What benefits are there to playing wide?

[Redaxe]

Liberty definitely works better on a larger map with more cities and a longer game but it certainly takes longer to ramp things up than a 3 city Tradition.
But I'm assuming that most people stick with Standard sized map because you literally need a supercomputer to run Civ 5 on a huge map.

 

[Gort]

On standard maps I find Liberty's lack of happiness too limiting to my population.

The amount of science you can get out of a Tradition capital with the National College in it is gigantic, too - it's tough to give that up.

I'm a big fan of 4-city Tradition in the early game followed by military expansion once Ideologies show up, or using mods to make the other initial policy trees more suited to their purposes