Pretty much spot on. For cultural victories, Freedom is especially better at higher level difficulties where the Immortal/Deity AIs get an extreme happiness bonus, making it much harder to utilize order's tourism bonus. Freedom's tourism bonus is more consistent.
I think overall the ideologies are pretty balanced, maybe Autocracy needing a little boost.
Immortal/Deity AI may get happiness bonuses, but their growth and width is more than enough to burn it all away and become even or less than the player's. Very often, there's only one AI that has run away with happiness, and usually, the happiness is due to having many happiness wonders, and not any inherent bonuses.
I don't know that autocracy needs a boost directly, but making the warmonger penalties less stupid would indirectly be all the buff Autocracy needs, IMO.
Uh, no offense, but are we even playing the same game?
Order's tier 3 bonuses are 100% inferior to Freedom's.
There is a tourism bonus in both; Freedom's is better because it only requires having a broadcast tower as opposed to more happiness than the AI.
Freedom's sounds better at first because "oh hey, +33% just for building a broadcast tower!" Unfortunately, it is not a final, "take everything together" modifier. What I mean by this is, look at the influence page. Mouse over total +% to total influence. These are final, everything together modifiers, and they are inherently stronger than bonuses to city tourism, because they work against the ideology penalty, and modify all cities automatically, with no further input required. Having more happiness as Order will be enough to totally negate the ideology penalty, which means the Order player can have a +100% bonus with other civs with Trade Route, Religion, Open Borders, and Diplomat -- even more than if your ideologies were the same, while simultaneously blocking your own tourism. Order also starts to get a large bonus with other Order civs in Tier 2, and Freedom never gets a bonus to other Freedom civs (though you might argue that this is part of what Media Culture does), so their culture victory will inevitably be slower.
Arguably, Freedom does get a larger boost from the World Games Win than Order does, but Order has a FAR larger chance of actually winning the world games, because they have HUGE production bonuses, and are rewarded for building factories in every city. Tall, thin empires generally have a lot of trouble winning the World Games, because they just don't have that massive combined hammer output that wide Order/Autocracy empires do.
Once again, though, this is a case of Freedom having more accessible bonuses at the cost of potential effectiveness. Freedom is "easy", and if none of the other special conditions line up, it has an advantage over the other two, because its bonuses never go away. However, the other two pull ahead when their special conditions do line up, as a counterbalance for being limited. Since the AI loves Order, Freedom is vulnerable to World Ideology, which, if passed, will almost inevitably activate Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Naturally, this is uncommon, and Freedom can just as easily wreck Order's plans with their greater number of city-states, so it all depends on the game.
There is a spaceship bonus in both; Freedom's is better because it allows the purchase of spaceship parts with gold, whereas Order's requires... expending a great engineer? WTF? And 10 science? I'm getting thousands of science per turn and you want to give me 10 more? Even with % bonuses it's not a significant increase in tech. It might speed my entire tech process up by 1 turn.
Perhaps we should look at the greater picture and not just the tier 3 tenet: Order gets a science bonus from each factory, as well as +1 Science(/food/gold/production) per city, and since Order is for wide empires, that adds up to quite a lot of science. Actually finishing the spaceship is almost never the problem with winning science victory, it's getting the science, and on that front, Order has every tool it needs to get ahead, more than surpassing its science penalty. Order also has an easier time of protecting its own science, thanks to Double Agents, so once it gets ahead, it tends to stay ahead, while still being able to steal techs from Freedom/Autocracy.
Then there's a weirder comparison wherein Order gets free courthouses on city capture whereas Freedom can get free influence with city states for trade routes. Do the gold math on that and see which is better, ie, cost of influence in terms of gold versus cost of a courthouse.
Now that's a silly comparison to make, because they both do completely different things, and are not comparable to each other at all.
On that note, however, Iron Curtain is actually quite useful, because it means you don't have to wait for resistance to end in order to get a city with normal happiness. Another useful side effect of this is, because you MUST annex a city in order to raze it, you suffer a much lower unhappiness hit when razing. It's a solid tenet, if situational.
