Tech Victory Tips?

Pump your economy and your trade to increase your income, build starbase economic modules to increase freighter income from trades. grab any technology resource you can and max out its mining bonuses. Try to get as many 15+ planets as possible as they increase your economic base and allow you to build mutiple constructors faster and also build multiple research social projects. there is a lot of techs to research to get the beyond human but it can be done in 3-4 hrs on a small map.I speak from experiemnce as i have done two of them so far.

Dragonmack, you said that build starbases on technology resources and max out the mining bonuses.. Do the mines built on starbases have any affect if there are no planets in that sector ? Are the starbase mining bonuses only affective in the sector the base is in, or do they affect your whole empire ?

~SDC~

Resources affect your empire as a whole.

~SDC~

Yes.. I know that the _resources_ affect my empire, but do the upgrades that I build on my starbases affect my empire ? I know that on some of the upgrades it says quite clearly on the description that it affects the planets in the same sector, but do some of the mining etc. upgrades affect larger areas ? Like the cultural upgrades, they affect neighboring sectors also.

~SDC~

The mining and economic upgrades that affect your military and social production only affect the sector the starbase is in.

The mining upgrades that improve your resource extraction affects your entire empire.

~SDC~

Ok.. Thanks, that's all I needed to know... For now

~SDC~

I dunno. The final couple of techs are rediculously difficult to research. Planetary Destruction took me like 7 turns to research. Terraforming took me like 5 turns to research. Evolution Control was like 120. Planetary Destruction took me like 7 turns to research.
Star Creation took like 45 turns. Controlled Wormholes took like 50 turns and 4D space phasing was like another 50. Thats over 200 turns just for the first couple of techs along the road to Final Frontier. Seems to me like in order for tech victory to be a feasible victory option, you would need to be playing on a huge or gigantic map or be playing on a large map and control so much of the map that you could win much more easily by military or culture victory anyway.

Looking in GCTech confirms this.

Galactic Creation and Near Omnipotence alone have a cost comparable with the sum total of all the techs not on the road to Final Frontier.

On a huge map, it took me about 20 months to research "beyond human." The others took about 4-6 months each. At that point, I could've won via conquest or culture. Alliance was probably out because the only remaining AI race didn't like me.

~SDC~

That figures i generally play on large maps and on those maps the tech victory is simply not a feasible way to win. On such maps Dreadnought technology is considered an endgame tech. I might switch over to huge.

But on small with cultural influence turned on, it is hard not to dominate culture before a tech victory given the expansion needed to build a planet base to maximize researching.

Other concrete tips for tech victory?

I'll definitely agree that you don't go for a Tech victory because you're having a problem achieving a different victory condition. On the other hand, my one Tech victory was on a large map, and I didn't have the outrageously long tech times that others are talking about. In fact, I don't think that any of the techs were 12 turns towards the end of the game. I know, because the 12-month cultural victory popup came along on the tech while I was researching Beyond Human. I'll admit I had to redline my economy for a few turns to get Final Frontier down under the 10 turns I had remaining, however. As you might guess, I did control most of the map, but it was with habitable planets set to the rarest setting, so my population wasn't what you'd expect for that map size.

Ack! I'm about to fall out of the top 200! I really need to finish the game I'm playing now. It's a Huge map, I'm going for a Tech victory, and I'm only as far as Avatars at the moment. Need to start clicking! Good thing it's a long weekend, I might just finish two games.

Oh, Librarian, I'd say that the only thing you're missing is that a Tech victory is a *LOT* of work. Just kidding, sure you're aware of that. I don't think that a tech victory is ever the easiest victory, and you definitely have to either turn off cultural victory, play an AI that's good at cultural defense, or play on a huge or gigantic map to get the tech win before the cultural one. Oh, one other option. Build the AI some cultural starbases and give them to it.

What role to starbases play in tech victories? Is it mostly beefing up military and social, then compensating by decreasing those sliders to do more research?

Would people support research labs on starbases that either improve planets in the sector or contribute to research in a more concrete way?

I don't want tech to be a cakewalk, but taking 33% more time to reach it than a cultural victory seems to discourage that path other than for personal entertainment.

Are there any random events that catapult one towards tech victory? If not, that might be a great addition. For example, an event that hurts your culture and military due to a research breakthrough that helps you towards tech victory.

The thing about the tech victory that sets it apart from the other victory conditions is that you can do it without being dominant in any other field; you can be the small guy on in the game and still eke out a victory that way, if you can survive long enough. (Alliance victories are kind of like this, but still end up taking a good bit of work.) So, naturally, it does have to be set up to take a while to do so.

The main thing for a tech victory is just making sure you aren't researching a lot of techs that you don't need. Grab one of the resources that list all the techs, and research towards the main victory. As far as the length of time taken, that mainly depends on how well you scale the rest of your civilization; if you have a strong economy you can turn research up high and just plow through the techs. On the tech victories I've had, I don't recall any of the individual techs taking more than 15 turns to research, but my economy is always massive by that time. Starbases can certainly be one way to increase production, so you can build the items necessary to achieve high research. You probably don't have enough cash coming in, though; max out your trade routes with starbases along them to raise the amount of money coming in. That should allow higher productivity overall, and you can increase your research accordingly.