That's it - Liberty is complete utter worthless trash

@noto

I don't know about 8 but I can definitely get 6 cities on a standard-sized map pretty regularly just from settling. The exception might be a strange start where I was blocked into a peninsula and forward-settled. I think the small continents maybe be what is biasing you towards cramped starts. It means at least one neighbor AND small landmass, not the greatest for expansion. The few times I've random-rolled on a small island with a neighbor on immortal I usually have to war them to stay on top and get enough room with liberty. Try checking random and getting a few more map types. Obviously pangaea is great for liberty, but island maps can be too. The AI is slow expanding early. Out of the six cities I settle on standard maybe 3-4 of those city sites have unique luxes, the others are usually more mediocre sites settled near duplicate luxes or adequate resources. These will mean unique luxes and money after trades with the AI so they are acceptable to me. As a few players have said it is not necessary to have a unique luxury for every expansion. To further capitalize on liberty you can take a few more cities from neighbors eventually. I'd guess a typical standard/liberty game would be 7-8 cities to be competitive.

Also, I hadn't thought to mention it but usually when I'm going liberty I'm also building a decent military and use it to block or capture enemy settlers, steal workers from my neighbor, etc. This puts them on the defensive and thus means they don't have the opportunity to peacefully expand and rob me of all but 3-4 city spots. You always want to be aggressively blocking your neighbors and speeding out settlers on immortal+ trying for liberty because they will likely win out in a peaceful expansion contest. AI just has too many buffs. There is no need to go full-out war in the beginning, all you need to do is a guerilla war sniping workers and maybe a settler if they are especially expansionist and it'll slow them down enough you get the upper hand. Don't underestimate the value of economic terrorism early-game!

I'm not gonna claim this'll work on every roll, but I don't think any strategy should. Strategy should be formed after you scout the lay of the land and see what is there. If you do end up in one of the situations you speak of with only 4 good city spots and no mediocre ones then tradition is the obvious choice. If more land opens up later you can expand then. But you are right that if you only expect to produce 3-4 cities you cannot capitalize on liberty enough to justify taking it unless you are role-playing.

Not sure if this has been said before, but in my opinion Liberty is more useful for early-game warmongering than Honor. Liberty gets you +1 hammer and +5% on Buildings, both of which are pretty significant in the early game to crank out comps faster. The free settler is also great, since a second city usually = second source of units. Honor, on the other hand, gets all its culture from barb farming (so you have to buy tiles more often), and the hammer bonus only works for melee units, which you shouldn't have more than 2-3 of. The GG bonus isn't that relevant either because I'll get one naturally anyway.

That being said, does anyone here have advice on getting more gold as Liberty? I seem to be either earning close to 0 or outright bleeding most of the time (in terms of raw income, before earnings from war or trade)

My experience is that Liberty is stronger than Honor for early wars. Using liberty GE for Machu Picchu can solve some problem also. It can however become a problem if you have too many/long roads until you get market/banks. If you're set on a conquering spree, using pillage tricks, selling buildings in razing cities, and plunder gold can get you above 0 gold. It doesn't really matter if you have negative gpt as long as you keep conquering. As long as you're careful, you can get by with negative happiness and negative gpt.

Also though, and this doesn't work on multiplayer obviously but I've been playing single player somewhat more lately, you can sell luxes to the AI apparently for GPT. Also work a couple plantations or favor mineral lux mines more in your tile working, clears up gold problems right away and normally early game pre-specialists you have a couple extra citizens that could work gold

Sclb said:

My experience is that Liberty is stronger than Honor for early wars. Using liberty GE for Machu Picchu can solve some problem also. It can however become a problem if you have too many/long roads until you get market/banks. If you're set on a conquering spree, using pillage tricks, selling buildings in razing cities, and plunder gold can get you above 0 gold. It doesn't really matter if you have negative gpt as long as you keep conquering. As long as you're careful, you can get by with negative happiness and negative gpt.

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I know about plunder and such, which is why I mentioned it was "before war and trade". I can imagine rushing Borobudur or Petra, but is Machu Picchu really worth the GE? It's a pretty good wonder, but if the AI doesn't have mountain capitals I can get it anyway.

In MP, people usually settle at least 2 tiles within a mountain, and Macchu is pretty competitive. It comes at guilds, on the way to a crossbow rush, and if you need the gold to upgrade high-promotion comp bows engineering it isn't a terrible idea. Plus with Mausoleum engineering it would give 100 gold, and then the resulting income would be pretty high... Good for military expeditions, and also good for non-aggressive infrastructure. Crucial for some XBow rush strategies, too.

