerate away in the tech race.

244bpt at turn 262 is way down on where it should be. Somewhere 500+ would be better. I think you are going to have to declare war on numbers 1 and 2 anyway or they will win in another couple of hundred turns anyway but that depends on how many techs ahead they are. Preferably don't declare war on them at the same time