How to get a decent liberty start?.

The feeling that you're wasting time waiting for the workers is also a Prince level problem, even on King the workers come out faster. I may even wager to say King is a little easier than Prince, because while the AI don't yet carpet rush you, and they aren't able to get to space before you're in the Atomic Era yet, they have better gold, trade opportunities, and early workers.
However if you're not comfortable moving up, I would say build two or three workers in between the settlers you build to establish borders and the settlers you build to fill in your lands.

If you're not playing on very hard difficulty, my preferred play on Liberty is to use free Worker to chop Glib, bulb Phil, build NC and Oracle, then start pumping out cheap Settlers. Use free GE to get Petra. Then use rapid teching and high production to pump out an army to bulldoze AI cities and take their capitals. If I have few neighbours, I'll use cheap settlers to fill the gaps, but generally the Liberty bonuses are the hammer, culture and happiness in each city.

To go wide early on... it's situational. Like most ploys, it depends on geography. If you can grab a strong faith NW or Pantheon early and be sure of happiness from Pagodas or such, and if there's solid luxury diversity, that's the key to it. If, on the other hand, your capital has a load of food and a delta and a mountain, but everywhere else is rubbish, go tall!

The other advice here is solid, I want to reiterate the point that you need to scout early to decide which strategy will work better. I never load into a game having decided to go liberty or tradition already - it depends on the lands I get and who my neighbor AIs are.

The times when I do a liberty 8 city spam start are only when I have lots of different luxuries available and plenty of breathing room from the AI. It's not a common start, honestly. 6 cities is more common on a standard size map.

I will open liberty if I'm surrounded by warmongers though, only plant 2-3 cities and plan on rushing them. Why should I build 3 settlers when I can just capture the cities they forward settle on me? Lol

Gamer1291 said:

I am still currently playing on prince difficulty and trying to master liberty start.

Should I build worker early like scout>monument>shrine/worker? because I don't want to waste time waiting for CS to make worker and steal and bring to my capital safe from barbarians.

Also when spamming settlers should I make workers in between for new cities?.

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Well if its prince I'd probably do something like this.
Scout, scout, shrine, worker, monument, Pyramids,settlers........

I usually don't mind delaying the monument because chances are I almost always bag an early culture ruin, and building 2 scouts pretty much guarantees this.

Redaxe said:

Well if its prince I'd probably do something like this.
Scout, scout, shrine, worker, monument, Pyramids,settlers........

I usually don't mind delaying the monument because chances are I almost always bag an early culture ruin, and building 2 scouts pretty much guarantees this.

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This is probably the way to go.

One of the core tenets of high level play is the worker steal. You can't steal workers from civs and cs's which have no workers. Getting the GL only to be at Philosophy with no workers isn't going to be as good as having all your expos hitting the ground running with improved tiles.

My instincts are screaming earlier settlers when I'm reading this order but I guess on prince it's the best thing to do

inthesomeday said:

My instincts are screaming earlier settlers when I'm reading this order but I guess on prince it's the best thing to do

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Well assuming your referring to the build queue I put up, you'll still get a free settler from Liberty. You can certainly delay the pyramids to get an extra settler out first. In fact that is probably a better option so

scout, scout, shrine, worker, monument, settler, pyramids, settlers.....

On prince I may go scout > monument > shrine > settler (x2 optional, depending on land grabbing goals; usually the free one and the +50% would come sometime in this stage, so bear that in mind when making decisions here) > worker > pyramids > settlers

With multiple worker steals as soon as possible in order to rapidly improve borderlands

A good Liberty build order on Prince is one that focuses on early units imo, you want at least a couple of archers before you get Collective Rule to complete CS quests. Remember that you can also demand tribute on Prince.

Worker stealing is delayed on Prince, but the upside is that you can steal from every AI all game long, they won't have the military to punish you. DOFs are pointless on Prince unless you're Sweden, AIs have no gold, they're too slow to improve luxuries and RAs are weak. Just rush-buy the first worker and steal 6 more while you're building settlers.