SoonerJBD said:

Why are you so insistent on using one map size for every game? You are willing to try new strategies, but you aren't willing to alter your game settings whatsoever? I don't understand this. Tradition is obviously much easier on standard map size and speed. If you want to try Liberty, what is stopping you from upping your map size? I've found bumping the map size to large makes Liberty much more viable depending on the Civ and the starting conditions. You are complaining because you can't shoehorn every possible strategy into the one setting you want to play every game with. That's your problem, not the game's problem.

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I play standard size and standard speed for 2 main reasons:

1) I do not have the patience to play a large/marathon or whatever game that takes 40 hours to finish. To me, that is not fun. I will lose interest long before I finish the game because real life interferes. I might have to go 4-5 days without playing and to try and pick a game up after that kind of break is no good to me.

2) the game is balanced to standard size/speed. Playing smaller maps or quick speed feels really messed up and broken.

sugerdady87 said:

In this thread, liberty has been advocated with getting 7-8 cities. That's a lot more than tradition. If you were to only get 4 cities, why even open liberty?

Also with tradition, some of us build settlers outside the capital. If you were to do so with liberty, it would negate the benefit of CR, in which point again, why even open it?

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How can you possibly know the map and if it will allow for more than 4 cities before you open your first policy tree? I'm well into my first policy tree before I've seen enough of the map to know these kinds of things, and yes, I do know how to scout and I do build a scout first.

Klesko said:

I have to respectfully disagree once again. It is in fact suboptimal play. Each turn that you're producing a settler you have growth of the city set at 0. You want that city growing in the early stages while settler production cost is at full price. You then switch to settler production mode when that cost has been cut in half. The discussion and rationale for this is much more in depth than what I've covered in this brief paragraph but it all has to do with opportunity costs.

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You absolutely cannot afford to sit on your capital until you unlock the settler production discount if you want to get more cities than you would with Tradition. On immortal +, but that time, the AI has already grabbed almost every good expansion site anywhere near your capital. You're going to get boxed in hardcore (standard size, standard number of civs, of course)

Liberty might be fine for early wars but if I am planning on being at war the entire game I will just choose Honour. It has similar benefits to a wide empire (extra culture and happiness per city), and it results in my troops have more promotions and my units are cheaper to upgrade, not to mention the cash I generate from killing enemy units, or that my front line melee units get an extra flanking bonus.

I think the problem here is that there are too many trade offs with map scripts and I'm particularly feeling the Liberty pinch due to the maps I prefer.

Pangea offers no naval combat or island colonization. Continents plus offers no island colonization without conquering CS. Archipelago is unfair to land based military civs. Etc, etc.
Hemispheres solves all of these problems and is the best map script available, to my tastes. The problem is it is terrible for Liberty, it's too crowded.

noto2 said:

How can you possibly know the map and if it will allow for more than 4 cities before you open your first policy tree?

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That is the real gamble with Liberty. I can usually rule out that there is not enough space for Liberty, but some games I think I plenty of space (even with a two scout opening) but that turns out not to be the case.

noto2 said:

... map types ...

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Liberty is good for Continents: early CB/XB rush. Then you have to slow warmongering (even stop) until you learn to swim accross ocean. This means you have to switch to peacefull mode and have a whole continent for yourself. Lots of building and even settling empty space atleast until frigates/artilery.

For Continents map/DomV, I find Liberty to be better then Tradition or Honor.

I have not yet seen a hemispheres map, I've never gone with the type. I'd love to see an example to help you improve your liberty play and point out some planting locations, it's single player so you don't even have to worry as much about defensibility right

noto2 said:

You absolutely cannot afford to sit on your capital until you unlock the settler production discount if you want to get more cities than you would with Tradition. On immortal +, but that time, the AI has already grabbed almost every good expansion site anywhere near your capital. You're going to get boxed in hardcore (standard size, standard number of civs, of course)

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Learn to defend, dude. I mean, seriously, your schtick in this thread is getting old.

Just because you haven't figured out how to do it doesn't mean it can't be done.

Step 1 - spawn as whomever. In my case, Catherine.

Step 2 - Scout the map.

Step 3 - Box in Siam with units, griefing his workers and settlers.

Step 4 - Settle towards Indonesia first.

Step 5 - Backfill your empire, finish off Siam, a now completely crippled AI with no military, on workers, no economy and no expansions. Or don't, whatever. I just don't like clicking thru his denouncement every 30 turns all game.


