Why Liberty as opposed to Tradition.

I use to be a fairly frequent poster here, but stopped play Civ V and lost password, so this isn't actually my first post. I suddenly started playing again inspired by Beyond Earth.

I am playing at Emperor/Immortal level and unless I am doing a early warmonger go tradition all the time (i'll throw in a few picks on the honor side as war monger)

I thought I'd give liberty a chance a figured Roman is about as wide friendly Civ as is out there.

Imortal/continents/epic game. I got a good grassland/jungle river start with 3 gems, and marble. The first 2 CS I meet were religious so I got my Pantheon (+2 faith gems/pearls) without having to build a shrine. There were space for 4 new cities (2 toward other civs and 2 behind a mountain range. I wanted to grab one of the spots early so I went left side of liberty and foolishly built a worker (not finding any to steal).

I got 3 cities founded, connected 3 resource (4th was 3 hexes away), built the Pyramids and played until T125 when I realized that I wasn't going to be able to connect to the Iron for another 8 turns or so and with 2 happiness really couldn't expand to either of my back cities until I got Pagoda, CSs, or Colosseum. Nor did the Zulus look like a tempting target military target.

I restarted and this time went tradition. I tried to duplicate my start as best I could, I found the CS states a bit earlier but only got 30 culture and garbage (the first play through I got Archery, a weapon upgrade, culture, maps and barbarians.) Also the CS barbarian quests worked out for me better the first time. I only managed to build the Mausoleum (2 CS requested it)

Still at end of T125, my tradition score was 293 vs 263 for liberty. I had 4 workers on liberty vs 3 tradition and obviously they are more efficient, but on every other measure population (3 more for tradition), number of turns to complete the tree (17 tradition vs 26 liberty), infrastructure and tech etc, tradition was better.

Other than lower the culture cost and the free engineer for finishing liberty every thing else seems better about tradition. Realistically I am probably going to pause expansion to build the NC and hook up my cities. I would certainly get want 2 more cities for either tradition or liberty, but the extra money I from the capital and lower maintenance costs make would make it easier to buy the settlers than build.

So help me understand is there some huge advantage that Liberty has latter in the game that Tradition has if you aren't going for domination victory?

Liberty is better for going wide and getting early hammers. Early hammers are good for early infrastructure and early-ish war. There will be some time where liberty feels like it's floundering because tradition will have big cities and more science.

However, late game liberty will have more science and overtake tradition. This is because more cities make more science and obviously more production. 8 universities and 8 public schools make a lot more science than 4.

Also, later in the game you have so many trade routes that you can grow your cap massive by pointing 6 caravans at your cap. Tradition simply can't do that because it doesn't typically have 7 cities.

I find Liberty is tough to really take full advantage of. The bonuses to Wide play it offers really don't stack up to Tradition's all-around good bonuses until your empire is pretty damn wide.

The free Settler is kind of underwhelming in my experience; even if you get there as your third policy you've probably had to hard-build one settler already. Also, Tradition's +2 Food in Capital contributes to Settler production. The free monuments in Tradition also provide extra early hammers (40 per city!) and save Gold per Turn in maintenance costs. With early gold now being a scarce resource it's very nice to save even the 4 gpt that those Monuments cost.

Also, the Happiness and Gold from Monarchy are much better than the Happiness bonuses in Liberty. Say you're at 6 Cities - Liberty can give you +5 Happiness IF you get a road to all of them; these roads may about break even in terms of maintenance costs vs. revenue. Liberty will also give you a little 5% off unhappiness from Citizens, but to even get +1 Happy from this you need 20 citizens across those hypothetical 6 cities. Monarchy will give you all that if your Capital is at 12 Population, plus another 6 gpt to boot.

I think the real kicker is just how important getting a National College up is. If Liberty is fast-expanding, it's delaying the NC more or less until it's done founding new cities.

Not saying Liberty isn't playable, it's just that it's hard to make it play much better than Tradition. Liberty's bonuses are either total one-offs like the Settler or Worker, or they're bonuses to BEING a large empire - not necessarily the kind of bonuses that'd help you found a large and competitive one.

The best thing Liberty has over tradition is the repair/pillage abuse for wars. It's also good for all forms of early game conquests due to a free GP at the end and additional hammers.

But I almost always prefer to play a tradition game. Or you could always go with the trad/lib strategy.

I use almost only Liberty but not because it's better - more likely vice versa. Tradition is good and/or easy depending on one's pov especially when expansion isn't necessarily beneficial and more really isn't always better. Liberty is more fun and active. Usually balancing with happiness while keeping the economy up gives me something to do. Back in vanilla when the first DoW came @T20-30 life was diferent but in general Tradition should get hit by a nerf bat but it's probably too late for that. Liberty is fine but it usually requires more active playing.

