Help with a deity win with culuture!?

[snarzberry]

I do not agree. Like I said, Liberty is nice. The problem is that so is everything else. You're going to make exclusions.

Tradition and Liberty are both openers - early game policy trees. Picking two openers and thereby forsaking/postponing a different policy tree is, IMO, bad play (and something the AI does all the time, I'm afraid). Picking both Tradition and Liberty early means going both tall and wide at the same time thus not capitalizing fully on either. It is wiser to pick one of the openers, move on to Piety then suitable medieval policies (Patronage, Commerce) and finally into Freedom. Had I opened a cultural game with Tradition, I would almost certainly not pick Liberty as one of the five trees. In a late-game empire, Representation and Meritocracy are the only meaningful policies - everything else is obsolete. Adopting a full tree just for two policies isn't the way to go. There's much more bang for the buck to be had everywhere else at that point in the game. So, unless there's a very good case for not going Honor or whichever you're missing from Patronage/Commerce: no Liberty.

Liberty only truly shines in the early game. A free settler is immensely more valuable on turn 20 than turn 200. The same goes, to a lesser degree, for every other policy in that tree. Liberty becomes increasingly less valuable the further the game advances. The same is true of Tradition, but to a lesser degree. So, vice versa, by opening into Liberty I would most likely not come back for Tradition.

In response let me outline how I approach cultural victories, I expect you're thinking along more general lines and I think this is the source of our disagreement.

What is the main business of a cultural victory? What are you really trying to do? On what should all of your efforts be focused and your strategy be designed to achieve? The main business turns out to be only 2 things -

1. Reduce the amount of future turns needed in order to complete 5 SP trees
2. Stay alive

The tall vs wide and early vs late aspects of tradition and liberty are all very valid points but all very peripheral to this main business of increasing your pt while decreasing the total amount of you need to produce to begin building the utopia project, whilst staying alive. Everything else takes a back seat to that.

So as I see it there is a very strong case for not going commerce/patronage in place of liberty. That is that the liberty tree offers you something huge (amongst lots of other nice stuff), it offers a large reduction in the total amount of that you need to produce in order to complete 5 SP trees, and this is your main business. Nothing in commerce should tempt you away from that.

The free worker, settler and GP all contribute to make liberty still a very strong tree. Tradition is mandatory for legalism and aristocracy in the early-mid game but then there's nothing much else on offer there and the rest can be skipped for the other policies available at that stage that really address your main business in piety and freedom.