No other way but Tradition

layelaye said:

For some reason you all consider Tradition vs Liberty to be Tall vs Wide, when infact i play tradition exclusively and still go wide, simply because tradition is more powerful at wide play then liberty.

the "fast settler" in liberty is 3 policies in, and you have to build a monument for it to come at any reasonable rate. When i feel like fast expanding, i get a settler as soon as my cap hits 2 or 3 pop. at this point i cant get 3 policies in liberty, but might be able to get 3 policies with tradition. traditions extra food actually translates into production when building settlers, if you go over what you need to feed your citizens, and in those early stages it often translates to 40-50% faster build speed on the settler.

gold and happyness- no point in discussing. monarchy and oligarchy destroys liberty in that aspect, even with a tiny cap monarchy will outdo in gold and happyness what the entire liberty tree can offer.

The free buildings in traditon are essential for Fast expansion, faaar outdoing libertie's building bonus in both production and GPT. and for some reason they work for 4 cities instead of 3 or 2, which makes tradition very viable when pursuing anj 8-city wide empire, as i often do.

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It's really not. You can run the math for it (and I have). Assuming same speed of settlements, if you settle 7 cities and the game goes on for 300 turns, liberty is already winning out on resource gain. Liberty also, obviously, let's you expand a bit faster in the early game. In the 6-7 city range, there are good arguments for tradition over liberty or vice versa, but wider than that, and you're arguing personal preference over actual bonuses.

I think a good balance would be more of a happiness perk for liberty. That would make going wwide more viable.

Agree with a lot of what has been said. Piety and Honour are fun in their own way, but mostly what we're looking at here is Tradition vs Liberty.

In favour of Liberty, I'd note that you can get the faster initial expansion with Liberty, which makes it more useful on smaller maps as you can grab good city sites faster vs the AI. I've often found on smaller maps that with Tradition by the time I'm looking to place my fourth city, the site I want for it is taken. With Liberty, cities 2 and 3 found at roughly the same time.
The biggest thing for Tradition though is the early Great Person, which lets face it, is going to be Great Scientist most of the time, or Prophet/Engineer for specific gameplans. An early academy means the tide turns in favour of the player sooner, as its catching up in tech that normally makes a player's win possible.
Specific strategies might benefit more from Liberty too: I'm thinking Venice could do really well out of getting two MoVs out of Liberty, and that from Tradition all they are really REALLY wanting is monarchy, which can be grabbed after finishing Liberty and while waiting for Rationalism.

I still prefer Tradition, however, as I have a tendency for liking food cargo ships and huge capitals, and Tradition is plain better for that approach. Also, I like that completed Tradition gives you the option of spending Faith on a Great Engineer in the Industrial period, whereas Liberty doesn't give you ant faith spend options. Yes, I'm aware that the best players don't reach the Industrial period, but my playstyle rarely results in me winning before then.

I can see, however, that a stronger and better player than me can probably leverage a shorter game time to win out of Liberty than Tradition, simply because of the hammers saved in building a Settler.

Arcaian said:

Whereas you're so used to liberty, you'd have to drop 3 difficulty levels if you wanted to play tradition, get used to it and play up, like we'd have to do for liberty.

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I doubt it, but maybe you will need to drop a difficulty level for a single game. There are not comparable, Tradition is mostly autopilot, liberty require HEAVY tile management, growth management, CS management, diplo management... to get a good track and match Tradition.

Liberty is able to match tradition only in best circumstances, and only thanks to the ability to drop your initial cities much faster. Droping the 4 cities on turn 50 is great, but to get the happiness going doing so and growing those cities at a decent pace... Is not easy at all.

Honor and Piety don't get better with any metric, and only very few civs should start with them (I think this was intended).

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Don't think so. I think the intention is to support different behaviours: Tall? Wide? Combat? Religion? You got your tree. But on practice is far away from that.

