Is it ever advisable to build many cities and run Liberty now in BNW?

Is this a viable strategy any more - I get the impression that it only pays to have a few, well-developed cities, run tradition and emphasize science. Going to war is counterproductive because of the massive warmonger penalties and you get heavily penalized in terms of happiness and science for each city you build. Are there any alternative means of playing the game now?

 

YES IT IS WORTH IT!!

By going wide you will nearly allways get bigger population then a tall empire in the end.

Happines will be the most limiting factor so get happines Buildings quickly, maybe Before liberies.

Best way to get a lot of lands is to build cities first to cut of the land from other civs then expand into that land aka OTI (outwards to inwards) or OI.

 

It is worth it, it's just not as easy as playing tall, which is why it gets sidelined. Ultimately you'll be putting out substantially more science, happiness and culture than you're losing by going wide (not to mention extra faith, and with Sacred Sites quite a lot more tourism), but it takes quite a while to pay off, and above all you need a strong economy with a lot of city connections to support it, which makes it difficult to sustain until quite late in the game. There's a reason AIs on higher difficulties outperform the player for much of the game and it's not all down to difficulty level bonuses - they seem to expand a lot more than they do on lower difficulties.

 

IMO it is more doable on maps with lots of water. The Scrambled Continents map pack in particular has a map called Small Continents Plus which IMO should actually be the game's default map. IMO it is MUCH better balanced than the current maps.

On that map, playing wide or tall works. Tall is still probably easier and early war mongering is still a pain. But the wide works if you dont mind (probably) taking more turns to finish the game.

A great way to go wide on a watery map, BTW is to go with Carthage. They get a free Harbor with every city which at first doesn't seem too great. But in BNW there is a policy in the new Exploration tree that gives you +1 Happy from every Harbor, Lighthouse, or Seaport--and it only takes two policy picks to get to. So, automatic +1 Happy per sea city, with possibility of +2 more. Combine that if you can with the pantheon belief +2 science from city connections, which works great because every sea city is connected to the network instantly. And yes, BTW, you get that free Harbor when you conquer foreign cities too.


As for how to go wide, my technique of late is to still go ahead and grow the capital as tall as possible. The difference is in the satellite cities. I try to place those near as many production tiles as possible. Horses or Ivory nearby (for the Circus) is very helpful for the extra +2 Happy.

 

Try to get alot of unique luxery Resources, that will help alot if you go wide and is one reason you should try to expand far from captial first because that give you often lux Resources you don't have at your capital.

Tall play will probably allways have a stronger early game but tends to stagnate later on compared to wide empires so have that in mind then you Think about going wide or going tall.

 

It also works on larger maps. I play on Huge, and Liberty is definitely viable there. Then there's a variety of civs that have some happiness buildings/UA's (Netherlands, Egypt, Celts), not to mention that a good religion can help as well (Ethiopia, Maya, Celts again).
I like to supplement Liberty with Commerce. The +50% happiness from luxuries policies is extremely strong. In a Liberty strategy, I also find the Big Ben to be a rather handy wonder since you'll want to buy some happiness buildings in your new cities ASAP, which is another reason to pick Commerce.
As noted before, Exploration is also a rather nice option. I think that it loses out to Commerce in most of the wide empires though, unless you really have a huge Port-based empire.

 

I like to go wide with Russia. Plop your cities near strategic resources and they'll be a bit more productive, sell your strategic resources for money instead of luxuries so you don't lose happiness - this is a great way for achieving a good gpt early game: a pasture on a 4 horse tile means 8 horses to sell to other civs (8 per turn) and +1 for your city.

 

One of the best civs for a liberty gsme is Indonesia as long as you have a map with multiple land masses. You basically get three free cities. I've had some enjoyable Liberty games with Indonesia. The thing to remember when you go Liberty is that it is a game of patience. You may start slow or behind, but you will catch up and surpass your opponents mid-game.

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You basicly get 3 mercantile CS in your empire, get them ASAP and sell the extra Resources.

 

I really don't understand the disdain for harbours; they're the best source of income in the game when you're able to set up multiple city connections by sea. Playing wide, city connections will earn you much more money (especially with MP) than trade.

