Science Victory: Freedom or Order?

I just won my earliest science victory on turn 302 with the Mayans, and I chose to go with order. Thinking back though, I might have been able to do it faster had I been able to just outright purchase the Spaceship parts. Have any of you actually noticed which is better for science victory? I thought at first that Order might be better for Tall and Freedom for Wide, but I'm interested in your perspectives and experiences. Thanks.

The Freedom tenets regarding the specialists are pretty huge; 1/2 food consumption and 1/2 unhappiness. But Order's 25% boost to beakers with Factory and the Spaceflight Pioneers tenets take the cake IMHO.

This depends more than anything on weather you went Tradition or Liberty as your first tree.

If you went Tradition, by the time of ideologies, your core will be tall, and pretty much already working every useful tile in addition to working all science specialist slots.
The Civil Service will then allow you to add first every engineer specialist slot to that, and later every merchant slot.

If you've also gone Rationalism, those extra specialists will also produce some science, and if you've built Statue of Liberty, you also gets hammers from all specialists as well.

In addition, if you've planted several academies, you'll get a nice science boost from Freedom's New Deal. (Especially if your capital was right next to a mountain so that it had both NC and an observatory)

Order will work better if you've instead gone Liberty. In addition, if you really want to self found a city that late, Order has a tenet that will start the new city at size 3.

If you want better finish times, then Tradition + Freedom is probably the way to go. When played well, it will win a science victory before a wide Empire really gets full momentum.

I just played the same game twice with a 4 city Tradition start. I saved the game on the turn of choosing Freedom vs Order and played to the end with both. One using Freedom, one using Order. Freedom won by 2 turns. One was won on turn 244, the other on turn 246.

The differences are obviously fairly small. Because of my 4 academies with the +4 bonus to each and larger population thanks to Freedom, I was able to make up for the lack the lack of 25% factory science and then some. I made pretty much the exact same choices, and Freedom had slightly higher science per turn.

The ability to purchase only made a 1 turn difference. The real problem was I had to wait 2 turns more for my last tech due to slightly slower BPT. It is possible I may have been able to win even faster on Freedom, but I purchased an engineer to build the Statue of Liberty. That did cause me to be later to get my last Great Scientist from Faith, but did allow for me to build a few other buildings sooner.

Uzael36 said:

I just played the same game twice with a 4 city Tradition start. I saved the game on the turn of choosing Freedom vs Order and played to the end with both. One using Freedom, one using Order. Freedom won by 2 turns. One was won on turn 244, the other on turn 246.

The differences are obviously fairly small. Because of my 4 academies with the +4 bonus to each and larger population thanks to Freedom, I was able to make up for the lack the lack of 25% factory science and then some. I made pretty much the exact same choices, and Freedom had slightly higher science per turn.

Click to expand...

its different every game actually, as you must take into account:

1) Are you rich enough so you can afford to buy parts at all?
2) Can you handle ideological pressure? As if you choose freedom and you get unhappy, there are no magical +1000 happiness tenets there
3) Do you open ideologies first or not?
- If you are first - Order is clearly the way to go, as you need just a few turns to get to the level 2 tenet, that not only give you 25% science boost, but will cut the building time of the factories in half.
- if not - then it actually depends. No of free tenets actually matter, what your closest neigbour chooses too.

I find it hard to pick freedom in a non-CV game tbh, as I usually decide if I go SV or late domination later on. And domination doesn't really work with freedom, but you can do both with Order.

dragonxxx said:

its different every game actually, as you must take into account:

1) Are you rich enough so you can afford to buy parts at all?
2) Can you handle ideological pressure? As if you choose freedom and you get unhappy, there are no magical +1000 happiness tenets there
3) Do you open ideologies first or not?
- If you are first - Order is clearly the way to go, as you need just a few turns to get to the level 2 tenet, that not only give you 25% science boost, but will cut the building time of the factories in half.
- if not - then it actually depends. No of free tenets actually matter, what your closest neigbour chooses too.