Tradition gives too many bonuses, honor is plain bad design: doesn't actually support having an army with the early economy broken. Piety mostly affecting religion can't compite with all the bonuses you get from Trad/liberty, and desesperately calls for culture.

adwcta said:

In the 6-7 city range, there are good arguments for tradition over liberty or vice versa, but wider than that, and you're arguing personal preference over actual bonuses.

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Is not actual bonuses, momentum has a lot to do with it. Is truth and I'm totally agree with his arguments, I also felt comfortable going wide and using Tradition, you lose a bit on the culture department (just for the culture cut per city from liberty), but oh, for the rest you have the upper hand for everything.

layelaye said:

For some reason you all consider Tradition vs Liberty to be Tall vs Wide, when infact i play tradition exclusively and still go wide, simply because tradition is more powerful at wide play then liberty.

the "fast settler" in liberty is 3 policies in, and you have to build a monument for it to come at any reasonable rate. When i feel like fast expanding, i get a settler as soon as my cap hits 2 or 3 pop. at this point i cant get 3 policies in liberty, but might be able to get 3 policies with tradition. traditions extra food actually translates into production when building settlers, if you go over what you need to feed your citizens, and in those early stages it often translates to 40-50% faster build speed on the settler.

gold and happyness- no point in discussing. monarchy and oligarchy destroys liberty in that aspect, even with a tiny cap monarchy will outdo in gold and happyness what the entire liberty tree can offer.

The free buildings in traditon are essential for Fast expansion, faaar outdoing libertie's building bonus in both production and GPT. and for some reason they work for 4 cities instead of 3 or 2, which makes tradition very viable when pursuing anj 8-city wide empire, as i often do.

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Yeah, if you're hard-building a settler in your capital at population 2 then you're doing something pretty weird. That's gonna be a massive build time, and significantly inhibit growth. I haven't done the tests, but I can't see any way that would help you. The food does translate to extra production, but it's very inefficient. You can see this yourself - stop working a 3 food tile and start working a 2 hammer tile and your production time will rise. The growth bonus doesn't compete with 50% cheaper building for the amount of production saved, definitely. Do the maths/tests if you like.

In terms of gold and happiness, in an 8 city empire you'll have 7 city connections, which is equal to the happiness gained from a pop 14 capital. I'm sure if you played tradition you'd have a pop 14 capital by the time a liberty player would get 7 cities down, but if you're trying to get that many cities down you're probably inhibiting your caps growth a bit (with both settler production and taking some of the caps land) unless you're really lucky with AI expansion. Even if going your tradition-wide route you get the cap to size 16-20 there is only a difference of 1-3 happiness, hardly massive. Gold on the other hand you're correct - there's simply a lack of gold producing policies in liberty, which can make it quite hard to afford some of the troops made. Markets remove the problem anyway, so it's not a problem for long, plus the bonus from city connections means you'll be getting gold from them before tradition does normally.

There are only 2 free buildings in Tradition - the monument and the aqueduct. Both are very powerful, but I hardly see how they're so great for a wide empire. The monument would allow you to get some more social policies at the start, but going wide liberty would quickly catch up to you, as liberty has the cheaper social policies option. The aqueduct will allow faster growth, but happiness and not food limits growth in wide empires until the point where 5-10 happiness is dwarfed by other means.

Ninakoru said:

I doubt it, but maybe you will need to drop a difficulty level for a single game. There are not comparable, Tradition is mostly autopilot, liberty require HEAVY tile management, growth management, CS management, diplo management... to get a good track and match Tradition.

Liberty is able to match tradition only in best circumstances, and only thanks to the ability to drop your initial cities much faster. Droping the 4 cities on turn 50 is great, but to get the happiness going doing so and growing those cities at a decent pace... Is not easy at all.

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No, I definitely find Liberty much harder. I don't know how much of that is my reliance on Oligarchy for defence, the happiness from tradition, etc. The happiness is definitely possible - though Liberty benefits more than most from settling nice spots and stealing workers to work the spots - but involves a lot more work. Need to only work the spots you need in the cities early on, get as many CS quests done for mercantile CSs, sometimes trading your strategic resources for luxury resources and the like. I find it very difficulty, but I've seen people who make it look like a breeze, so it definitely is possible.

