Giving techs, and other issues

[Nubclear]

A) When is giving techs really wise? For me, it seems like you'd want to always maintain the largest tech lead you can over the AI - giving techs gives them an opporitunity to....

B) Stab you in the back! It seems that the AI is much more aggressive, and builds a massive military that always seems to pwn/nearly pwn me. How do the rest of you maintain good research at higher levels without being railroaded by the military of your enemies?

[Tattila the Hun]

Don't invent railroads, then!


To answer you question, I play on Noble, and lose more often than win... Last game, when Capac invaded me with tanks and helos against my grenadiers... Yah.

[Blake]

A) Give techs to backwards warmongers who will never out-tech you, in exchange for...

B) Them declaring war on your rivals, wasting both civs armies .

It's the pet warmonger concept, find a warmonger, befriend it, feed it techs to keep it strong enough to fight and sic it onto the real competition. Heck, I even give my pet warmongers large gifts of gold (if my budget allows) to ensure that they can upgrade all their units to whatever cutting edge tech I've given them.

The nice thing is when you fund a warmongers conquests the warmonger ends up with an increasingly crappier economy, so as soon as you stop propping up their economy they permamently fall behind in tech and they'll still love you.

Befriending warmongers is definitely the cheapest way to destory armies, but if you want to do things the expensive way you can just get a massive army and use the sack bonus from capturing/burning cities to fund your research.