For me Liberty is good at Rapid Settling, and when it is paired with Wide Religious and Science Tenets it can be brutal. However, at Emperor+ it becomes less effective/harder to go Wide and more effective/easier to go Tall. That being said, I am by no means saying that Wide cannot be played well on Emperor+ rather I am saying that it takes considerable effort to make it work; a fact which may reduce the fun factor of your game.

I just finish a game on deity level with liberty. Liberty is still quite good with civilisation like chinese or maya. Those nation have powerfull building that really make use of a large empire.

For me, Tradition is better for an early war if you want to keep the AIs placement. Liberty is only better for the early war if you want to burn down all non capitals and refound the AIs in their proper locations one or two hexes away from where they actually did.

Liberty's main edge is settler founding, the more settlers you build, the better it is. Tradition is much more about the massive happiness boost in the capital which due to global happiness translates directly into support of conquering more cities.

Self founding a total of 4 cities prior to ideologies is Traditions founding limit. (This includes the capital)
But self founding a total of 5 cities prior to then isn't really attacking advantage of Liberty's settlers either leaving it in no mans land. (Self found at least 6 for Liberty)

Tall Tradition also gets strong growth bonuses compared to Wide Liberty. It's not really total number of cities that matter with all science buildings but it's instead total population with all science buildings. Tradition also gets a boost with a higher percentage of the population getting the academy in the NC city boost along with the transition times of faster progress to all science buildings whenever a new tech revealing a new science is discovered especially if the science building is rushed in the capital. It's very common for the capital of a Tradition empire to be producing over 60% of the total empires science, especially with Food Cargo ships running to the capital. In fact, the main reason in BNW that a Tradition player upon conquering a city may be quickly annexing and cash buying science buildings in the conquests is just to get the newly conquered city to pay for the 5% increased tech cost.

Liberty tends to work better on large-huge maps where there is more space to settle. Also I would say the 6 city mark is around where Liberty starts to shine over Tradition. Tradition still benefits from a wide Civ due to Oligarchy (that can save you 1-5 gold per turn depending on what turn it is) and Aristocracy which produces 1 happiness per 10 citizens and the faster border growth.

Also the example you gave on Epic speed is really too early to conclude which is better and you didn't have enough cities down either to really make a proper Liberty game.
If you want to play a real wide game without being too militaristic you need to use your warrior and build 2 early scouts and immediately blockade another nearby AI, take their workers/settlers and forward settle them to take all their good city spots. That way you won't have to DoW later to conquer cities which risks more wars with AIs

Religion is key to a good wide game. If you have 3 pearls I guess Tears of the Gods is good (you will need to get happiness from other beliefs; probably Pagoda's and Religious Centre).
Without a good faith pantheon another option is to go Goddess of Love/Sacred Waters and do a hybrid Liberty/Piety opening. You unlock the free settler in Liberty then get Organised Religion. Faith and Religion works much better on a wide game. You should of course get Stonehenge on this strategy to compensate for the non-faith pantheon. Great Mosque is really good to get if you can as it generates a huge amount of faith and provides a myriad of other benefits. Obviously the earlier you get Grand Temple the better - it is one of the best sources of faith in the game.
Positioning is key to playing wide. You need to make good use of stone and horses for the extra happiness. If these are clustered around the map then try to position your cities so each one of them can get their own access to stone/horses if possible.

A stoneworks and Circus will completely negate the happiness penalty from a city. There are other tricks to work up to as well. Obviously if you are going to DoW on your neighbour to settle their land do it ASAP and before other Civs find you and that will negate warmonger penalties. That will make it much easier to trade/sell your luxuries.
If you have built stonehenge/pyramids that will start generating you an engineer point. It is well worth saving the engineer to rush Forbidden Palace (which requires a well-spent point in Patronage).
The weakness of Liberty is you can't buy Great Engineers with Faith in the industrial period. This is where Piety can come in handy. If you have unlocked Piety to Organised Religion you can sink another point in to get Mandate of Heaven when you are ready to start buying Pagoda's & Missionaries. Beyond that none of the policies are that essential so you can wait until you are closer to the Industrial age or later to finish filling out the Piety tree to get the Reformation belief 'To the Glory of God'. This allows you to buy any great person with faith.
As this belief doesn't kick in until the Industrial age there is no reason to rush Piety which is usually a very bad choice. But if you're resourceful and win the World Fair (if you have Forbidden Palace, you can propose it in the World Council) then you will have enough culture to fill out Piety also. Check your demographics screen - if you are number 1 on Manufactured Goods than you are guarantee to be able to win the World Fair - if you are number 3 or 4 then you need to start rushing workshops/stables/stoneworks, switch population to working mines, build ironworks and route trade routes internally for production, then you should be able to have enough production to win the World Fair). Also proposing the World Fair is one of the easiest ways to make a lot of AIs very happy with you.

