
@ Glassmage
You are 100% right! That boat picture inspires you to victory. You can't lose after you get it.
BTW. I just took a look at that HoF Science challenge to see if I could actually demonstrate that Tradition can be quite decent (no I never said it was vastly superior or any such nonsense). It made me laugh though. That has got to be pretty much the most biased settings in favour of liberty I can possible think of.
First of all, it's on the warlord difficulty. So there goes the need for any defensive army. Hence pure oligarchy or anything involving honor is absolutely useless. Also there will be no rush for any wonders at all. You can build them in any order or at your leisure. Hence aristocracy is useless. The real kicker is... you have to play as France. France?!?! That's by far and away the absolute best civ to take Liberty with. Early legalism is useless (even late legalism is kind of useless as them). You want a wide empire to max their bonuses, which makes monarchy and landed elite useless.
So I'm supposed to prove that tradition is good in a situation that nullifies all its bonuses?
How about the aztecs prove they can get a lot of culture from barb hunting... but oh BTW there are no barbarians. How about we prove that liberty is the best. Oh but you have to play as Egypt on a tiny island map with no room for a second city until astronomy.
Anyways.. to end the argument as I didn't want to cause one in the first place... I am more than happy to concede that I know very little about streamlined games that are focused on winning as soon as possible. I'm sure other players are far more knowledgable about that. So if they say liberty is the best for that kind of game, that's fine

.
I play more for fun. I like to have like 20+ wonders built and survive to 2050 or something. I like to see how many future techs I can get before the game ends. I like to try to survive the nukes on Deity. I like to try to make rather poor trees like commerce pay off and such.