Essentially liberty starts off more slowly than tradition, then presuming tradition went tall, liberty plays a catch up game. Once liberty has the happiness to grow 8 cities to a decent level, it's obviously gonna catch up to tradition at some point. The wider you go, the longer the period at the start where you fall behind and the faster you can catch up. An excellent liberty player can catch up fast enough to be at least competitive in a science victory (with the added advantage of less reliance on the capital, so less risk) but you have to be excellent. Most liberty players probably can't - this is something else BNW did. It made the game quicker - many victories can be obtained earlier in BNW than in G&K.

Basically, my changes for balance to Liberty would be this:

- For the finisher of liberty, reduce the science penalty, maybe from 5% to 3% on a standard map? Would allow a faster catch-up science wise.

- Make the NC give a 25% science boost, add the 25% taken off to Oxford University - it'll discourage the saving Oxford many people do (seems a bit cheap to instantly get a tech like dynamite or even flight/radar from like 2 turns of production). It'll allow a less static opening for many builds, and on top of that liberty wouldn't be in such trouble.

Arcaian said:

No, I definitely find Liberty much harder. I don't know how much of that is my reliance on Oligarchy for defence, the happiness from tradition, etc. The happiness is definitely possible - though Liberty benefits more than most from settling nice spots and stealing workers to work the spots - but involves a lot more work. Need to only work the spots you need in the cities early on, get as many CS quests done for mercantile CSs, sometimes trading your strategic resources for luxury resources and the like. I find it very difficulty, but I've seen people who make it look like a breeze, so it definitely is possible.

Essentially liberty starts off more slowly than tradition, then presuming tradition went tall, liberty plays a catch up game. Once liberty has the happiness to grow 8 cities to a decent level, it's obviously gonna catch up to tradition at some point. The wider you go, the longer the period at the start where you fall behind and the faster you can catch up. An excellent liberty player can catch up fast enough to be at least competitive in a science victory (with the added advantage of less reliance on the capital, so less risk) but you have to be excellent. Most liberty players probably can't - this is something else BNW did. It made the game quicker - many victories can be obtained earlier in BNW than in G&K.

Basically, my changes for balance to Liberty would be this:

- For the finisher of liberty, reduce the science penalty, maybe from 5% to 3% on a standard map? Would allow a faster catch-up science wise.

- Make the NC give a 25% science boost, add the 25% taken off to Oxford University - it'll discourage the saving Oxford many people do (seems a bit cheap to instantly get a tech like dynamite or even flight/radar from like 2 turns of production). It'll allow a less static opening for many builds, and on top of that liberty wouldn't be in such trouble.

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Liberty also seems harder because if you have a great starting location (food, river, 6-8 resources), it doesn't make much sense to pick Liberty over Tradition. So to make a case to pick Liberty over Tradition, you need a less easy start to the game.

dashwinner said:

I'd want to like piety, but with the aggressivity of the AI towards trying to jam their religion down your throat, it becomes more of a frustration than anything else. In truth, I don't really prioritize religion anymore. faith yes, but i can usually choose which of the AIs religion i prefer and focus on other things

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Piety's quite useful, but not in isolation. I think it's wrong to look at either Piety or Honor as a substitute for Tradition or Liberty - these are second trees or trees to mix and match. Most religion, for instance, is favoured by wide empires, as are the Piety opener and faith bonus from shrines/temples, so Piety is a supplementary tree to Liberty.

As a tree in its own right, the one thing that kills Piety is simply this: alone of all the starting trees, it doesn't have an opener (or even any policies) that boost culture output, and the one thing you want your first opener to do is accelerate your progress towards future policies. Honor has a limitation in this regard in lacking consistency, but it can be a culture farm in the right contexts (and is always good as a money machine once you complete it).