I find it hard to pick freedom in a non-CV game tbh, as I usually decide if I go SV or late domination later on. And domination doesn't really work with freedom, but you can do both with Order.

Click to expand...

1) In my example, where I played out both from the turn I opened up Ideology, I made sure to make good gold. That was what allowed me to win in 244 turns, rather than my previous best 252.

2) Actually, Freedom has awesome -unhappiness with half unhappiness per specialist. If you are running 8+ per city, that is -16 unhappiness. You also get 1/2 food use per specialist as well, which allows for great growth.

3) I was first to open up ideologies, and it definitely was not clearly better with that 25% boost to base beakers. In fact, I had more science with Freedom due to being able to run a bunch of specialists, all with +2 science, and the +4 science per great person tile. As a side bonus, I had a bunch more production due to every specialist getting more hammers due to the Statue of Liberty. I can only assume Korea would be especially awesome with all the specialists you can run with Freedom.


I was surprised. I've always wondered what was best, and in the past, I always chose to go with Order, assuming the factory outweighed everything else. As it turns out, it does not. At least not in my example.

drawing conclusions from one game is not too good idea tbh I don't say freedom is bad - its awesome, but only sometimes. While order is always good.

edit: and btw, if you are running 8 specialists in each city, it doesn't really matter what you will pick. you can win with authocracy too , lol

dragonxxx said:

drawing conclusions from one game is not too good idea tbh I don't say freedom is bad - its awesome, but only sometimes. While order is always good.

edit: and btw, if you are running 8 specialists in each city, it doesn't really matter what you will pick. you can win with authocracy too , lol

Click to expand...

Look, when you have 50% from observatories, +50% from Research facilities, +50% from universities with Rationalism, 25% only adds about 10% to your total BPT. With Freedom, due to the 1/2 food use per specialist, and +1 hammers per specialist, and 1/2 unhappiness from specialists, you can run a TON of specialists effectively and grow faster than Order. You cannot run that may specialists with Order, or your growth stalls out.

With +4 base science per academy and all those +2 base science per specialist, you gain a lot of extra science as well, as all those bonuses also get multiplied by 250% from all those other bonuses I previously mentioned. That alone comes close to offsetting the factory bonus. And with Freedom, you grow a lot faster. Order was pretty much as good as it was getting.

I choose the game to test this out, because I'm quite familiar with it, as I learned how fine tune my SV from it. It was an example that I would have expected to favor Order if anything. Or at the very least, it should be similar. As it turns out, they were close, but it favored Freedom.

I intend to play a few other maps I'm familiar with in order to test this further, but I do not expect a lot of differences. Either way, the difference was only 2 turns, so it wasn't huge, but I did make a tactical choice which set back Freedom 1 Great Scientist. Due to not having to purchase engineers with Freedom, I could have had one more GS, but I did not due to a choice earlier. It is quite possible, I could have won a few turns sooner in my Freedom example.

I really don't know. These 2 ideologies both offer good science. .. order has workers faculty and freedom has scholarly tenets. ..

joncnunn said:

This depends more than anything on weather you went Tradition or Liberty as your first tree.
.

Click to expand...

I found this thread while looking for an answer as to why I keep guessing wrong when I'm first to ideology. It's about 10 SV games in a row where I choose either Freedom or Order, only to have the rest of the surviving world pick the other. But I'll leave that question for another thread.

I'm responding to Jon's post above: Which would you choose if you are going with a Lib/Tradition mix, which I do quite often, depending on early culture. If I think I'll have enough due to a good start/faith pantheon, I love getting 2-3 settlers out before NC.

So let's say I've been successful and am 1st to ideologies by Oxfording Radio, and I've got 4-5 pretty good cities. Assume I haven't made too many enemies (yet), my military is still likely to be on the weak side, as I rely on diplomacy a lot after some early punishment of neighbors (How dare you spawn near me?).

What criteria do you use then to choose Order vs. Freedom?

Since I always guess wrong, we can assume the rest of the world is going to take whichever Ideology I don't (Murphy's Law of Civ 5). If I go Freedom, I'm at the top of the tech tree going for SoL and Labs. If I go Order, I'll divert to the bottom to get to Railroad.