If you are going for a wide game make sure you don't neglect culture. You still need at least 1 tall city (preferably on a river/coast tile) so you run food ships (if possible), build garden and National Epic for the +50% Great person bonus. That city should have Writers/Artists/Musicians guilds ASAP so you aren't missing out on culture and so you can start making a little tourism - this gives you more flexibility later with choosing Ideologies.
Also don't neglect citystate quests particularly Cultural citystates. My current game actually had a barb camp spawn about 6 tiles away from the city but they never gave me a quest to clear it. So instead I moved a swordsman unit nearby. I would use it to attack new barbs that spawned and damage them. Then I would move back into the Citystate and sit the unit on 'Alert' so once the barb moved to the edge of the Citystate I would kill the barb for 12 experience. So far I've done this several times and it's given me enough influence to remain allies even though I haven't had any other quests I can complete. That had provided about 30% of my early game culture.

you stop your experiment too early.
First you need min 6 cities to make liberty pay of, preferably 10.

There are 2 ways to achieve that
1) self found 10 cities - possible with liberty -piety approach. You grow your capital, may be build library there why beelining to free settler policy wise. after that almost non stop settler production in capital may be for a break for pyramids and a few composites. After free settler you put 3 policy into piety. Then order of next policies up to you.

Build order in new cities obelisk-shrine- coliseum (well granary in early cities). Basically you do not warry about grow your new cities, just connect lux and increase your fault production, so you can quickly found and enchant religions and start to buy religion happiness buildings everywhere. You religion policies concentrate on happiness.

2) Warmonger liberty. In that case you use your free settler to claim strategic resource and increase supply cap and start conquest as early as possible. You self found only 2-3 cities max, everything else come from war! You can go liberty- piety or liberty-honor for that, depends...

Mutineer said:

2) Warmonger liberty. In that case you use your free settler to claim strategic resource and increase supply cap and start conquest as early as possible. You self found only 2-3 cities max, everything else come from war! You can go liberty- piety or liberty-honor for that, depends...

Click to expand...

Warmonger tradition is much better at self founding 2 - 3 cites max and conquering the rest. That's very minimal use of Liberty's settler abilities.

Mutineer said:

you stop your experiment too early.
First you need min 6 cities to make liberty pay of, preferably 10.

There are 2 ways to achieve that
1) self found 10 cities - possible with liberty -piety approach. You grow your capital, may be build library there why beelining to free settler policy wise. after that almost non stop settler production in capital may be for a break for pyramids and a few composites. After free settler you put 3 policy into piety. Then order of next policies up to you.

Build order in new cities obelisk-shrine- coliseum (well granary in early cities). Basically you do not warry about grow your new cities, just connect lux and increase your fault production, so you can quickly found and enchant religions and start to buy religion happiness buildings everywhere. You religion policies concentrate on happiness.

2) Warmonger liberty. In that case you use your free settler to claim strategic resource and increase supply cap and start conquest as early as possible. You self found only 2-3 cities max, everything else come from war! You can go liberty- piety or liberty-honor for that, depends...

Click to expand...

I just tried the warmonger liberty as you say and tbh as much as it is wasting the settler abilities this approach works, now please excuse me as i fling 10 trebuchets at Amsterdam.

why would liberty be so good at war? How many tiles apart do you build cities with liberty?

I am new to favoring Liberty over Tradition, but I am finding it quite engaging. It is just fun to try and fill up the map more. (My games have all used standard setting, except raging barbs, Immortal, Continents Plus.)

GoStu said:

The free Settler is kind of underwhelming in my experience; even if you get there as your third policy you've probably had to hard-build one settler already.

Click to expand...

It's not the free settler that matters, it's them being half price. After the first one, every other build in cap is a settler, until all the great spots are filled. I actually find that my first settler comes later with Liberty than Tradition, because I do wait for the policy. Liberty cap means extra builds: Monument early then Pyramids later, so waiting for settler is okay. Having a reliable-to-obtain early Wonder is another perk of Liberty.

I think the real kicker is just how important getting a National College up is. If Liberty is fast-expanding, it's delaying the NC more or less until it's done founding new cities.

Click to expand...

