Big Ben is wide because of Liberty > Commerce > Autocracy purchasing strat, which is stronger than tall version because there's more cities to buy out of. Example: This turn, I need to buy 7 XCom because my stealth have reduced every capital down to nothing. Alas, I have only 4 cities! Oh, woe is me. The amount of gold generation really doesn't matter, the point of the strategy is making things dirt cheap, so any substantial gold production is plenty, and any civ can get substantial gold production.
Plus, Order building purchasing really isn't a thing. And order is better for tall empires IMO, while freedom is better for wide. Statue really belongs in wide, I think, because more specialists in more cities equals more hammers. If Kremlin was any good it would belong in tall; a flat hammer bonus vs a hammer modifier is wide vs tall at its most apparent.
Why is BB under wide when you are advocating a Autocracy purchasing strat? It should be under domination then, not under wide.
Also this strategy works
much better with Trad since your goal is not to get maximum gpt, infact, gpt will almost always be high enough to buy units in either your capital or your most faraway annexed city. Your key goal is to get to your desired tech as fast as humanly possible, which if you are aiming for Artillery or Bombers then Tradition will almost always be faster, while if you are aiming for XCom or Nukes it comes down to how good your cities are. Liberty is definitely competitive, but I think Tradition will still be a little faster since this is not about having the highest lategame bulbs (Liberty does), it is about getting to one single tech asap.
Also, purchasing strats should be used in conjunction with either Alhambra or Brandenburg for maximum promotions out of the gate and maximum utility of your gold. Having both WW will allow you to recruit Blitz XCom, which can
land and attack the same turn.
The good thing about purchasing is that you can buy one unit from the capital every turn, that is why you want to stack those promotion bonuses in the cap.
Obviously getting Alhambra or Brandenburg is much easier with Tradition since those wonders come way too late for the free Engineer from Liberty.
Also, LCA is essentially just a lesser version of HCA in my opinion. I think Honor in this case will almost always outperform Liberty when it comes to total war plus it yields gold for kills and Tradition will almost always outperform Liberty when it comes to rushing to Arty/Bombers/Xcom. Also look at the paragraph on how gold is relative I wrote in answer to danaphonous. Tradition will almost always have lower gpt than Liberty will, but gets more use out of spending gold.
On Order and Freedom I completely disagree, too. It has been proven time and time again that Freedom will give you just slightly better finishing times with tall empires than Order. That is of course if you have the gold available. That is due to many reasons, one of them being the Factory tenet of Order not working with all the multipliers. For example, it does not account for +10% science while the empire is happy and vice versa. If you want hard evicence you just need to look up HOF records.
I do think wide Freedom is underrated and yes, wide empires do have more specialist slots available. That is true. However, they work them later because of the lack of food. Tall will always have more TR for each city, always a growth bonus from the Trad finisher, will have to share fewer tiles because cities are settled further apart et cetera.
Order however offers almost nothing for tall, seeing as most of the time you want to rushbuy your factories anyway instead of building them, meaning the 50% off of hammers are lost and because most of Orders bonuses scale much better with # of cities than they do with pop. Also Order offers the most happiness and often times the least ideology unhappiness, which is very advantageous for wide empires. Tall usually does not have that many problems with lategame smiles from my experience. Also, Wide grows much faster in the lategame than tall does, just due to sheer city size. So wide empires will need to stock up on happiness in the lategame, while Tradition probably isn't bothered all that much, especially with every 2nd pop in the cap being free.
Socialist realism, Young Pioneers, Academy of Sciences and Five Year Plan all scale indirectly with # of cities or size of your empire. Party Leadership scales directly with # of cities.
Freedom's best tenet on the other hand scales with # of Specialists worked in each city. Even in my best Liberty games where my border cities surpass 20+ pop I am often not able to work all specialists including Factories, Windmills and Stock Exchange without the city starving. In my average Tradition games I work all my specialist slots after hitting Plastics. It's no contest in my mind.
Once again I am not saying wide Freedom is bad, it honestly probably gets better finishing times for SV than wide Order does. But that's just due to Freedom's nature, not because it is particularly good for wide empires, it isn't.
There are probably a few more that are useful that I missed. In my experience those are the ones I get the most use out of though.
Big Ben is probably good with either strategy but given that the prerequisite to buy with is commerce you need to open commerce early, maybe second tree, to really get full use out of it. With wide/liberty games I almost always have 1-3 extra points to throw somewhere before renaissance and opening rationalism. I also tend to feel like I need to buy more when I have a large empire vs. a smaller one though this may be playstyle. My big cities are usually fast enough and I'm buying to make the mediocre ones keep up. Big Ben synergizes with the 25% cost reduction from commerce and either the military purchasing of autocracy or the building cost reductions in order. In the case of order I use it to cash-buy things like research labs and hospitals and stuff way earlier then I otherwise could get them all over the empire. All in all I just have a lot more to buy with a bigger empire. I will probably attempt the same strat in my Shoshone series if I have the chance to get the wonder. I usually get the money to do this around the same time Big Ben becomes available. The gold output from city connections and cities overcomes their maintenance cost and I end up getting solid gold, especially in the case of a tithes religion if I get one, though you don't always found.
With almost all games you have one or three SP between your opening Tree and Rationalism, especially with Tradition where you not only get much more culture much earlier in the game, but also usually close the tree out the fastest because you'll have both, your cities and your monuments up earlier than Liberty does.
Last time I checked Commerce was the single most viable choice to do before transitioning from Trad to Rat, with Patronage clocking in at second.
Of course you have more gold with a big empire, that is for sure. But you also pay more maintenance, work less gold specialists and have a smaller capital, which will cost you gold. 200 GPT is not much when you have rushbuys to do in 10+ cities, it is a lot if you only have four. Do you see where I am going? It's not about numbers, it is about relative strength of gold.
For Tradition gold is really strong because every single Public School or Lab or Uni you buy will give you higher science than the Liberty equivalent, just because your pop will be slightly higher. Therefore your gold used for rushbuying is a little more effective. But it does not stop here. City State allies are much stronger for Tradition than they are for Liberty, especially Cultural CS, just because they don't scale with empire size while Social Policy cost does. All buildings that work with modifiers: Workshop, Factory, Market, Bank, Stock Exchange, all science buildings will work better with tall empires than with wide ones. A Factory in a 100 hammer city will give you more hammers than a Factory in a 80 hammer city.