You need to explain more why these are better. In particular, why are these better than liberty and order for a game strategy designed to produce as much production as possible?
+2 happy and a 6 turn golden age is nothing, +10 culture isn't much either. police state is ok, but order gives -50% unhappy from all cities, not just captured ones.
I do agree with you though, that the freedom line is a lot weaker than I would have expected. There's so few specialists, that reducing their unhappiness and food consumption doesn't really help much.
Okay,
the explanation (for Emperor).
+2 Happy from basic Piety will help you plant the 3rd city without worked luxury resources. I noticed that on Empreror the AI will be more than happy to grab
my own best city locations without second thought (and I do like to have my 3 core cities where
I want them).
6-turn golden age. After the inevitable AI attack (on your diff. level I think it's after 2nd city, on mine it's after 3rd) I usually deny peace (except if I got ganbanged like in my last game) and finish off the attacking AI. When that's done (I raze most of the cities, but can't raze them all. At this moment I use the 6-turn golden age to:
a. build courthouses in their capital and maybe another city.
b. boost my finances
c. to negate the unhappy from new cities (not loosing points towards happy GA)
d. build colliseums and/or circuses since the war production is over
These 6 turns just tremendously help me do all this.
From my experience, bordering AIs won't give you fair deals until you beat them at least once (i.e. they sue for peace). It's not unusual for me to have 15-30 extra happy from trades and initial conquests for 100 or more turns. I use this time to take
50% of excess happines added to culture, as well as
25% reduction in golden age happy requirements. The "natural" golden ages last two or three times as long as great person ones, and I usually get
two before the continental conquest. That's 30 turns of super-production and gold.
The
-20% unhappiness in your own cities is great because in the initial expansion I usually take 1 or 2 enemy cities and re-populate the rest. I do like to have 6-7 of my own cities through the game, even if it means extra culture for policies. That means I'm looking at 12-28 happy from this trait alone. Works great with
Mandate of Heaven and
Organized Religion.
2 free policies means I can go whatever path I want to,
and I can get it now, for free, not increasing the number of culture needed for the next one (works well with high number of own cities). I usually put these two into either:
a. Honor (for a free, usually 3rd great general == another golden age) and putting myself just 1 policy till double exp for those oh-so-awesome siege engines.
b. Patronage and Philantrophy, if that's the way I want to go
c. Commerce (+25% gold in capital) and save up the last one for initial Order or Autocracy.
Basically, what Piety does is to grant you 4 policies for the price of 3. And all 3 can be used well, presumably better than liberty and freedom combined. And that's because:
a. I like to burn my great artists, excess generals and merchants on golden ages and at least
some of the puppet cities seem to like working specialists a lot (and I can't do much about it).
b. I like to work my tiles and usually I have specialists working
only in my great engineer/scientist GP Farm (basically a farms/hammers city).
c. I'll never have enough culture to fill out both Freedom and Liberty to get the max benefit out of them, because by the time I do I have order and autocracy available.
d. Only +1 culture and +1 happy per city are interesting in Liberty. Workers you capture (at least 4 per conquered civ) and I don't want my puppets to have extra production (and my core cities can very well live without it). Even with this,
Mandate of Heaven and
Theocracy give better results.