I think it's a shame that Exploration isn't better for this kind of map and empire, which is where it ought to be ideal. The production boost for coastal cities is great in combination with the Liberty opener, and the Exploration opener is pretty strong (missed the Great Lighthouse? Here, have another one. Plus it unlocks a decent Wonder that almost no AI ever goes for if you want to play the tourism game), but there's no real incentive to finish the tree - Treasure Fleets isn't worth it given its position and the fact that the Great Admiral prerequisite is basically a wasted social policy.

EDIT: Actually, scratch the last - that policy isn't needed for Treasure Fleets. Overall the rest of the tree has some uses (I'm finding it useful now), but it's rather situational and doesn't have an attractive finisher (hidden sites? You don't have enough GWA slots for all the non-hidden ones).

 

Tips for going wide/Liberty note I am an Emperor player.
Social Policies:
Liberty duh, Collective rule is great because of fast training settlers, Meritocracy is great aswell, Citizenship is ESSENTIAL once your empire is massive
Patronage, first 2 are great for allying city-states which you'll want for happiness
Exploration/Commerce because money mainly if you want cash go commerce but if you want to warmonger go exploration
Order/Autocracy, depending on what you want from your gigantic empire
Civs:
Carthage for free harbors & instant gold, Ethiopia because of religious benefits, Shoshone for land grabbing, Arabia for gold, Dutch for happiness, Siam for city-state benefits
Generally unless a city place is ESSENTIAL, grow cap to 6-7 & then spam cities.
New City Build Order:
Coliseum, (Circus), (Shrine), Monument, Archer, Worker

 

As others have said I find Liberty is usually very good for any coastal start or heavily coastal empire. That doesn't mean it's always good for wide empires or essentially enables you to go wide where you couldn't otherwise. I often use liberty for the benefits to a coastal civ (get granaries up faster for food cargo ships) and stay at four cities until ideology kicks in, then expand because it's easy to expand after ideology.

Liberty is much weaker than it needs to be in terms of fixing current wide empire problems. It gives you no free buildings and no free units and no gold - and you're forced to pave and pay for roads early for the happiness - whereas tradition gives you all those free things, so in a wide/liberty empire you just end up broke forever. Take Tradition and go wide, and you have tons of free stuff and can afford to rush-buy buildings at critical moments for national wonder timing.

Inca are a good workaround since free roads (I just finished a strong wide game as Inca), or actually the Russia resource-selling strategy someone posted sounds good too.

Wide Liberty empires are also screwed on happiness. Meritocracy - Liberty's happiness policy - is a joke. Here's from my same example game where I founded 6 cities with a Liberty open.

Spoiler :

My capital is at 29 pop. My other 5 cities are in the teens. Tradition would be giving me 14 happy from total capital pop plus 7 for every-10 citizens in a city, for a total of 21.

Let's see what Liberty is giving me. 5 for connected cities. Oh I must be getting a lot from the citizen percentage discount. Well, citizen unhappiness is that 76.95+23.75 which is [taps on calculator] 100.7, which is 95% of [more tapping] 106... I'm saving 5 unhappiness. For a total of 10.

Half of Tradition.

Liberty is almost completely dysfunctional for wide empires right now. I still get the production boost, policy discount, and worker speed, which in this specific game I think is working better for me than tradition's money, happiness, tile, wonder, food, and GE-faithbuying bonuses, but who knows. I really just take Liberty or Honor most games because I enjoy the game more without OP Tradition.

It has been brought up in other threads that Liberty was probably designed to have less bonuses than Tradition because before BNW wide empires dominated with science and river-gold. Now that science costs scale, and river-gold is taken away, Tradition is hilariously better, even for wide empires.

 

Liberty is good because it gives you more workable land with culture than with the other social policy starters . The social policies themselves give you a free worker, a free settler and a free golden age. If you finish the social policy you also get a free great person of your choice. So why not use liberty.

 

I love Indonesia for going wide. The UA is perfect for it. If you can get Peace Gardens the UB gets stupid powerful going wide, it's pretty good even without the belief. My last Indonesia game I was producing almost 400fpt by the end of the game and faith bought engineers and scientists left and right. Peace Gardens isn't usually real competitive either, you can often be the last to found and still get it.

I'd say Liberty is easily on par if not better than tradition on huge maps. The science penalty is only 2% so you can expand expand expand as long as you have the happiness for it without feeling the tech penalty much.