This is my biggest speed bump, getting NC in earlyish. I am still working on that. Late game science is sweet of course.

Not saying Liberty isn't playable, it's just that it's hard to make it play much better than Tradition.

Click to expand...

I agree with that. But it is nice to have the option to be the civ filling the continent rather than letting the AI do it.

Liberty's bonuses are either total one-offs like the Settler or Worker, or they're bonuses to BEING a large empire - not necessarily the kind of bonuses that'd help you found a large and competitive one.

Click to expand...

Except that you missed the half-price settler feature. It's the most import item in the tree IMHO. (Well, the finisher GP is nice too, and so is being able to hard-build an early Wonder.)

beetle said:

(Well, the finisher GP is nice too, and so is being able to hard-build an early Wonder.)

Click to expand...

The Liberty finisher is rather misplaced since it's stepping on Piety's finisher's toe in addition to a free great person helping a small empire just as much as it would a wide empire.
But so are the Tradition bonuses to city bombardment (that portion fits more naturally in the Honor tree) and the portion of Tradition's finisher bonuses giving the +10% & +2 growth to all cities. (Limiting to just first 4 cities would fit the rest of tradition better)

Good feedback. I probably did end the experiment a bit early. Still in most maps I'm lucky to find 4 city site were I get either a new resource or multiple existing resource. In this game there are probably 6 sites total but getting the 4th one really means getting there soon and with 2 happiness, that seems kinda of pointless. Plus I want to get the NC built soonish. In a standard map I've never seen an opportunity to self found 10 cities, that seems just ridiculous at higher levels. Likewise, I was laughing at some of the wonder suggestions. Hell I hadn't even researched mathematics before HG was built, and both Stonehedge and GL were completed shortly after researching them.

One of the other disadvantages of liberty vs tradition is the slower growth in the capital means less science (2 less+1 for library). I am actually worried that I'll be so far behind in science that by the time the I get my finisher engineer there will be no wonders worth building. I guess a get scientist and found an academy instead?

Normally, on tradition I build 1 settler and buy the other 2. With liberty for the same time you can get 3 settlers saving you (2x680 gold). At 6 cities I can see the benefits of liberty. But I am normally happiness limited in the early (most important) part of the game. It seems to me that 3 or 4 max is naturally stopping point for the early game, until the infrastructure is complete NC is built. The other 2 or 3 cities are founded later, but often the computer settles there first largely negating the cheap settler advantage of liberty.

I will go back and try the game as soon as finish my Babylon cake walk. (This will be the first game I won without founding a religion. ) Being the first to get a religion as Rome is a lucky break (Pagodas, and tithe) and 18 Faith/turn is pretty decent amount. I should be able to prevent the AI from settling the other 2 locations if I avoid open borders and patrol a choke point.

When playing liberty, you are not going after NC.
I typically build NC after astronomy. You have no really reason to do so, as your capital relatively small, compare to tradition capital.

Instead I build couple archers and use them to limit one neibor to 1 city, by taking his settlers/workers. That free more space for my own cities(that if I go with self founded cities.)

Mutineer said:

When playing liberty, you are not going after NC.
I typically build NC after astronomy. You have no really reason to do so, as your capital relatively small, compare to tradition capital.

Instead I build couple archers and use them to limit one neibor to 1 city, by taking his settlers/workers. That free more space for my own cities(that if I go with self founded cities.)

Click to expand...

I agree with this. In fact you can catch up on science later quite easily. And often you might settle a city near a lot of jungle in which case a NC will fit quite nicely.

And besides say by turn 80 your liberty capital is around size 10.
You get 10 science from 10 population, 5 science from a library and 7.5 science from a National College. It's good but its not that good.
In my opinion you are better off prioritizing the writers guild and artists guild in a city with a river for a Garden and National Epic otherwise you miss out on that 12 culture per turn.

You get an additional 3 from the NC itself (so 4.5 with the NC modifier). A total of 12 in your example.

Liberty should still go for it in a reasonable amount of time.

When I go liberty I also take patronage for some reason. Otherwise there simply isn't enough happiness available to grow the cities without forbidden palace. I think India with liberty could be quite strong, I dunno. They could go either way I suppose. They have the late game happiness to grow all their cities to respectable levels.

I would go piety more often if the tree was a viable choice. As it currently stands, piety isn't viable policy tree IMO. No happiness policies at all, scarce gold policies early on. Great mosque is just... meh not very strong wonder in my opinion. Forbidden palace is actually a great wonder in comparison.

Piety could work with Egypt and Songhai with free upkeep temples, but with normal civs it's quite challenging to manage the gold upkeep.