Scientific victory tenets of ideology

[Iamteehee]

I feel like the t3 tenets of order and freedom don't really fit that well.
The space procurements tenet of freedom seems to favor wider empires and is more useful the higher your science generation is. I find myself going freedom when I have enough bpt and great scientists to bulb through pretty much all of the info era tech tree, which is usually when I am going 5c tradition or liberty.
On the other hand, I find myself going order with smaller 3c/4c tradition empires because I need more science to get through the tech tree and the great scientists from spaceflight pioneer helps in this regard. It also seems rather weird to me that the order t3 tenet relies somewhat on great people which seems more fitting to freedom.
Does anyone else feel this way?

 

[Sclb]

It's the other way around. Freedom for tradition and Order for liberty. It's usually difficult to find coal for small empires and freedom can do without coal due to no need for factories and rush buying everything including SS parts. All you need is high gpt which is easy to get if you focus on gold buildings. For order, you need high production and coal which is easier to get from a wide empire. Factory is a must for the extra bpt in this case, but you need to have enough hammers to be able to build them in every cities. Also the extra GE from order is nice for rushing late wonder such as Hubble for extra GS since you can't faith buy GE without tradition.

 

[Iamteehee]

I know that Freedom is for smaller empires and Order is for larger empires. What I'm saying is that it seems weird to me that Freedom seems more fitting for larger empires and Order is for smaller empires. I do see your point though.

 

[fyar]

I don't get why you say that Space Procurements is better for wide empires. The way I see it, you need money to use Freedom's level 3 tenet, and wide empires are expensive. In the late game, a lot of your income comes from trade routes, which does not scale with your number of cities, so tall empires are just as capable of generating income as wide empires. On the other hand, the primary expenses are building and unit maintenance, and wide empires will have more of both.

 

[inthesomeday]

I agree completely with OP, the tenets of order favor tradition when going for science; engineers come easier to tradition, because of the obvious faith buying, while gold generation is easier for Liberty due to the availability of more gold tiles, and with typical Liberty>commerce, it's easier to purchase this way.

 

[Redaxe]

An Order SV is one of the few times you might want to actually consider building windmills. You might just get an extra engineer out of it.

 

[claudiupb]

A 4 city tradition empire with all gold buildings will produce a lot of gold. If you want to use Space Procurements you should replace your farms with trading posts for the gold boost (having Civil Society will allow you to do this without such a big cost), so you don't need to rely on gold tiles for your increasing your GPT. Of course this works best with commerce, the finisher will give you an extra coin for the trading post if you manage to get there (I assume you already go for mercantilism with this strategy so it's not such a big step to finish commerce eventually). You could also work all the merchant specialists for extra gold, at that point in the game growth is not that valuable, especially since you can increase your BPT from Trading Posts.

On the other hand the wide empire will have more maintenance costs for buildings, but it will be also pretty hard to have the gold buildings in all cities, and you can't work both the scientists and merchant specialists in all cities, so no extra gold with that. What you do get extra with a wide empire is more BPT, and Civil Society is a lot stronger so it can actually help grow your cities, but there aren't too many gold benefits to use the space procurements better. You might end up building some of the space parts yourself and using gold to rush buy the last ones.


With order things are pretty simple, because order favors both wide and tall empires. The science boost from Workers' Faculties scales perfectly with size (what you do lose in a tall empire is the second benefit of this, the half cost factories, because you probably have 3 out of 4/5 factories already). Five-Year plan is pretty good even for tall empires and will give you a significant hammer boost to be able to build spaceships faster. Of course this policy works better with wide empires in general, but from a SV point of view you will only need the hammer boost in 2-3 cities and having the centralized production a tall empire gives it's actually better for building spaceship parts. Then you get the Spaceflight Pioneers which of course works best with tradition if you can faith buy some engineers for the spare parts. But even if you went liberty wide you can still benefit this, you can use the free GE for that very last part, but you will need to time it so that you finish all the other parts at about the same time. It's a little harder to do but manageable.

In my opinion for SV, both order and freedom work best for tradition tall empires. For wide empires order is the best choice, but that doesn't mean freedom is not manageable, in the right conditions it could be quite good for wide empires also.

 

[donkeyfish]

I dont have complete knowledge of this forum, but the best SV I´ve seen here has been Freedom/Tradition. Or Trad/Lib/Freedom with Poland.

