kaspergm
Deity
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- Aug 19, 2012
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Would it, really? How would this benefit you more than Tradition if you were playing narrow/tall?
How to Fix Liberty
- Thread starter CraigMak
- Start date
GhostSalsa
Emperor
That's not a strategy. That's a wish. Money isn't unlimited. A wide empire is still broke at this point in the game. Assuming the TR slots being used for food to your guild/science city are not up for consideration, then to run routes to new cities you have to give up international routes, becoming even more broke thanks to expansion.
Rush-buying in it? You still need to rush a workshop in your guild city and re-up your happiness CS's, etc etc - you already don't have enough money. The lack of ready money in wide empires is the whole reason these fix-liberty threads keep popping up.
It's true Oxford and Hermitage can be deferred but I don't think any empire that settles after 110 will reach Worker's Facilities and 5-Year Plan the same time as one that halts at 110 ever. It would just never happen in practice. You don't recover science, culture, and core city production (due to having to distribute crucial rush-buys to these new cities) fast enough.
Settling new cities slows everything in your empire. Ok, that's fair, you should have to nurse the city and make it productive. What should the turnaround time be? Well currently in the Medieval and Renaissance eras it is almost exactly the same as ancient and then in Modern when settling is just pointless from every perspective, it is 1/10th. That makes sense.
I myself have always preferred Liberty over Tradition and went for wide empires, production focus and military domination. I have played duels, teamers and FFA's in that way.
When BNW came out I noticed that a distinct change in game play was required to be successful. The game now definitely favors Tradition over Liberty. While you can kill the guy next to you, what are you going to do against that one guy who built up un-harrassed the entire game with Tradition?
Almost every game will have one of those guys with a HUGE tech lead and Liberty simply can't compensate like it used to. Especially now that a large army almost requires liberty to run negative gold. You can kill people but your science suffers greatly the entire time.
Every city you added used to help your science output, that is no longer the case. You used to be able to have a massive army without going negative. That is no longer the case. The game did a complete 180 from war bias to simcity bias when BNW came out.
You can't get the GL reliably on the higher levels, and you would have to completely ignore your development and defense to get the NC slingshot in. You can pull it off sometimes, and well, sometimes you will have Attila next door...
Why would you be rushing Guilds when going wide?
adwcta
King
Eh, statistically, settling a city when you have two modern era techs is the break even point for science. That's very very late. It's also useless and costs happiness (for a slight net loss of gold) unless you have a good non-science reason.
But, it means late Renaissance to Early Industrial (post-Hermitage) are still good (okay, not good, but acceptable) times to settle. You'll want to hit Industrialization first (or right after schools, but I prefer before) for ideology of course and build 3 factories.
The question for these late cities isn't whether you can get your science back (you certainly can, with library + university + 2 specialists)... It's whether these cities are doing anything else for you. You can usually make them generate gold for science games (a nice benefit, but obviously not decisive), and delay your ideology to go archeology and fill more artifacts and/or settle next to those dig sites.
Wide culture games are heavily underrated IMO. On difficulties below Immortal, you can win pre-NVC/Internet. On Deity, you can lose out to the AI on some wonders and still out tourism tall for endgame great musician bombs. Unlike tall, it'll never run out of steam.
I would only build these cities in a science game for mountains and chokepoint security. 150 is my cutoff on Liberty, 120 on Tradition (less bonuses, more cost).
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But, it means late Renaissance to Early Industrial (post-Hermitage) are still good (okay, not good, but acceptable) times to settle. You'll want to hit Industrialization first (or right after schools, but I prefer before) for ideology of course and build 3 factories.
The question for these late cities isn't whether you can get your science back (you certainly can, with library + university + 2 specialists)... It's whether these cities are doing anything else for you. You can usually make them generate gold for science games (a nice benefit, but obviously not decisive), and delay your ideology to go archeology and fill more artifacts and/or settle next to those dig sites.
Wide culture games are heavily underrated IMO. On difficulties below Immortal, you can win pre-NVC/Internet. On Deity, you can lose out to the AI on some wonders and still out tourism tall for endgame great musician bombs. Unlike tall, it'll never run out of steam.
I would only build these cities in a science game for mountains and chokepoint security. 150 is my cutoff on Liberty, 120 on Tradition (less bonuses, more cost).
