recurring pattern in my games

[cort]

in all of my games, there is a recurring pattern. just wondering whether it is specific to my style of gameplay or it is a common thing.

my point is that; being a human it seems inevitable to gain the tech lead after sometime. tech trade is so common that with a little amont of time spend on "who needs what" discovery, you can always find a way of gaining techs from rival civs.. either a luxury, a resource, money, world map, communication, anything would do the job..

and during the medieval age, while AI is spending its beakers on the (dead-end) printing press-democracy branch, you focus on era-required-only techs, never sell your techs to anybody else until discovered by at least one other civ,
unless you are overrun militarily, tech gap will continue to increase by time..
i am not exactly sure about the reason they fall behind but my best guess is that they spend their time on useless techs.
i am playing on monarch & emperor levels by the way..

and most of the time, being tech leader results in the (boring) situation that; "be the first civ to discover flight (ai civs 5-6 techs behind), switch production to bombers, destroy anything within sight; bombers have no risk of taking damage because AI civs are completelety defenceless"
since at that time major cities have completed their factories & coal plants, building a bomber takes 3-6 turns which means it is possible to add 3-5 bombers every turn to your destruction machine..

any comments?

[Kekkonen]

As to gameplay styles, do you subscribe to the "speak softly until you have the Really Big Stick (tm)" doctrine? Your style sounds an awful lot like mine (of course, I've had the game for a week, so I'm still on the lower levels).

[jack_frost]

yeah. Exactly the same.

Once the library is gone, I end up getting ahead (I never got the library, and simply stopped bothering to try).

same difficulty. Same pattern. Once you get that tech lead, the game wins itself. Unless you get sloppy, and arrogant, and end up on the recieving end of world war beatdown. And even then, by the time that happened, the AI usually can't compete with me, and my superior war making skills.

[barefootbadass]

GL is less useful now than it used to be I think, because 1. you can stay ahead by avoiding the unnecessary techs till later. and 2. When another civ discovers and passes a tech that you don't have around to all others it becomes cheaper to research. and 3. Of course it expires much earlier now.

That being said, it is good to be a 'tech broker', but it requires you to talk to all the civs you are at peace with every turn. Any tech that will get passed around anyway you buy from the one who has it and then sell it to everyone else for all you can get.

An interesting thing happened to me recently doing this. One civ discovered a tech I had so I had to sell it to all others(can't remember which, maybe banking). I did so, but one civ that I was on very good terms with and that had a lot of money was going to be insulted with lumpsums all the way down to 2 gold for the tech, but they would bite for 1 gold. I guess the only reason they would be like that about that tech was if they only had 1 turn left till they had it researched. Of course they had it next turn, but they could have traded for it giving the 1 gold to someone else. I didn't sell it for 1 gold so he would waste some overflow beakers.

[reds4ever]

i concur