How do you choose between Liberty and Tradition

I know the theory, one is for fast expansions and the other one is for "tall" empire. However usually by the time I get 30 culture I haven't seen nearly enough map to make an informed decision. I.e. last game the map looked empty and I took Liberty, lo and behold the very next turn 3 civilizations met, could barely fit in 2 cities. When I am lucky and can get those cities going always prefer large empire, it's allegedly 4x game after all, but how do you know you are going to have enough space? Any signs to look for?

Building 2-3 scouts before anything else at the beginning should honestly tell you what your surroundings are going to look like by the time you have 25 culture. Unless you pop an early culture ruin, in which case you can probably consider going a mix of them.

Tradition is the best in almost every case. I only go Liberty when I want a change or I want to try a very specific strategy that synergizes with Liberty (e.g. needs a certain Great Person early).

Agree that tradition is best. Its a flexible pick as well so i dont honestly see what you get out of liberty that is so great. Since its nigh impossible to get more than 5 cities that will grow early doors its largely irrelevant. As long as you can get at least 1 good city site tradition is best. Even afterwards, you are probably better off taking honor and going after you neighbor as expansion is too late by then. The only time i think it could be useful is on an amazon type map where worker improvements would take ages without an army of workers. Unless you are going for a specific GP its largely pointless.

Ignoring the issue that tradition is much stronger in general, you have to make a choice in what you are hoping to make from your civ. If you have to change course, you are behind the 8 ball, just like in real life.

I look at the soil and my neighbours.

If I get forwardsetteled or have a known aggressive neighbour I go liberty and make units to destroy it.

If there is lots of room and peaceful situation I go for tradition.

So early war or no early war? That is the question!

Also, I like liberty more because I have played so many games going tradition.

I think tradition is easier but liberty just as good when you get the hang of it.


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CornPlanter said:

I know the theory, one is for fast expansions and the other one is for "tall" empire. However usually by the time I get 30 culture I haven't seen nearly enough map to make an informed decision. I.e. last game the map looked empty and I took Liberty, lo and behold the very next turn 3 civilizations met, could barely fit in 2 cities. When I am lucky and can get those cities going always prefer large empire, it's allegedly 4x game after all, but how do you know you are going to have enough space? Any signs to look for?

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Tradition is much more flexible. If there was extra space; after your four cities you just wait for the AI to inevitably fill the void by founding their own cities and then during the inevitable war conquer them, keeping the ones you want and razing the rest.
The happiness bonus in your capital from Monarchy far exceeds Liberty's mere 1 happiness per city for any empire within reason.

In the other direction, if you choose Liberty but there's not enough room for at least 4 self built cities you are kind of screwed. (There's no food bonuses in the Liberty tree and so it would be really difficult to get the "Tall" in tall empire with Liberty)

4X: This is still a 4X game; but the Expand part was given so many penalties in Civ V that it works much better to keep that part short and small and focus more on Exploit and Exterminate. (Oh yeah, and no longer take Exterminate literaly, let them keep a useless city to avoid that penalty)

For me following almost any strat at a high difficulty level on a standard Pangaea type map, the sooner I have the Tradition finisher done, the stronger I will become.

Of course the exceptions are if going early domination or somehow planning a Sacred Sites ICS.

I usually don't think too hard about how cramped I might be for space. Even with tradition I have never run into cases where I can't get at least three decent cities up, and the vast majority of time I can four decent ones even on diety pangaea. Maybe you are too picky with city spots, or maybe I just expand earlier than most even when going tradition.

Still, liberty has other benefits worth considering. Straight liberty is amazing for domination games in which you plan to conquer early facilitated by the use of pillage-healing through citizenship and the pyramids. Some people argue that it is better than tradition for salvaging bad starts, but I am not sure where I stand on this. I will say that once you are proficient using liberty, the early game feels much smoother on Diety.

When in doubt, just open tradition; it is the safest bet. From there, most of the time you will just continue on into tradition, but an early culture ruin (or some other form of early culture like tecs ua) can situationally be turned into full liberty from there or a hybrid build (trad opener, left side liberty, finish tradition, into mid-late game policy tree most likely rat) depending on circumstances you will have additional time to assess.

Depends on my capital location mostly. Not much use to get all the bonuses to the capital from Tradition if my capital can't grow much or doesn't have a lot of good tiles to work.

Tradition is better in about 90% of scenarios.

Liberty can be a pretty decent second tree if you are looking to warmonger, IMO (but still want to develop nation well, instead of going all out with Honor)

How do I decide? Well, if I want to win I take tradition.

Tradition is technically better because you can have free stuff from the AI and these actions dilute the power of Liberty.

Due to the food caravan/cargo mechanics, it's usually better to get a new city and a food caravan/cargo at the same time. Because the newest city will substantially gain a lot of hammers early on to clear the most early important buildings like the granary and library. And that timing is best done between the turn 60 and 90, turns where you will probably build the NC.