It's really not that hard.

^^lol what the hell is that, huge/pangea? It's a completely different game, completely different.

definitely not huge, huge is bigger still, but might be large.

That said, don't laugh just from the picture, he just gave you the exact same advice I gave you yesterday, and that is that in a cramped map you pick a neighbor to harass and keep the war going. Not only does it mean free workers, but you can capture his settlers too, effectively stopping him from competing with you for space allowing you to get a few more cities before the map fills in. They usually escort their settlers with a weak warrior early making them ripe for stealing. You don't just sit there and peacefully compete with the AI and their buffs. You want to steal their advantages for yourself and set them back through early-war focused on pillaging and stealing his civilians. By weakening a neighbor or two you also give yourself time to peacefully build a strong infrastructure in all the new cities because the AI will pick on the weakest civs first and they will act as a distraction and buffer to warmongers.

This is actually easier to do on continents where you have 1-2 ppl to focus on as on pangaea if you aren't careful you'll get dogpiled and raided for expanding and early warring. You have to keep a large military on hand which is another thing to balance with early buildings and settlers. Notice he successfully kept two neighbors small. That is why he is big, not the map-size. Based on the map size and proximity without his strategy he might have gotten 6 cities max. Now he has 10 due to it. Based on the screenshot I'd say his advice works. My only criticism is his growth is getting ahead of his improvements. I would've hard-built more workers to keep up because that's wasted potential. Still though, nice science for the time and size.

Chum, why do you have half your cities on science? I can't see what you're teching, are you trying to hurry a tech like research labs along?

I personally prefer continents, though I will play other maps for a change of pace. I don't think games on large maps take that much longer than standard. I also don't see how large maps break the balance or feel "broken." I'm guessing what you really mean is that it feels different, and you are comfortable with your usual settings. Anyway, you can dial back the number of competing Civs on a large map and have all the Lebensraum you could possibly need. There are a lot of options here that you aren't considering. If you don't want to try new things, just go back to your old Tradition strategy and play the same game over and over.

noto2 said:

Liberty might be fine for early wars but if I am planning on being at war the entire game I will just choose Honour. It has similar benefits to a wide empire (extra culture and happiness per city), and it results in my troops have more promotions and my units are cheaper to upgrade, not to mention the cash I generate from killing enemy units, or that my front line melee units get an extra flanking bonus.

I think the problem here is that there are too many trade offs with map scripts and I'm particularly feeling the Liberty pinch due to the maps I prefer.

Pangea offers no naval combat or island colonization. Continents plus offers no island colonization without conquering CS. Archipelago is unfair to land based military civs. Etc, etc.
Hemispheres solves all of these problems and is the best map script available, to my tastes. The problem is it is terrible for Liberty, it's too crowded.

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I don't even know what a Hemispheres map is; I need to look that one up. On a standard map, either lower the sea levels or reduce the number of civs from 8 to 7. (more than that gets tedious for me too.) Enabling "raging barbarians" can also help slow down the AI's.

Liberty is also good for founding 3 or 4 cities, then conquering your neighbor and connect it with roads. But on some maps Honor is better for that. I just wish in my current game that my former neighbor had built the Pyramids. I really miss those turbocharged workers! I went Honor instead of Liberty because I spawned on a narrow peninsula with no fresh water and only one hill and one fish tile. At least it's easy to defend.

I disagree about pangaea not having naval combat. At least half of the capitals are usually coastal. I'm playing on an "oval" map and I'm beelining Electronics for building battleships. They are going to be crucial for defending my allied CS's when I declare war on Rome, and then for bombarding Rome itself once his army is decimated. After I capture Rome, I might switch mostly to planes and landships, but 5 of the 7 caps are coastal on this map so the battleships will still be useful.

zxcvbob said:

I disagree about pangaea not having naval combat. At least half of the capitals are usually coastal. I'm playing on an "oval" map and I'm beelining Electronics for building battleships. They are going to be crucial for defending my allied CS's when I declare war on Rome, and then for bombarding Rome itself once his army is decimated. After I capture Rome, I might switch mostly to planes and landships, but 5 of the 7 caps are coastal on this map so the battleships will still be useful.

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I was going to mention this, as well. Pangea maps often require or at least reward a good navy. It sounds like someone who has never played other map settings is complaining about those settings.

Yeah, they may be thinking of Great Plains or scenarios with solid borders. Pangaea often has a complete coastline.