Please help me choose an Ideology

Marshall Thomas said:

I'm playing my first game of BNW and the time has come for me to choose an ideology.

I'm having a difficult time choosing between Freedom and Order. Please help me decide.

I'm playing as Arabia and my gold income-per-turn is excellent. I also chose Mercantilism (-25% buying) and I've built Big Ben (-15% buying). So if I choose Skyscrapers, I'll have -70-something% when buying buildings! This makes Order extremely tempting.

The thing is (unless you are picking an ideology in Industrial from three factories) there aren't that many buildings you'll want left to buy. Your -40% might be enough and you're better to invest in other boosters.

My tourism is only +2, which is why I'm bee-lining radio in hope of building the Eiffel Tower.

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At this point you should probably give up on getting high tourism. You won't win culturally, that +12 won't help you that much, so there's not much point in focusing on that at the expense of what would help you win. Getting culture buildings up (like Broadcast Towers) will be important, because you won't be able to make up fast enough for your delay in increasing your tourism and it's the strength of your culture that will protect you from being pressured too early.

You might want to consider going for the Great Firewall if you fear an AI will win a culture victory before you meet a victory conditions. It stops the Internet effects (Internet doubles tourism... beware the raw numbers.. if they're high now, it might go downhill very fast once the Tourism leader(s) get Airports and Hotels, and if they're tall, their NVC and then they're close to the "closer" Internet that doubles everything... it can be game over in little turns once an AI gets to that).

The only other civ which has an Ideology is The Zulu and they have chosen Autocracy. My army is one of the smallest and the Zulu's is the largest; but luckily I don't share a border with them.

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Based on this situation, which Ideology do you recommend I choose? Thanks in advance.

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If you go for science victory, are you already quite in the lead in science? Do you have a great economy or great production cities? Do you have coal to build factories in all cities that produce a good amount of science? Order would get you a big science bonus for factories. If you can buy and produce GE, it also has a tenet that let you build spaceship parts with GE.
Freedom has a tenet that lets you buy spaceship parts. They go for around 5000 gold (on Marathon).

If you want to go for diplomacy, look at the tenets for each ideologies that help you with that.

Some Freedom tenets help with your culture, but they rely on your Great Works, so you've screwed a bit by neglecting them too much. Around the time you get Archeology is a good time to start increasing tourism if you've neglected guilds, cultural Wonders earlier. Modern Era or Industrial, +2 tourism.. the clock is ticking. Great Works help increasing culture too, they shouldn't be neglected when all you have to do is to build the guilds and assign specialists to get them. Archeology sites are more situational as you need to build archeologists (can't buy them) and they can waste turns spent on more important things if you're not going for a CV.

If your army is that bad, you might want to be careful about picking an ideology too soon. If you're tech leader or close you may no longer have that option, but if there are several AI about to pick one (I think unless they pick one in Industrial they usually pick one when they have between 196 and 204 in tech score) you might want to delay picking one, to go with the tourism leaders or your friends. With Autocracy the Zulus won't stay peaceful with Civs from differing ideologies. You might want to be on the "stronger side".

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Bad Wolf said:

I finished a culture victory with Order - found it wasn't exactly ideal for my chosen strategy, despite the fact that every ideology is supposed to be able to achieve a culture victory. The only real culture-boosting aspect of Order is the one that gives you a tourism bonus to other civs with less happiness than you - but the only civ who was really giving me a problem (China, which had a huge amount of culture) had WAY higher happiness than I did for most of the game, as they picked Order too and got all the happiness policies...

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EK834 said:

The thing is (unless you are picking an ideology in Industrial from three factories) there aren't that many buildings you'll want left to buy. Your -40% might be enough and you're better to invest in other boosters.

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