Liberty THEN tradition

If I'm playing Immortal, I frequently get the free worker from Liberty before I fill out Tradition. I almost never go full liberty any more - my games just go better when I go tradition.

On Diety though, you don't have the luxury,so I usually go full Tradition (maybe making a detour the opener for Patronage if I have some good CS potential, or I'm playing Sweden).

Primacide said:

I agree here. I will frequently open commerce and go right to the -25% discount on building purchases (coupled with the very get-able -15% from Big Ben, it's just amazing). I rarely finish commerce unless the game turns into a Dom fest. If that happens, I will generally come back and finish commerce because I have conquered a wide range of cities with unique luxes. The happiness bump is great.

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Yes - this is my standard SP pathing for almost all my space race games as well as my dom games. Additionally, if I'm still sandboxing at that point, it's my go-to: full tradition, commerce to mercantilism, full rationalism, ideology goodies. But the thread is about liberty followed by tradition, which I maintain is a decent option IF you're playing without rationalism, which is admittedly sub-par and I'm only doing as a refreshing change of pace, and BTW highly recommend to players looking to change the scenery.

Additionally (and I was thinking of starting a new thread about this, but it seems appropriate enough here) I'm simply looking for a way to make Liberty work at all in SP deity. We all know that happiness is going to be VERY tight, probably going to have a decent % of total turns at 1/4 growth. Plus, we all know that the economy is potentially going to be problematic as well.

But the big problem that I've been having in the few consecutive games that I've tried Liberty on Deity is that the AI simply expands too fast. Liberty should have at least 6 cities to take advantage of its bonuses, but I find that by the time the 4th settler (for 5th city) rolls out, they've trolled all but the most useless of nearby territory. Yes, you could clear the land with early aggression, but that will add warmonger hate to the eminent land-jealousy hate that Liberty implies, meaning that you're already frail economy suffers even more.

So my question: The only setting that I seem to be able to make Liberty work in SP-Deity is Polynesia on an archipelago. Anyone have any other suggestions for maps on Deity where you'll be able to set up your cities without having to bulldoze first?

It really depends on your start, most starts don't seem to support peaceful liberty, but sometimes you do get isolated starts and they are great for liberty play.
Of course, comp bow rushing your nearest neighbour out of existence works too, especially if you are on Continents where the other half of the world won't know of your genocides.

gobbledydook said:

It really depends on your start, most starts don't seem to support peaceful liberty, but sometimes you do get isolated starts and they are great for liberty play.
Of course, comp bow rushing your nearest neighbour out of existence works too, especially if you are on Continents where the other half of the world won't know of your genocides.

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Yeah, forgot about this one,but it does work well. Is there any map that's coded to both make it likely for you to start on a landmass with only one or two other civs AND prevent the other side of the world from meeting you pre-astronomy? Small continents does pretty well giving you the right sized landmass, but the rest of the world can often meet you with triremes. Regular continents works this way about half the time, but since you won't really know what the landmass looks like until after you've opened Liberty, it leads to quite a few tough games, re-rolls, and ragequits.

ShakaKhan said:

But the big problem that I've been having in the few consecutive games that I've tried Liberty on Deity is that the AI simply expands too fast. Liberty should have at least 6 cities to take advantage of its bonuses, but I find that by the time the 4th settler (for 5th city) rolls out, they've trolled all but the most useless of nearby territory. Yes, you could clear the land with early aggression, but that will add warmonger hate to the eminent land-jealousy hate that Liberty implies, meaning that you're already frail economy suffers even more.

So my question: The only setting that I seem to be able to make Liberty work in SP-Deity is Polynesia on an archipelago. Anyone have any other suggestions for maps on Deity where you'll be able to set up your cities without having to bulldoze first?

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Well, playing on a Large or Huge map increases the map size disproportionately to the number of civs. That is to say, even though 12 civs is 50% more than 8 civs, the huge map is nearly 150% larger than the standard map (128x80 vs. 80x52). Assuming the land is distributed equally, this gives each player 64% more room to expand. Of course, on Deity, it probably won't be distributed equally. But in my experience with huge maps, and given that you're fairly experienced yourself, I don't think it'd be too hard to get to 6 cities with Liberty.

Be forewarned though that the AI also gets that much more room to expand. So if you're thinking to go from 4 cities to 6 cities, then expect the AI to go from 6 cities to 15 cities, and the per-city science penalty for that is reduced from like 5% to I think 2%. But that should at least make Liberty viable. Almost mandatory, even. I tried the standard 4-city tradition as the Inca, had good growth thanks to a number of high-food terrace farms, expanded to a 5th but way too late (Renaissance or maybe even Industrial), and lost a science race by just a few turns to Gustavus Adolphus who had acquired some 25 cities or so through warfare.

fyar said:

Well, playing on a Large or Huge map increases the map size disproportionately to the number of civs. That is to say, even though 12 civs is 50% more than 8 civs, the huge map is nearly 150% larger than the standard map (128x80 vs. 80x52). Assuming the land is distributed equally, this gives each player 64% more room to expand. Of course, on Deity, it probably won't be distributed equally. But in my experience with huge maps, and given that you're fairly experienced yourself, I don't think it'd be too hard to get to 6 cities with Liberty.

