We are currently playing a game and he is leading in a lot of the key fields on the grounds he opened Tradition and I opened Liberty. ..Tradition is unbeatable if you are going to keep 4 or less cities and still works well with Liberty once you have finished the Tradition tree whereas the reverse is not true for Liberty because you need more than 4 cities to justify opening with it to begin with.
It's still early days yet. We're what, less than 20 turns in?
Opening with Liberty requires a vastly different play-style completely, more akin to an RTS where you need to expand rapidly and always maintain aggression which in a slow, turn by turn based game like Civ5 many players are tripped up by and understandably just take Tradition instead.
This is what I keep hoping to see demonstrated (and may still this game!). I want to see Liberty be awesome at something. I've outlined the issues I ran into when I tried it. I tried to go wide and ran into massive gold and happiness issues which basically meant my cities never produced enough science/production to be worth having so many. I'd love to see a game where Liberty out-performs Trad.
Thank you for the post game report Filthyrobot. It seems you came to some conclusions by yourself on where you could have done better and I didn't feel there was much to add to what you already surmised. Byzantium is certainly not a very good pick for a Liberty opener but I find them a weak pick no matter what. 1 extra religious pick really does little to save them and as you experienced first hand she really doesn't have much you can fall back on to help clutch out a victory.
I did actually win that duel, just ;p
I really liked the Byzantium, cataphracts were amazing, tithe+church property was the only thing that keep me in positive gold, and in a duel you're 100% going to get a religion founded, which circumvents one of Byzantine's major weaknesses.
What I didn't like was how weak Liberty felt, even with a religion that provided 3-4g and 3 happiness per city. I STILL was gold and happiness starved the entire game. I'd have expected that Byzantine would have been one of the
strongest Liberty civs, since their UA addresses many of the Liberty weaknesses.
There's been some good criticism of my religion picks in the game I posted about, so that probably contributed, but you're not ALWAYS going to get pagodas, so what happens when you've gone Liberty and not gotten them? What do you do then?
Maybe our current duel will shed some more light, I can hope! Good luck!