I dont think that would be the case if Order suits Tradition more.

Order needs fewer Policies though. It can be difficult to get every required SP in Freedom games if you have a lot of cities.

 

[fimbul]

Share the same thoughts as the OP - if you have like 8 cities freedom makes a ton of sense since the gc/gpt can be used to buy parts. Whereas with order you need trad finisher to buy more GEs..

Although normally i go freedom for science victory since its brain-dead easy to do - just follow Acken guide and you'll win like 60 turns after ideo. might not be the fastest, if i had some nice 5-6 mountain city trad setup with coal and enough faith to buy a few GS and GE i think order would be faster.

 

[beetle]

OP, are you really arguing that 4-city-Tradition-Freedom or wide-Liberty-Order play are not both solid? The examples you give do not discount those two popular combinations.

The space procurements tenet of freedom seems to favor wider empires and is more useful the higher your science generation is.

wide-Freedom-to-SV is also strong. You can open Tradition or Liberty on six cities and have a very strong game.

On the other hand, I find myself going order with smaller 3c/4c tradition empires because I need more science to get through the tech tree and the great scientists from spaceflight pioneer helps in this regard.

4-city-Tradition-Order is strong because 4-city-Tradition-anything is strong. Yes, being able to faith purchase GE for Order 3rd level tenet is great.

I feel like the t3 tenets of order and freedom don't really fit that well.

Your examples don’t support this assertion with which you begin your post.

It also seems rather weird to me that the order t3 tenet relies somewhat on great people which seems more fitting to freedom.

I don’t see GP being limited to a single Ideology, but, in any case, the Order 3rd level SV tenet provides two GP. So it does not really rely on GP at all! It is only your last SS part that needs to be rushed to save turns to victory.

 

[Tzar Sasha]

Let us not forget that Liberty-Order is totally doable along with faith purchasing GEs for rushing the spaceship parts. All one needs to do is found a religion and reform that religion in order to pick the reformation that allows purchasing of any GP.

 

[Iskiab]

I'm not an expert on order since I rarely play it, but when I do I almost never use my great engineers on spaceship parts. I tend to grab all the late wonders (especially hubble telescope) and spend my faith on scientists.

The T3 order spaceship tenant sort of sucks, I look at it like it's a tenant that gives me a free scientist and engineer and still chose it, just not for the spaceship part portion.

The freedom T3 spaceship tenant on the other hand is amazing. I always buy my last spaceship part and end the game maybe 10 turns earlier then normal.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I'm not an expert on order since I rarely play it, but when I do I almost never use my great engineers on spaceship parts. I tend to grab all the late wonders (especially hubble telescope) and spend my faith on scientists.

The T3 order spaceship tenant sort of sucks, I look at it like it's a tenant that gives me a free scientist and engineer and still chose it, just not for the spaceship part portion.

The freedom T3 spaceship tenant on the other hand is amazing. I always buy my last spaceship part and end the game maybe 10 turns earlier then normal.

Well, if you only buy 1 spaceship part, the Order tenet is better since it is 1 Free Scientist and 1 Free spaceship part (no money needed)

 

[Chum]

Well, if you only buy 1 spaceship part, the Order tenet is better since it is 1 Free Scientist and 1 Free spaceship part (no money needed)

A GE won't finish a SS part itself.

 

[danaphanous]

I dont have complete knowledge of this forum, but the best SV I´ve seen here has been Freedom/Tradition. Or Trad/Lib/Freedom with Poland.

I dont think that would be the case if Order suits Tradition more.

Order needs fewer Policies though. It can be difficult to get every required SP in Freedom games if you have a lot of cities.

That's interesting because I've heard some really good players assert that Order/tradition is the only way to win with the fastest times. By "fastest" I mean below T200 on standard speed. All those games that I've seen are order games. I assume the reason this works better is freedom relies on loads of specialists and growth to start becoming powerful in science but if you are finishing the game before turn 200 you simply can't grow as big as normal. And as you say, it requires less tenets to get the relevant order policies. This makes the early boost of 25% science from factories better for finishing the game fast. You can use the extra production from order to build hubble, apollo program, and the first 4 spaceship parts pretty easily with your big 4 cities and purchase an engineer or two to finish off the last so you don't waste any time on the late parts. All you need to do is save 2500 faith and it's as good as space procurements doing it this way. Without tradition order is harder to utilize as you can't buy great engineers when you need them. But it is still better then freedom.

