How to compete early in science with Liberty tree?

Use your Finisher to get a free ge for NC. Mix the Pyramid wonder for max effect. Build 5-6 cities pre-NC.
 
You can use Liberty for SV. But you'll never ever be as fast as with Tradition.

It's a snowball effect. You need to build aqueduct (100 hammers each), so you need to tech enginerring before Education (105 beakers for Construction and 175 for Engineering), so you miss 2 to 3 pop before Education (tech Engineering and building aqueducts), so you can't fits writer's guild and universities slots. So you reach Renaissance later and open Rationalism later. And because you didn't end Tradition, you're cities don't growth 15% faster.
So you're always late relative to tradition.
And your free academie with Liberty finisher can't fill in this gap.

But spawning a 10 GS in a very short period of time can.
Also having lots of cities tends to mean lots of gold from both city connections as well as from all the extra resources you can sell which can be used to buy cultural CS to more than make up for the culture issue and allow you to keep up with social policies although that is a it luck dependent.

In my last game i went liberty on immortal and by the mid game i was churning out more culture, had more policies and was parity in tech with the AI and then my GS's starting popping and i went on a massive slingshot. I ended up reaching ideologies long before anyone else and revealing archeological sites before anyone else and thus decided as i was steam rolling i would go for my first cultural victory.
All the extra gold means you can also buy important buildings as well CS's for food as well as the culture i already mentioned. It also make grabbing a religion a lot easier so you can grab lots of happiness to fuel your growth so you can up as well as out.
I think the real key to a liberty wide strategy though is it needs to be aggressive. If you can take your neighbours out and annex their good cities so you can control what they build it is a lot easier and effective. People always seem to go for puppeting still which is bad with the culture cut puppets have as well as the extra science debuff for extra cities so you need to be controlling what they do to optimise them to make it worth it.
 
Use your Finisher to get a free ge for NC. Mix the Pyramid wonder for max effect. Build 5-6 cities pre-NC.

I have a feeling that using the GE for a happiness wonder like chichen itza or forbidden palace (Notre dame is too hard) might help more with science than an earlier NC.
 
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