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GhostSalsa
Emperor
I play Immortal so I can usually rely on Worlds Fair, and I find that with that and Hermitage I can get to Iron Curtain by turn 220-ish. This is essentially the same post-Industrial window where I might still settle some cities, but really I'm looking at conquest at this point, for fun and points and because the cities will turn around fast enough anyway, it all breaks even. Point being that there's a huge blob of early culture for Order on the line with regard to mid-game settling and potentially throwing my build orders in my wide empire.
We disagree that Medieval and Ren settling turn 110-150 is detrimental for a wide empire. I think it's not controversial to say it should at least be a clearer benefit and more attractive. If production bonuses scaled up in mid-game, settling in Ren would look better. "Oh ok I've got +25% on my granary because literally it's not the year 3000BC anymore this is nice."
I don't play AI, I refer to multi-player where the game is actually interesting. In a real game, you can beat anyone to GL if you have an early production spawn. FFA matches are usually pretty docile since nobody wants to get entrenched in war and fall behind everyone else. It's quite easy for some one with a decent start to rush GL, get NC and then make settlers.
This strat works well with Liberty so that you don't have to hard build a settler or worker while building your GL and NC. Go worker first to chop for them and get a free settler about the time NC is done. It's quite strong, possibly OP only due to NC placement synergy with GL.
Unless you specifically mention that you are taking about multi-player, which you didn't, people are going to assume single player because that it what the vast majority of threads on this forum deal with.
Well the AI is epically stupid and boring, I really don't see the point in discussing strategies vs such an opponent. Although what is more efficient in a multi-player game should also translate over to a single player game.
Except of course for unrealistic stuff where the AI makes GL on turn 15. Since the AI can only be competitive through blatant cheating, single player is wholly uninteresting IMO.
It's like discussing how to beat a chimp and then oh wait, the chimp has a laser gun while you have only your fists. Yeah, hes completely stupid but has a massive advantage if he can figure out how to use it. This is single player mode.
this made me laugh
i too play almost exclusively MP, since single player is unchallenging. not only that, but deity games limit your strategy (units such as rome's legions become useless for offence since they come too early and at this point you have a huge tech disadvantage)...
anyway to the point of this thread: liberty is either underpowered, or tradition is massively overpowered.
adwcta, you can say you crunched the numbers all you want, i say you crunched them wrong. you probably left out important stuff out, if you reached the conclusion that liberty is better at larger empires.
this game has so many variables in it, the easiest way to know tradition is OP is playing a wide 8 city empire with tradition and then another one with liberty, and see which one goes more fluintly.
to every one of liberty's bonuses, tradition gives a better one. to every one of its free stuff, tradition gives "free-er" stuff. +1 hammer and +5% prod with buildings? HAH! tradition has +2 food and +15% growth. early on thats another hill (+2 prod) later on thats 5 extra citizens and 3 more hills.
1 free worker and 25% worker speed bonus? tradition has 160 INSTANT hammers with monuments (that generate culture INSTANTLY. no need to wait 20 turns to finish the moneument, that adds up to some heavy culture early on).
the tradition finisher is ridiculously good, due to:
1. the aqueducts being FREE and INSTANT. that means by the time liberty has to research and build those things, which can take more then 50 turns extra, this finisher grants the 4 tradition cities several new citizens each.
2. you dont have to research them, which lets you focus on universities etc/ upper part of tech tree.
3. they are FREE. they dont make future aqueducts more expensive, like the liberty finisher does.
i can go on and on, but honestly other people have summed it up better then i have.
play ninakoru's balance mod if you want a balnced SP game.
in short, monarchy needs a big nerf, and traditions free stuff need to apply to 2-3 cities instead of 4.
megabearsfan
Prince
I don't remember if it was already mentioned on this thread, but one idea for buffing Liberty would be for a policy to add a trade route.
Perhaps Meritocracy can be augmented:
+1 Happiness for each city connected to the capital, and -5% unhappiness from citizens in non-occupied cities.
+1 free trade route and free caravan. Internal trade routes generate 2 local happiness in the destination city as well as providing +2 gold and +1 additional gold for each era after ancient.
This gives prospective wide empires an extra trade route so they don't have to sacrifice an international route in order to get newly-founded cities established. On top of that, the internal routes will help offset the extra unhappiness and gold maintenance during the construction of a road to that city.
