But wait, if you choose to go freedom you'll have to invest more hammers in the mid game in culture to generate the additional 3 social policies necessary to finish freedom as opposed to order and unless you can time a GE near the end you probably can't get Hubble and you'll miss out on the additional 2 GS it provides although you'll probably pop one with the additional spawn rate that freedom provides.
Edit: If you aren't going for RAs do you take the two policies in Rarionalism and jump to Order/Freedom and then come back? I just recent did just that with freedom and it timed out to finish my last too technologies with the finisher( unfortunately Catherine beat me to again. at t278).
With a competitive OCC start (petra) hammers aren't that big an issue and you will have plenty of spare hammers to build culture buildings. In particular, culture should be your 2nd infrastructure focus after science building in any OCC - even if you don't go freedom.
As for RAs. In my T219 victory, I actually delayed the RA bonus from rationalism until after full freedom. I suspect I would've shoved another 3-5 turns off if I went for it since I had so many RAs going. It was a hard pick - I wanted to get at least the +2 culture per wonder rolling as soon as possible to achieve my goal of demonstrating full freedom+rat+trad+ 3/6 patronage was quite achievable. In the end, I hit full freedom around turn 175-180 so I would very likely have benefited more by delaying that to 190 but getting an extra 10 or so RAs with that +50%.
So in short, if you get very few RAs, definitely skip that SP for freedom it will compound for much more than the RA bonus especially if you have PT (which you should) since it turns the relative bonus from 50% to 33% (go from 150% to 200%).
Not arguing for Freedom, but it's possible to hard-build Hubble if you have a few decently productive cities that can build SS parts.
Yes it is. Especially on lower difficulties. But I generally find myself hard building hubble around turn 230-240 on deity because saving that 1k-1.5k faith on a GE allows me to snap an extra GS (talking typical 4+ cities tradition tall science where order > freedom). In the T219 victory deity game, I could've easily hard built it (I could even have wasted one or 2 GSs earlier to get the tech around turn 180 to hard build it) but since the goal was to achieve optimal turn to victory, I wanted to save my GS bulbs for when my BPT had been 8-turn optimal and thus needed the hammers from GE in order to build all spaceship parts-1 by the time I were to tech the last part tech.
Then again, it is significantly easier to time GE+GS pop in an OCC in the late game. I've done it in my last 4 OCCs just randomly looking at my GP points about 20 turns from hubble and then allocating some more GPs left and right to achieve timing.
This is generally my biggest problem is culture (non-OCC) games. I'm getting a lot quicker on my science victories (playing immortal) but I still struggle to get my culture high enough. Plus if I'm annexing some other AIs cap's to improve my science it slows my culture down.
I probably need to focus on culture buildings a bit earlier.
I still haven't player Korea so might give them a shot.
Korea or Babylon will have a bigger impact on your turn to victory than culture will. However, culture is significantly underestimated by players and it is often a big component of deity players' success.
In games where you don't have many culture CSs or spammed wonders, annexing cities should actually slightly improve your turn-to-SP, if you build/purchase culture buildings as necessary. Obviously this is quite rare in 4 city trad style but sometimes, a lame combo of ghengis khan and Ghandi or Ramses can lead to it. The main thing I've been trying to do lately which has really improved my science games is to knock hermitage in capital between hard built PT and teched scientific revolution. At worse, its the first thing after public school, even if it means buying the opera house instead of a public school in a marginal city. Getting factories bonus earlier will compound to the slight loss of a single delayed public school by 10-20 turns.
I'm curious as to how other people respond to this situation. 99/100 I tell the AI to screw off to keep my relations with the CS high. Most of the time it doesn't seem to really affect my relationship with the AI. There was one time I was friends with Japan with RAs and all game he was harassing CS and I kept telling him to bugger off. He kept renewing my friendship too.
I was almost sure he was going to backstab me but never did. I don't even think twice now and just keep the relations with the CS when this decision needs to be made.
Outside OCC, I always tell the AIs to f off. The diplo hit is, indeed, quite small. However, for OCC, everything is so tight and you also get so many more diplo hits from wonder spamming and allying as many CSs as you can for patronage that it can turn out to be the break between a DoF+RA and just a 208g/lux trader. My point was mostly that the net gain from "friendship" was already significantly offset by winning all of the faith/culture/science quests as well as most wonder quest.
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). But I will try to give it a shot before BNW. Hopefully.
and puppetting an AI Cap or 2. Really only need 2 workers in OCC.
All the above is the pros of OCC. In certain way it's much easier than regular game. In another it's much harder.