So, the criteria I've been using is to try to guess when the first wave of haters is going to come my way. If I think war is imminent, I'll go Freedom and hope my magically teleported-in Foreign Legions (the cheap upgrade to Infantry is OP, IMHO) can hold everyone off until GWB's. If I think I have a bit more time, I'll go Order to take advantage of the factories' production and build a defense.

Thoughts?

Did I mention that I never guess right?

The problem with 'guessing' right, is that you probably have some warmonger hate from earlier wars, and aren't playing the diplo game well enough. The second person to ideology will pick something different to get the free tenents and then because the rest of the world likes them more than you they follow that person (or go for autocracy).

I think it really comes down to how many cities you have, and how many academies you have planted.

Illianor123 said:

The problem with 'guessing' right, is that you probably have some warmonger hate from earlier wars, and aren't playing the diplo game well enough. The second person to ideology will pick something different to get the free tenents and then because the rest of the world likes them more than you they follow that person (or go for autocracy).

I think it really comes down to how many cities you have, and how many academies you have planted.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

In the game I'm playing now, which prompted me to post, the diplo game was played very well (if I do say so myself) and there should have been very little warmonger hate.

As for # of cities and academies, I'm pretty consistent, when going for SV, at having 4-5 cities and 1 or 2 (no more) academies planted. Also, remember, Lib/Tradition start, so city size is usually around 24-18-18-12 when Radio is complete. I've gone through a lot of math on the Ideological choice, even making spreadsheets, and it's pretty darned close. I can't come up with a rule of thumb.

I'm half tempted to slow my mid-game tech down, focusing more on culture/units, and trying to be 2nd or 3rd to ideologies and then bulb into tech lead. I've been using PT GS and 1 more to get through Industrial, then Oxfording Radio to get 1st ideology. Now, I think I'll just save Oxford until I see the lay of the ideological land.

The AI seems to like it's free tenets, not enough to take something that goes against its victory, but they seem to rarely have an attachment to one ideology, though if you have good tourism, they generally have to really hate you to go another way (they seem to recognize the unhappiness they'll get).

So it's very rare any one ideology will have fewer than 2 adopters, given the AI likes those tenets.

Tall with few academies would point to Order for me. I know lots of people like Order for wide and Freedom tall, but I go the opposite way. Tall civs can already work lots of specialists, tend to get a tech lead faster (double agents can help them), factory science means more with more raw beakers (which tall cities get), and they can actually buy buildings in all their cities (skyscrapers), while both Iron Curtain and Spaceflight Pioneers can help with SV, if you can get both (IC doesn't help wide civs to SV, and wide civs are less likely to be able to buy a GE with faith).

If you end up wider, the ability to use tons of specialists comes into play with Freedom. Space Procurement might be better for wide civs too, who will often lack a really heavy production center, and, thus, may need more than that one last part fast. Wide civs also likely have more artifacts with which to abuse Creative Expression, and they need it more to help power though the higher cost of SP's.

Shark Diver said:

Did I mention that I never guess right?

Click to expand...

I'm afraid the code gives a strong incentive for the second to reach ideology to pick something different.
The main thing you can do for those 3rd to an ideology if you are first or second is to have him like you more than he does that other civ.
As a proxy, you can probably assume the AI with the most techs (without an ideology already) is the most likely candidate to next reach an ideology.

There are other factors that you can't really control. There's no way to tell when an AI is in the industrial era which victory condition he is seeking, so you don't know if he's ruled out Order (via wanting Diplomatic victory) or ruled out Freedom (via wanting Domination victory)

Yeah, a tall core empire that's attached a wide empire has advantages in both ideologies. Again the tall cities will benefit the most from Freedom (run every specialist possible while continuing to work every useful tile & all great improvements will definitely be these cities as well) while the smaller cities provided they have enough food already will benefit the most from Order.
Freedom appears somewhat more flexible as it will also allow a city struggling to support its scientists to grow while Order's factory bonus requires you to have gotten coal from some source, which in some games is hard to find.

joncnunn said:

I'm afraid the code gives a strong incentive for the second to reach ideology to pick something different.
The main thing you can do for those 3rd to an ideology if you are first or second is to have him like you more than he does that other civ.
As a proxy, you can probably assume the AI with the most techs (without an ideology already) is the most likely candidate to next reach an ideology.