While on topic of additional trade routes, i think that Commerce should offer an extra trade route at some point, and there should be a national wonder that gives an extra route IMO. That way, you're not completely dependent on getting to certain techs in order to increase your trade route limit. Such changes might need to include a slight downscale of trade route values in general.
Well, I, and many other people, don't have the time (or willingness) to sit down for 3 hours or so without interruptions for a multi-player game. So we're stuck with single player where you can play a game in half an hour or one hour chunks. Enjoy it while you still can.
HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
I agree. Put it like this: The national wonders by their design favour small empires. Therefore, to the extent that national wonders are indispensable for victory, the game's design itself favours small empires and hates on wide.
As it happens, the National College is so epically good that the turn on which it is constructed - and it is assumed it will be constructed - is a pivotal turn of any strategy. Beginning to balance tall vs. wide must come after giving national wonders (and the national college specifically) a proper examination.
That said, the tall vs. wide question is not the Tradition vs. Liberty question. Liberty is equated with wide because the one is (supposed) to be the ideal conditions for choosing the other.
So with that idea, we have the notion of "intent" to deal with. Whatever an acceptable fix to the game's tall/wide/Tradition/Liberty issue would look like, we know it has to satisfy some concepts of what Liberty is "intended" to be. For instance, it is intended to resemble some ideas from the Roman republic if I'm not mistaken. In this thread, I've also heard that it is intended to have gold problems.
This is strange to me. What makes the statement that Liberty should be bad at gold valid? I was all in a huff to propose that the Liberty Opener instead read "Cities yield +1 gold" or have some kind of mini-golden age effect, to incentivize settling to work luxury tiles, but I might be wrong?
Tl; dr, The fact that we need to discuss nerfing tradition, or the mechanics of empires themselves, to balance liberty, speaks to the gross imbalance of things.
I don't know what's going on in your life that you can't get a few hours to yourself but I am very sorry for that. Sounds terrible. Women/children have their rewards but nothing is worth every hour of your life. That's called slavery.
You know, what really puts me off multi-player is the people who play it.
sendos
Immortal
There are two choices: strengthen liberty a little or weaken tradition. Tradition sets the standard for starting policies. With liberty, the main issues are gold and happiness. The following suggestions would liberty a bit more attractive and balanced to tradition:
- free granary in first 3-5 cities
- +10% gold from city connections added to meritocracy and -15% unhappiness from cities connected to capitol, rather than -5%.
- free library in first 4-6 cities
I also support weakening the NC's bonus to 25% and giving the other 25% to Oxford.
- free granary in first 3-5 cities
- +10% gold from city connections added to meritocracy and -15% unhappiness from cities connected to capitol, rather than -5%.
- free library in first 4-6 cities
I also support weakening the NC's bonus to 25% and giving the other 25% to Oxford.
The only thin that needed to balance liberty and tradition is to remove tradition border grow bonus.
Really, in liberty you still can grow capital big , but in order to do that you usually need 3 more cities around just to grow borders to give back to capital.
+3 culture to capital is enough bonus to grow border to capital. additional bonus is what make tradition ridiculous.
Really, in liberty you still can grow capital big , but in order to do that you usually need 3 more cities around just to grow borders to give back to capital.
+3 culture to capital is enough bonus to grow border to capital. additional bonus is what make tradition ridiculous.
Veras
Prince
I think Tradition should remove the 4 Free Monuments from Legalism. It makes the Tree very strong to begin since the +3 culture opener plus the +2 of the Monument allows you to pick at least 3 social policies very early. And I'm not even considering the possibility of the +20 culture ruin. It doesn't end there, since the Free Monuments also saves you gold and hammers, extrapoling what should be the Tree's focus. Changing Legalism into other less significant thing would cut a good amount of gold, production and culture, making Tradition more even, maybe.
LoneRebel
Emperor
Is it fair to say that Liberty is more desirable on Large and Huge maps? On those map sizes, you are expected to have more cities.
Tradition is clearly the stronger choice on any size up to Standard, but I think that past Standard it isn't as clear-cut.
Tradition is clearly the stronger choice on any size up to Standard, but I think that past Standard it isn't as clear-cut.