Be forewarned though that the AI also gets that much more room to expand. So if you're thinking to go from 4 cities to 6 cities, then expect the AI to go from 6 cities to 15 cities, and the per-city science penalty for that is reduced from like 5% to I think 2%. But that should at least make Liberty viable. Almost mandatory, even. I tried the standard 4-city tradition as the Inca, had good growth thanks to a number of high-food terrace farms, expanded to a 5th but way too late (Renaissance or maybe even Industrial), and lost a science race by just a few turns to Gustavus Adolphus who had acquired some 25 cities or so through warfare.

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That sounds awesome! But alas, I don't think my machine can handle it I found that the game runs much better on small maps, when I played standard, it started to take almost a minute between turns around turn 220-250, and it was obvious that I needed to finish the game before turn 300 (which actually made playing at deity more practical; since you can siphon beakers and techs, the game usually finishes earlier.) I'd hate to play large or huge, get 150 turns in, get really into it, and then just have to abandon the game.

ShakaKhan said:

That sounds awesome! But alas, I don't think my machine can handle it I found that the game runs much better on small maps, when I played standard, it started to take almost a minute between turns around turn 220-250, and it was obvious that I needed to finish the game before turn 300 (which actually made playing at deity more practical; since you can siphon beakers and techs, the game usually finishes earlier.) I'd hate to play large or huge, get 150 turns in, get really into it, and then just have to abandon the game.

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Gotcha. Well truth be told, a minute between turns is typical for me also on huge maps during late Deity games. Especially because I leave the animations on -- I'm just a sucker for watching them for some reason, but if I'm at war with an AI using great war bombers, I have time to go to the bathroom just during a single great war bombing run. If you turn off all the animations and it still takes that long, I don't blame you.

I might suggest then just playing a standard sized map, but then go to Advanced Setup and delete a few civs. Maybe reduce from 8 to 6. Or if you feel that only beating 5 AIs cheapens the victory, you could try a large map but reduce it from 10 to 8 civs. Maybe even just reducing the number of city-states might help your processing speed. I think the bigger determining factor isn't so much the size of the map but the number of units out on the map. On Deity, even city-states spam like a dozen units each late in the game.

Sclb said:

Commerce protectionism is good for domination based wide game, not peaceful. You will have to actively conquer civs to get luxury especially if they hate you because of your wide empire and rapid expand.

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I guess an early domination game certainly - but you have to make sure that you are well on track for a turn 200 win. If it turns into a late game turtle you don't want to your happiness to be dependent on buying luxuries or suffer from WC bans. That was the problem I found when I put 100% focus on Protectionism for Happiness for a peaceful SV. I couldn't declare war on my neighbor who was nearly finishing the space ship because I'd take a 36 happiness hit! -ouch! Plus importing 6 luxuries was costing 54gpt - not exactly cheap!

If you were to finish the Liberty tree I honestly think Tradition is a poor choice - you would be better with a few points in Exploration or Commerce. Even Piety is a solid choice if you have enough faith to be able to make good use of The Glory of God reformation, You'll be able to buy engineers, scientists, writers, artists etc....

Redaxe said:

I guess an early domination game certainly - but you have to make sure that you are well on track for a turn 200 win. If it turns into a late game turtle you don't want to your happiness to be dependent on buying luxuries or suffer from WC bans. That was the problem I found when I put 100% focus on Protectionism for Happiness for a peaceful SV. I couldn't declare war on my neighbor who was nearly finishing the space ship because I'd take a 36 happiness hit! -ouch! Plus importing 6 luxuries was costing 54gpt - not exactly cheap!

If you were to finish the Liberty tree I honestly think Tradition is a poor choice - you would be better with a few points in Exploration or Commerce. Even Piety is a solid choice if you have enough faith to be able to make good use of The Glory of God reformation, You'll be able to buy engineers, scientists, writers, artists etc....

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No, any domination game. I dunno what you're referencing specifically, but Commerce ends your happiness problems if you're sufficiently wide. Obviously it's not going to do anything if you have 8 gems and no other luxes in your empire, but since every capital has clumped different luxes, once you own 2-3 capitals, you have no issues with happiness anymore.

I've run into exactly zero problems on any domination when I've followed the simple rule - Commerce is better than Rationalism. Once you start delaying that Commerce finisher, that's when you get into trouble. Honor/Commerce/Autocracy works for any domination game length, and it works amazingly well. There's a difference between 5-6 city wide, and domination wide.

Domination wide pretty much is at least as wide as liberty self founded, and is usually much larger than that depending on how many cities you keep. If you have a good ideology combined with lucky captured AI capitals with sufficient tourism/culture, you can easily support empires with more than 20 captured cities. Usually it's better to raze the extra cities to prevent tech cost increases but it can be done if you want a massive empire or after points.