Science Victory: Freedom or Order?

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.

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