A little bit confused with liberty

[Archerinho]

Hi.
I've been playing on deity for a while. I'm winning my games with certain civs starting with tradition but can't get the best out of liberty and I feel some civs are just made for liberty.
In BNW, I liked Ashurbanipal very much, his ability to take a tech combined with a very good ram unit. So, the concept that I can't understand is where should I go?
I mean, I almost in all games go to war with my closest neighbor, but then I lose out on tech. I manage to make sub-80 national college, but am not sure whether to go on education next or go gunpowder or machinery and mass war. I would like to go "down" to gunpowder but I feel I would be much outteched. In fact that's what always happens to me, whereas if I go to education I am still not a very advanced civ and my army is weak.
Maybe my weakness is that I can't keep optimal number of cities and population, however, could you share your insights on this? How do you manage to win vs a deity when going liberty?

 

[Archerinho]

hi?
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[Vidszhite]

My experience with Immortal, not Deity yet, has been that you will just have to expect being behind until the late stages, and as long as you start to close the gap little by little, you will pull ahead at the last minute. If you can kill a second rival, I would go for it, especially as Ashurbanipal, since this will also catch you back up in tech. Try to always stay the same military tech level as your nearest rival, and do NOT let them snowball. I would get education first, though, because unis are important for leveling off the tech gap, and the Assyrian UA will help you close it.

Use your spies. Autocracy/industrial Espionage is a godsend on Deity because you can park spies in non capitals and still steal techs in less than 20 turns each, regardless of police stations. Yes, it is that good. You probably want Autocracy anyway as Assyria, but if not, I didn't even get IE in my last liberty immortal game, and I still pulled ahead, even with all my mistakes. Had I gone Order, I would have pulled ahead in science much faster, since Order jacks up science with many of its tenets. Consider that if your culture can't withstand the top civ, and watch out for uber Freedom, set your sights on them fast if they out-culture you too much.

 

[Mesix]

When playing Assyria, go down the military tech path. Get your army rolling early and never stop. The AI ill be slightly ahead in tech, but you will get a free tech every time you take a city. Let the AI research the top half of the tech tree for you.

Honor might be a better pick than Liberty when playing Assyria.

Liberty shines for civs which have a good UB which provides more benefit for having more cities. Libety allows you to expand faster and reap the benefits of the UB from several cities.

As a general rule, Tradition is better for a few cities to grow a high population. Liberty for more cities with not as high population. Honor if you don't want to build your own cities, but rather want to take them from the AI. Since BNW, you can also choose Piety as an opening tech tree. This might be good if you have a strategy which relies heavily on religion.

 

[André Alfenaar]

Shoshone is made for liberty. I don't know about other civs. Venetian maybe because of the free Great Merchants.

But usually I think a combi of tradition/honor/piety is stronger. With tradition you can get out a settler as quick (sometimes even quicker) as with liberty (when you have to wait for the right social policy):

scout>momument>shrine>settler (meanwhile buy a worker)

Liberty is faster in getting subsequential settlers, however.

The combi oligarchy/military caste is simply too good to ignore: extra culture+happiness+no maintenance. And piety to win the religion race.

 

[GhostSalsa]

My first experience with Liberty in Immortal is that it can't hack it.

I'm a little bit overwhelmed with how badly it went after the insane amount of time it took to crawl the whole map and settle and deal with BNW's super-micromanagement, but—

I believe the reason is simple: there's no more gold benefit. I mean obviously the science benefit was undone, but that's probably balanced enough. What kills is that money comes from trade routes and you don't get any additional trade routes, meanwhile you are paying for more buildings.

In my game I was 2nd in gold for most of the game thanks to a ton of plantations plus all trade routes being sea - but I never had any money. I was making more money than everyone but also spending it all on buildings. By modern era I was sitting at 9th in army because I couldn't afford to upgrade my frigates, I hade 10 frigates waiting to upgrade and was only netting 100gpt in the 1800s - it would take me 40 turns! So of course the brilliantly tedious BNW AI was sending huge fleets at me and pointlessly razing my weakest cities only for me to win the war settlement later.

It was madness. I want to emphasize again that I was generating more gold than 8 of 9 Immortal AI civs so I was essentially generating as much as I could, and building maintenance drained all of it.

On a tall start I would have had 300 gpt per turn by then.

On Emeror it would have been fine because the AI wouldn't have had modern units yet. On Immortal you can't afford extra cities and an army. All you're doing is settling new puppets for your friends. I'm annoyed.

 

[Anarchist]

When playing Assyria, go down the military tech path. Get your army rolling early and never stop. The AI ill be slightly ahead in tech, but you will get a free tech every time you take a city.

That's not Assyria.

The Siege Towers are awesome though (in the true sense - they inspire awe, and fear). Shock & Awe, guys, Shock & Awe!