Actually, Egypt is a great civ for Liberty because of your UB Burial Tomb, +2 happy per city. Combine with +1 happy from shrines or +2 happy from temples and you end up with a lot of local happiness from a small number of buildings.
Hmm, Tradition. I don't really agree with the statement that Tradition is only good for small empires. Plenty of times I have settled my first 4 Tradition cities, only to realize there was tons of open space, so I settle 6 more. Of course Liberty would have gotten me to the 10 cities quicker, but Tradition allows you to grow larger (at least in 4 core cities). To me, the best part of going liberty is the free great person for a free Petra or Hagia Sophia! Yeah Liberty gives you a flat 50% production bonus to settlers. But that does not mean 50% more settlers. For one thing, you buy some settlers. Second, Tradition allows your capital to grow a lot larger, working more tiles, so it can build settlers quicker than a smaller Liberty city.
The majority of the benefits of Liberty are really not all that great past early game, I don't find that the free worker and settler of liberty accelerate you that much due to being able to sell luxes and buy them, plus Tradition cities grow bigger and can thus produce things quicker anyway (as well as generate more science, gold, etc)
Still, you say that you like to fill up the map with all your cities, so there's no reason for you not to pick Liberty if that's how you like to play. Have you tried the Maya? I think they're the best ICS civ due to the UB Pyramid giving both faith and science, as well as the free great people they get. Normally the Long Count is anathema to great people generation (at least of the ones you want), but wide empires don't generate many great people anyway.
I'm really not a fan of Liberty overall; I think it's weaker than Tradition under most circumstances, except when you *really* want to spam out cities (talking 12-20 or more), but it sounds like that's exactly what you like to do. So I think you should stick to it.
One last point: you mention that you feel like you'll be overrun if you don't spam out cities. This doesn't have to be the case. It is possible to defend yourself, even on diety, even if you build only one city. Spamming out cities and keeping up in science is hard, and science is the backbone of civ. By playing in a city spam manner, you're inflating the difficulty. Maybe that's fine for you
Or maybe you like the extra micromanagement of having 20 cities; I know I start to get annoyed when MY turn starts taking 15 minutes (let alone the inter-turn delay). As tends to happen as the game goes on when you ICS.Now, it's generally considered easier to keep your military up and large if you build more cities, so if you favor domination games, that's OK. But it's harder to do a science, culture, or diplomacy win with 20 cities than 4. (some pro like tommy nt is gonna come in and tell me how I'm wrong on this point, well maybe for him, but for us non pros this is the case).
I rambled a lot in this post, so here's a TL;DR:
Liberty is correct for your city spam playstyle for sure, and Egypt is good for it, but you don't need to spam cities and it's harder. Have you tried a 4 city tradition game?
I was actually on level pegging with Greece in my most recent game, and have learned to keep units behind my cities rather than let them get destroyed. I did abandon the game, however, as I slowly started dropping back again. I had a good variety of buildings in my cities and a good sized army. Inland sea map against Greece and Russia was the setting, (King). The problem was the position of both Greece and Russia. I was at the bottom right of the map, with Russia above me. Greece was bottom left. And every time I managed to beat one opponent back and obtain peace, the other civ would declare war. So I had to keep sending my army back and forth to defend my land, ( a fair distance). This caused the gradual slip behind the other two,as they never declared war with each other (well, once for a very short time). I have started again, going tradition and will see how things pan out.