I think civs with economic bonuses like the Inca or civs with happiness bonuses like Indonesia, Egypt, Persia, the Celts etc. fare the best with liberty. The tech penalty prevents wide/short empires but if you can manage to keep your happiness up while growing all those cities you can often surpass the small/tall ones around midgame. Try Liberty-Commerce-Order and get big ben, mercantilism and skyscrapers for super cheap buildings. If you can manage to toss in secularism, humanism and free thought from Rationalism you really won't notice much slowing in the tech progress.

 

6 cities isn't much as is 100 pop, of course tradition is stronger in such case.

Liberty is for like 10+ city civs with maybe 200+ population then you get more happines from Liberty then tradition by far.

Early good can be gotten by Selling Resources to other civs, something wide empires have an advantage in.

I can keep a large city empire with a big army without problem with Liberty.

Tradition looks strong because its easier to use but if you can go wide you should in my opinion because it will pay off.

 

Than with the other starters, but not than Legalism, which basically gives you double the Liberty opener for the first four cities, plus you have the Tradition opener. You need to race to settle cities to make use of Liberty's opener at a time when that +1 culture per city is much use, and economically I find I can't settle more than about 5 cities in the first 75-100 turns; in my current game I had a great wide start, getting to 5 cities before turn 75 - but it was another 50 or so turns before I could expand any further, and even on turn 300 or so I have only 7 cities. Every city needs a monument to expand, every city needs a granary to grow, every city needs a library to give you any benefit at all from the faster population growth compared with going wide.

That's 3 gold per city right there just on absolutely essential buildings; where does the money come from to sustain you while you're building the roads to connect them?

Meritocracy is poor and needs improvement, but happiness is not a huge constraint any more and there are quite a lot of ways to circumvent it - for a start wide empires are good for religion. GhostSalsa's screenshot makes the point - sure he'd have 20 rather than 10 happiness from Tradition, but he's got plenty of excess happiness as it is so that doesn't much matter.

By contrast Liberty absolutely, desperately needs a money-generating or money-saving policy.

On the 'tweak a policy tree' thread I suggested adding a 33% discount on building maintenance to Republic, in addition to its current effects - as you have those three essential buildings per city, that's basically equivalent to saving the maintenance on one in the early game, much the same as Legalism gives you for Tradition's first 4 cities, but Republic is a later policy (I actually shuffled the tree to make both Citizenship and Representation prerequisites, which makes both game and thematic sense).

Because mostly these aren't substantial boosts. Liberty basically does one thing and one thing only: boosts production. Settler and worker for free are basically just a set of free hammers, as is the discount on future settlers built in the capital. Republic is exclusively a production bonus as it stands. But you can't afford all the buildings you're producing, and nothing much about saving hammers really favours playing wide.

Fundamentally, these are two trees that play with one of the game's core resources: Tradition is all about food. Liberty is all about production. It's a policy tree structure that will inevitably favour Tradition, because food is the more important resource (and more food = more citizens who can be turned into more production at the click of a button. The converse isn't true - you can't turn production into food except with three buildings very widely separated on the tech tree, and which cost maintenance, two Wonders which you may not get, and food trade that has to be unlocked with trade routes and granaries and cost you the money-generating trade a wide empire so desperately needs before it hits a critical number of city connections).

As for the Great Person, it's timely to get a GS at that point, or occasionally a Great Prophet, but would you trade the ability to buy unlimited GPs later in the game with faith for the ability to get one early GP as a one-off? And what is the Golden Age doing for you at this point in the game? The key advantage of golden ages in the past was the increased tile yield from tiles that already produce gold, but tiles don't produce gold now without certain luxuries, and you want to get Representation long before you having trading posts or the Colossus, or even markets to multiply the income you're receiving.

 

Yup

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A few simple changes would do much to alleviate this
1. Remove the maintenance cost of shrines and monuments (this is also a small nerf to legalism)
2. Move the National College further down the tech tree, perhaps to Scientific Theory
3. Remove the requirement for the Hermitage needing Opera Houses in every city except in the city you choose to build it in.

 

If you have space, go ahead and go wide. Make the decision after you have scouted. If you find space for at least 6 cities, take liberty. Grab choke points asap and block foreign settlers. Going wide not only allows a strong late game, and also denies your competitors from expanding.

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More cities more museums so more artifacts to dig up more hotels which replies to more tourisme.


Going liberty with exploration is a really good combination you can get a lot of artifacts. use oxford on archeology and go nuts with diging buy most of the museums.