Liberty often mean war. The idea is to use the caravans/cargos for external trade routes instead. This allow you to stay with small cities but with a large number of them. Liberty often suffer from lack of gold. So these trade routes annihilate this. You will probably need extra gold to upgrade a ton of units too, since that the warpath is often the best with that tree.

There is one exception with Liberty where this tree can be better than Tradition even on peaceful starts. It's the desert starts. As someone mentionned, the Sacred Sites strategy fits well for Liberty, even better with a desert start. Even for non-Sacred Sites games, these desert starts are appealing because you can put Pagodas in a lot of cities and counter the unhappiness awaiting for you later. The Liberty finisher(free ge) is perfect for a very strong wonder ''wide based'' civs, like Chichen Itza or Machu Picchu. It can be Petra too if it arrives very soon(Oracle, cultural cs, etc).

If you get out these freebies due to poor AI mechanics(not protecting their civilians) we would probably not talking about Tradition that much...but more about Liberty. In competitive FFA games with no cs or AIs the Liberty tree is often stronger. That tells a lot.

Tabarnak said:

these desert starts are appealing because you can put Pagodas in a lot of cities and counter the unhappiness awaiting for you later.

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If all you want is happiness; you are much better off with the belief that gives +2 happiness to each and every city with the standard boring temple. No faith required to build this.

I'm not sure how a civ with 5+ self founded cities without Piety is going to both faith buy a full set of religious buildings & build a couple of Inquisitors to ensure they keep their religion before Industrial era.

In fact for a wide empire (that doesn't have Piety), I'd also pick the belief giving +1 happiness to Shrines before anything with a faith requirement.

"How do you choose between Liberty and Tradition?"

Thank you for your answers... so it seems always going Tradition is a safe bet in every case while I'm still learning the game. I used to beat immortal once upon a time, but a few years break, BNW release, and now I'm struggling on Emperor

Free stuff from AI is something I almost never do, apart from CS worker. Always afraid of consequences since wars are expensive and warmongering penalties just drive me mad. Any good youtube tutorials / letsplays on how to get free stuff properly?

it's probably worth mentioning that in BNW, warmongering penalties have been shifted away from DOWs, more towards city conquering. So you can steal units from the AI without much penalty, so long as you don't take cities.

joncnunn said:

If all you want is happiness; you are much better off with the belief that gives +2 happiness to each and every city with the standard boring temple. No faith required to build this.

I'm not sure how a civ with 5+ self founded cities without Piety is going to both faith buy a full set of religious buildings & build a couple of Inquisitors to ensure they keep their religion before Industrial era.

In fact for a wide empire (that doesn't have Piety), I'd also pick the belief giving +1 happiness to Shrines before anything with a faith requirement.

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Inquisitors are not that important if you go for Pagodas. You've already bought the building, so who cares if a city gets converted later? It's only important to keep your religion if it has an ongoing effect, the buildings will work regardless of what the majority religion is. You will lose your Pantheon, but that's not always important, specially later in the game, and you might gain something useful from the other religion.

Well think about it... one of liberty's policies (free worker) can merely be replaced by a single scout stealing one from a CS... no matter how you think about it, that policy is worthless but is needed to unlock representation, which is the best policy in the tree. But then again, that won't really matter until late game, and early on the +3 culture from tradition opener is worth way more. The free GP finisher is very forgettable as it is a one-time thing while tradition's finisher lasts all game.

So go tradition unless you want to give the AI a handicap...

Well think about it... one of liberty's policies (free worker) can merely be replaced by a single scout stealing one from a CS...

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OK let's think about it. I like thinking.

Tile improvement construction rate increased by 25% and a Worker appears near the Capital.

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1. Stealing worker doesn't seem to give you +25% construction time for the rest of the game.
2. They are not mutually exclusive, you can still steal a worker and have 2 workers with +25% construction rate both. I usually need more than one worker anyway, especially when I go liberty and try and settle 6+ early cities.

Now maybe it's just my skill and/or luck, but I don't find stealing workers always viable. Sometimes I don't find many city states and the ones I find I'd like to befriend. Especially on Continents+. Sometimes I only find them very far away and separated by jungle on top of that, so walking worker home takes a lot of time. Sometimes barbarians and expanding borders of other civs get in the way of bringing it back home, on top of the lost scouting time if scout accompanies the worker. Depends on map. Now I am sure if I did no mistakes, every single move of every single unit was optimized, and I knew exact CS worker spawning time and so on, stealing worker would be a bit more close to the Citizenship policy. But still not a replacement by any means. It looks like replacement only if you vastly oversimplify how things work. Am I right?

That of course doesn't change the fact that tradition seems to be better than liberty.