quote:
Originally posted by Campo on 02-06-2001 03:43 PM
Good work.
Once you had spaceflight, how did you keep other Civs from stealing the advanced techs and building a spaceship faster than you?
The only way I've been able to manage that is to conquer them into submission, which makes my AC game seem more like a Bloodlust.
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Ah, Campo! Welcome to one of my most worked out strategies
Since I play perfectionist 80% of the time I have honed these skills of technology guarding to good levels altough there is certaintly no 100% sure way to safeguard your tech in civ.
When defending your technology take these things under consideration.
1. Put a Spy on sentry in each and every city you have (nomatter the size) . She will be always inside the city except for emergencies and you should set espionage as a middle level priority in your science search.
It isn't important if you discover that tech first, or trade it or steal it. The important thing is to implement the «spy in every city» as fast as possible and to place the first wave of spies to the frontier cities of course.
2. Take under careful consideration (from the early game) the terrain layout. If you have to have more production try to plant forests where you know that the enemy has to pass through. If you are in a mainland with other civs next door, always try to bottleneck them in situations that they have one or two possible ways of reaching you. And guard those ways with units. If not in democracy with two units stacked.
3. If you are alone on a continent (because you were lucky or -more often- because you have destroyed the neighboors) things are much easier. The most effective way to protect tech. is to be in constant war with every potential thieve and have a strong naval force that will surround your continent and kill everything that tries to pass through. The ships should be accompanied with fighters and very few bombers - (limited attacks).
I have NEVER lost a spacerace when using these methods. But because civ is a complicated game you have to experiment a little bit with these general guidelines.
Note that this is ideal if you create a very strong and very «compact» civ. 8 to 10 cities with minimum overlap and all in one continent are always enough to win a spacerace if you have good production (i.e. never built Apolo if you have not solar plant in every city and each city has good production squares).
If you have that number of cities in the early beggining it might be good to resist the urge to expand to other continents if you have no way of guarding effectively the new frontiers against enemy spies.