PhilBowles said:

As a tree in its own right, the one thing that kills Piety is simply this: alone of all the starting trees, it doesn't have an opener (or even any policies) that boost culture output, and the one thing you want your first opener to do is accelerate your progress towards future policies. Honor has a limitation in this regard in lacking consistency, but it can be a culture farm in the right contexts (and is always good as a money machine once you complete it).

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Spot on. As it stands, Piety is not viable as a stand-alone opener. And I don't love taking it as a second tree, because, at least for me, commerce and rationalism are better 9x out of 10. Possible solution: +x culture for shrines/temples?

I actually found very effective way to play piety first start for some civs and starting sites.
I always play on immortal level.

Main condition for piety start to work is production rich start. Way to play: never build a single worker. Usual build order is 2-3 scouts, shrine after L1 piety, warrrior or archer- settler.

Basically start is to have perma war with 1-2 neighbors, stealing workers capturing settlers slowing down opponents.

eventually make peace with one you less successful in containing and take capital of second. I like to get city for peace with first one. After that it is usual game. You own cities stay very small hammer rich for very long time.

Explanation, tradition save you a lot production, free buildings and give a lot of happiness. By stealing workers you use your production rich start to hold down opponents. Eventually you get ahead in research not by having 1 big capital but lot of smaller cities (about 5-6) and exploring your religion.

vivalamexico said:

Spot on. As it stands, Piety is not viable as a stand-alone opener. And I don't love taking it as a second tree, because, at least for me, commerce and rationalism are better 9x out of 10. Possible solution: +x culture for shrines/temples?

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Piety is pretty good for civs that have a Shrine/Temple UB. Maya, Egypt, Songhai.

But there should be something that generates culture based on faith. Now if you have a lot of faith, for example with Spain hitting a faith Natural Wonder, the piety tree has little to offer and that is counterintuitive. Maybe a certain percentage of faith is returned as empire wide culture, the same as happiness with one of the Aesthetics policies. Or when you spend faith on a unit or a building, you get culture at that point, if you don't want to duplicate mechanisms.

Calouste said:

Piety is pretty good for civs that have a Shrine/Temple UB. Maya, Egypt, Songhai.

But there should be something that generates culture based on faith. Now if you have a lot of faith, for example with Spain hitting a faith Natural Wonder, the piety tree has little to offer and that is counterintuitive. Maybe a certain percentage of faith is returned as empire wide culture, the same as happiness with one of the Aesthetics policies. Or when you spend faith on a unit or a building, you get culture at that point, if you don't want to duplicate mechanisms.

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I do agree it's a problem - it's very hard to advance the social policies of Piety, mostly because you have so little culture.

Arcaian said:

I do agree it's a problem - it's very hard to advance the social policies of Piety, mostly because you have so little culture.

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Play civ which can use religion to get culture.

Siam is an example.

Mutineer said:

Play civ which can use religion to get culture.

Siam is an example.

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That's like saying that Honour isn't a useless starting policy because it goes well with the Aztecs. If they actually want Piety to be a decent choice for anyone other than 1 or 2 civs, it needs some culture in it.

It is not only Siam. Civs that can do good with piety opening Using civ traits:

Arabia, Aztecs, Byzantium ,Celts, Denmark ,Egypt,Greece, Korea ,Songhai, Siam, Zulus

That is list of civs I will consider go piety first if I got suitable starting location.

Main definition of suitable = production rich. That is the most important point which will decide for me go piety or not. I found piety extremely powerful if you start game correctly.


You may notice that main criterias is civ that can produce faith, can benefit from city states more or able to have early war.
But main criteria is : production rich start.

Arcaian said:

Basically, my changes for balance to Liberty would be this:

- For the finisher of liberty, reduce the science penalty, maybe from 5% to 3% on a standard map? Would allow a faster catch-up science wise.

- Make the NC give a 25% science boost, add the 25% taken off to Oxford University - it'll discourage the saving Oxford many people do (seems a bit cheap to instantly get a tech like dynamite or even flight/radar from like 2 turns of production). It'll allow a less static opening for many builds, and on top of that liberty wouldn't be in such trouble.