There are other factors that you can't really control. There's no way to tell when an AI is in the industrial era which victory condition he is seeking, so you don't know if he's ruled out Order (via wanting Diplomatic victory) or ruled out Freedom (via wanting Domination victory)

Yeah, a tall core empire that's attached a wide empire has advantages in both ideologies. Again the tall cities will benefit the most from Freedom (run every specialist possible while continuing to work every useful tile & all great improvements will definitely be these cities as well) while the smaller cities provided they have enough food already will benefit the most from Order.
Freedom appears somewhat more flexible as it will also allow a city struggling to support its scientists to grow while Order's factory bonus requires you to have gotten coal from some source, which in some games is hard to find.

Click to expand...

That's true... order does rely more on coal which isn't always there..

Illinus said:

The Freedom tenets regarding the specialists are pretty huge; 1/2 food consumption and 1/2 unhappiness. But Order's 25% boost to beakers with Factory and the Spaceflight Pioneers tenets take the cake IMHO.

Click to expand...

Think this way: if you have enough food and happiness to fill scientists' slots anyway, then Freedom doesn't give much benefits. Order has the best happiness advantage for wide empire.

Scholars of the Jade Hall+Freedom+Secularism+SoL=

Order isn't bad, but I think the 25% bonus from factories is just another multiplier on top of universities research labs and observatories, which is really not THAT much. Plus you need coal.

Happiness issues aside, I think freedom is better for SV simply because it allows growth better and increases power of specialists.

noonex said:

Order has the best happiness advantage for wide empire.

Click to expand...

I would disagree. Order gives 6 happiness to every city, we'll say (it can be a bit higher, due to river and mountainside cities, but let's ignore them, as we will for Freedom as well), between Young Pioneers and Academy of Sciences. You could get another 2 with monuments, but with Skyscrapers, Hero of the People, and Double Agents, a science heavy civ will likely have a hard time taking Social Realism. National wonders aren't going to be a big source of happiness going wide.

Freedom can get 5 happiness between Urbanization and Capitalism, with the same restriction of ignoring riverside cities, so 1 less than Order per city (and 1 less possible if all cities in your empire are mountain and riverside). That sounds like it gives an edge to Order, then, but there are a few things.

First, just with what we have assumed with our cities, Freedom also halves unhappiness from specialists. Wide empires have a lot of specialist slots, and even with just 4 scientists per city, that is effectively 2 extra happiness. Any more specialists that are being used makes it even better.

Second, taking into consideration you're likely to have some extra cities that can build river and mountain dependent buildings...well, Order has 2 extra happiness to offer to those cities, but the riverside cities will need aluminium to get their extra happiness from that, while Freedom needs only the low production, resource free watermill. Mountains aren't common enough, most likely, to assume a wide empire has a meaningful number of observatories, even looking for them going for science.

Thus, assuming you're working your specialists, at least science specialists, if nothing else, Freedom has more happiness to offer under any circumstances. Even with every city by a mountain and not a river (so no possible aluminum restrictions, observatory in every city), Order can give 7 happiness per city. Freedom can give 8.

A wide empire with Commerce (Big Ben, Merkantilism) and Order (Skyscrapers) can develop quickly through rushbuying all buildings. Production becomes almost irrelevant.

Big Ben + Merkantilism : -40% Gold-Cost for buying buildings + units. = 60% costs
Skyscrapers : -33% Gold-Cost for buying buildings

Big Ben + Merkantilism + Skyscrapers = -73% Gold-Cost for buying buildings = 27% costs
This is usually around or less than 1 Gold per hammer so you will buy factories rather than building them.

Together with increased income and happiness, commerce + order is a good combination for industrialized ICS.