 

[Browd]

A GE won't finish a SS part itself.

It should, if the city where you bulb the GE is large enough. The hammer formula for GE bulbs is 300 + 30*pop of city in which the GE is bulbed. Since SS parts cost 1,500 hammers (at standard speed), you should be able to bulb a GE to finish a SS part in a single turn if your city has 40 or more population (300 + (30 * 40)).

As a point of contrast, the most expensive wonders in the game (e.g., Sydney Opera House and CN Tower) cost 1,250 hammers, so the "break even" city size to get those wonders in a single turn with a GE bulb is 32 pop (300 + (30*32) = 1,260 hammers)

 

[donkeyfish]

Here´s some examples of Freedom wins. At least it disproves the notion that only way to win fast is Order. All contain results far beyond my records.

2 games with Freedom in this (t19x): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=563022
Another one with Freedom:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=530550&page=10
Not sub200, but t205 w/ Liberty/Freedom:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=562241&page=2
And yet another one (w/ reloads):
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=563063&page=4

The first link, afaik, contains the HoF record.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

i'm fairly certain that, if you browse through HoF, almost all of the sub-200 SVs are freedom wins.

let's be real here - the freedom T3 tenet is just that much stronger, very easy to abuse (with AI lump sum) and extremely braindead. you can screw around, get your timing wrong and still have a great win time because you don't have to build a single SS part (at least I never do).

order is far more challenging and more fun. to be frank, I think order cannot compete with tradition unless you get 6+ very good cities, have an amazing culture game (SP costs go up) and good sources of happiness (lux, trades, horses, elephants & stone).

 

[Iamteehee]

OP, are you really arguing that 4-city-Tradition-Freedom or wide-Liberty-Order play are not both solid? The examples you give do not discount those two popular combinations.

I'm not saying that 4c Tradition Freedom and Wide Order are weak, I'm saying that they usually aren't as good as 5c+ Freedom and 3c/4c Order. This seems rather weird to me.

4-city-Tradition-Order is strong because 4-city-Tradition-anything is strong. Yes, being able to faith purchase GE for Order 3rd level tenet is great.

I'm saying that Order seems to be the better choice for 4c Tradition (at least from my experience)

I don’t see GP being limited to a single Ideology, but, in any case, the Order 3rd level SV tenet provides two GP. So it does not really rely on GP at all! It is only your last SS part that needs to be rushed to save turns to victory.

You're probably right about this. I usually end up only using 1 GE for rushing spaceship parts.

That's interesting because I've heard some really good players assert that Order/tradition is the only way to win with the fastest times. By "fastest" I mean below T200 on standard speed. All those games that I've seen are order games. I assume the reason this works better is freedom relies on loads of specialists and growth to start becoming powerful in science but if you are finishing the game before turn 200 you simply can't grow as big as normal. And as you say, it requires less tenets to get the relevant order policies. This makes the early boost of 25% science from factories better for finishing the game fast. You can use the extra production from order to build hubble, apollo program, and the first 4 spaceship parts pretty easily with your big 4 cities and purchase an engineer or two to finish off the last so you don't waste any time on the late parts. All you need to do is save 2500 faith and it's as good as space procurements doing it this way. Without tradition order is harder to utilize as you can't buy great engineers when you need them. But it is still better then freedom.

I'm definitely not a sub T200 player, but when I go freedom, its because space procurements is hugely powerful, as yung.carl.jung mentioned. Being able completely ignore building SS parts shaves off a significant amount of turns off your victory and I'm guessing sub T200 players are able to grow their cities enough to the point where Worker's Faculties and Spaceflight Pioneers are unnecessary.

 

[Chum]

It should, if the city where you bulb the GE is large enough. The hammer formula for GE bulbs is 300 + 30*pop of city in which the GE is bulbed. Since SS parts cost 1,500 hammers (at standard speed), you should be able to bulb a GE to finish a SS part in a single turn if your city has 40 or more population (300 + (30 * 40)).

That explains that - I seem to remember them finishing SS parts, but that was a long time ago (Tradition and much slower victory time me). Liberty and fast finish time me never sees a 40 pop city.