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In fact I made a mod in a similar direction: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=21997

Heh, well, to make wide somewhat counter the penalty, I instead modified sciente buildings to give +1 / +2 / +3 (same) / +4 (same) points of science respectively, and to even it out, filled scientist slots give +2 science instead of +3.

I also split the NC bonus into itself and Oxford, and moved the latter to architecture but that is mostly to affect your science take off against the AI.

PhilBowles said:

Piety's quite useful, but not in isolation. I think it's wrong to look at either Piety or Honor as a substitute for Tradition or Liberty - these are second trees or trees to mix and match.

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Well, as game stands is most best answer for those policies, but I think they were clearly designed to be starting branches, not only because are unlocked on ancient.

For religion, to optimize it, you want a powerful faith generation ASAP, not only because of the snowball effect of early converted cities, but because how religion purchases get more expensive as you advance through eras.

About honor, the staring policy is clearly ancient (barb) oriented and melee units bonus production has no use at midgame.

Calouste said:

Piety is pretty good for civs that have a Shrine/Temple UB. Maya, Egypt, Songhai.

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Still, opening trees should not be specific to three civs

What about when you get a culture-producing pantheon start(pastures, plantations, jungle)? That would be a nice time to take Piety. And by the time that doesn't scale, you can have a guild staffed. Maybe that could help churn through policies quicker. Tradition, as almost always, will probably be even quicker, though. I agree that Piety does need a culture buff, although that could make lower to mid-level Sacred Sites culture victories even faster and their already much faster than Great Works-focused style victories.
The problem is, if you nerf Tradition, everyone(including me) will cry foul. If you buff the others, they become super powerful for wide empires and everyone(including me) will cry foul.

Okay, so I tried a straight up Liberty start. Random game. Small size. I was Korea on a nice island... until I discovered I was sharing it with Genghis. I had two fish tiles and two whale tiles. I also had tons of pastures. I saved the map on the opening turn. I'm going to play the same amount of turns using Tradition to see what it looks like.

My results were very unfavorable. I was constantly fighting for gold and happiness. I couldn't get any wonders despite my amazing production because I was so behind in science. Behind with Korea? Go figure.

I had 5 cities founded by turn 186 with two wonders in my borders. I made quite a few land troops just to keep Genghis from attacking, and that seemed to work.

I wasn't able to found a religion, so I was stuck with the God of the Seas Pantheon. This may have been a mistake. When I play tradition, I can't decide if I should stick with that Pantheon or take something to get faith. I didn't really have much of an option for Faith in the capital, but if I took desert faith, my next two cities would benefit greatly. Is that cheating?

I was also thinking about taking the culture for pastures pantheon because i had tons of sheep.

I missed the Petra by 1 turn on my first desert city. I really thought I'd have a Great Engineer by finishing Liberty tree by then, but nope. I did get a few wonders. Pyramids. Which was great, but my cities didn't expand at all, so I kept running out of tiles to work. That was the biggest frustration. I constantly had to buy tiles because I just wasn't expanding at all.

So I'm going to play the same game but go with the Tradition tree to see where I am by turn 186.

People said that you need to micromanage more with Liberty, but I'm not sure what I could have done differently. I mean, I know there are lots of little things I might have done differently, but I don't know what would have helped in the Big Picture.

For starters, stop building early wonders. Korea's main science bonus doesn't kick in until mid game, and you'll need to run food routes to support it. You also want to get GS and plant with Korea instead of GE. On turn 180 wide will always be behind tall in tech... always. On deity, it catches up at around turn 250, aka: endgame.

You're still thinking like you've opened tradition... almost everything has to change. Your whole mindset. Forget everything you've learned about what's "good" for early game or midgame. Its inapplicable. What's good for liberty is being able to spread without getting super bad diplo. If you've done that by the 150, you're well on your way to slingshot through the next couple of eras.

Tradition's bonuses are front loaded, liberty's bonus is much more evenly distributed. Also, what difficulty is this? You can't expect to get religion... Going wide has never hurt anyone from getting a religion over going tall.

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