Liberty or Tradition ? Which tech to get first ?

FarLead

Chieftain
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Every game i play i am wondering which one i should pick, i like playing wide in multiplayer but liberty dont give as much hapiness as tradition. The free monument in 4 first city and aqueduct seems like a way bigger bonus that a free setler and worker.

At 100 turn, on quick speed, what is the optimal population for 3-4 first city i built ?

As for Tech i always go for luxury tech, then go for library, then i usualy go for market. Which tech should i prioritize ?

Are arabia any good pick for multiplayer ? I also like playing Maya.
 
Wow, lots of questions. I play in NO_QUITTERS and I typically play Immortal or Deity if playing single-player, here's my thoughts:

Tradition is the best option 90-95% of the time. Liberty is the best option 5-10% of the time. If you chose Liberty when you should have chosen Tradition you're screwed. If you chose Tradition when you should have chosen Liberty you're actually going to do okay. I tend to default Tradition and play that. If you're playing with NQMod this is not as clear-cut.

Your capital should be at least 10-15, other settles vary. It's not hard and fast but biggest population is almost always going to be the winner. Population is almost everything.

Skip Writing, develop other technologies that will help you grow faster. Sailing or Animal Husbandry are much more valuable then Writing. Bronze Working is much more valuable then writing. The Wheel is much more valuable... Get the picture? You want to get a National College out pretty quickly but unless I'm playing Babylon (or have no where to settle) I don't even bother researching Writing until I'm building my last (pre-NC) settler.

Currency is a good tech, but don't rush it too quickly. GPT is something often neglected by many players so it's good you're keeping on top of that.

Arabia and Maya are both very very good civilizations in MP. For Arabia it's all about the Camel Archer. For Maya it's all about the Pyramid and the Long Count (so be sure to get Theology relatively quickly, I can't remember what turn you need to have it on for quick though).
 
Ok, so i should just research almost every tech in ancient era before going for writing. When should i start thinking about getting more science ?
 
Not every, just focus on what grows your cities faster first. Libraries + NC scale with city size. Getting them for tiny cities has little effect. You should have granaries, water mills, trade routes, shrines, etc. up before building libraries.
 
Not every, just focus on what grows your cities faster first. Libraries + NC scale with city size. Getting them for tiny cities has little effect. You should have granaries, water mills, trade routes, shrines, etc. up before building libraries.

This isn't quite true though. If you follow that logic library will be delayed too much. It depends on how many cities you have planned before building NC, and that determines how early you can get Philosophy for NC. If you want to play wide liberty, you might have to build library immediately after granary, or immediately after monument, or even before monument and use GE to rush NC. For 1st or 2nd expo, you can have time to build other buildings before library. For 4 city tradition, it is often best to buy the library for the 4th city and time NC to be built immediately after the 3rd hard build library. You will have to also judge when to get writing by planning ahead.
 
That's true if you go 4 city for a T80 NC but if you play liberty and plan on planting more prior to a later NC you'll have time to get more stuff. Like I suggest in my guide for singleplayer below.

I don't really know about Liberty in MP though. First issue is that MP likes smaller maps and Liberty scales with size so that's already a bad start. The second issue is that I'd guess human players are better at settling good spots fast than the AI.
 
Tradition is the best option 90-95% of the time. Liberty is the best option 5-10% of the time. If you chose Liberty when you should have chosen Tradition you're screwed. If you chose Tradition when you should have chosen Liberty you're actually going to do okay.
This about sums it up for me!
 
The two trees are about equally good, but it depends on the settings and on your intentions.

If you plan on having only 3-4 cites by turn 100 than Tradition is your best path. For Liberty to thrive you need about 7 cities, which may not be easy in MP.

Currency is not a priority tech, unless you have a desert start and want Petra.
 
I don't really know about Liberty in MP though. First issue is that MP likes smaller maps and Liberty scales with size so that's already a bad start. The second issue is that I'd guess human players are better at settling good spots fast than the AI.

I would think if you were playing Liberty you would be doing a composite bowman rush on your neighbors. Priority would be the bottom of the tech tree- building workshops and colosseums to have lots of larger cities (with more production) so your population can negate libraries & NC for a bit longer.
you would use your GE to rush the NC later on/
 
Hey guys, I'm fairly new to Civilization V, but I at least win at Prince difficulty and it starts to become easy towards the last 25% of the game; so I would like to move towards Immortal difficulty soon enough. I face the same dilemma almost every match: Tradition or Liberty. However, one thing I noticed when I went up the difficulty level is that Happiness starts to become extremely difficult to manage while expanding. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Tradition almost a no-brainer at the higher difficulty levels almost solely because of the Happiness hit? In other words, if Monument was your first building, etc., and you're collecting some excellent Culture non-stop, thus able to collect Social Policies regularly, then what use is Liberty in the beginning if you can't even build a 3rd city without going into negative Happiness by the time you're almost done filling the Tradition tree? See what I mean?
 
You need to plan your game. Make sure you have enough Workers to improve those luxuries, and then to connect your cities with roads for the happiness from Meritocracy.
 
You need to plan your game. Make sure you have enough Workers to improve those luxuries, and then to connect your cities with roads for the happiness from Meritocracy.

Then it becomes a matter of funds. Especially when we include roads in the picture during the first 100 turns or so. Each military unit that can protect my one or two cities, and the others exploring, takes gold per turn for maintenance; almost each building being added to the capital takes 1g per turn, and all this is happening way before there are banks. So at higher difficulties it feels impossible to even dream of using more than one worker per city, sometimes per two cities, let alone build roads.
 
If you have the room and there are 5+ luxuries, go liberty. It lacks in science a bit in the early and mid game but the production bonuses make up for it. Late game, the science a liberty empire can produce is phenomenal once you have schools/labs up.

Liberty takes a lot more micromanaging to get the most out of it so if you are newish stick with tradition until you start learning to manage overlapping city tiles your citizens work. When you get that down you will enjoy liberty as it has a tendency to snowball insanely hard compared to tradition.
 
As for techs with liberty empires, you tend to focus on the bottom half of the tree especially in higher difficulties as you need the military techs and liberty makes great use of timing pushes at xbows/arties with their production bonuses. Grab your luxury techs first then you usually want machinery for comp bows next. On lower difficulties you can delay comp bows if you want to grab philosophy next. Currency is also important as liberty has gold issues in the early game as your 5-7 cities with 1-3 pop can't pay for the roads that connect them, your workers and military units. After that you're pretty much beelining for workshops and xbows.
 
Then it becomes a matter of funds. Especially when we include roads in the picture during the first 100 turns or so. Each military unit that can protect my one or two cities, and the others exploring, takes gold per turn for maintenance; almost each building being added to the capital takes 1g per turn, and all this is happening way before there are banks. So at higher difficulties it feels impossible to even dream of using more than one worker per city, sometimes per two cities, let alone build roads.

You need to be selling strategic resources. Keeping positive gold doesn't become a problem for even liberty until mid ren era when building maintenance in 7-10 cities hits you hard.
 
For gold issues, a good suggestion is to not connect roads until the expo city is the same population as the number of road segments. You can pre-build them, leaving one turn to finish each segment if you want. You should be able to sell horses and iron for 2 gpt to the AI, sell them one at a time. You really don't need them (unless you want to use a UU, or plan to attack someone, where Horsemen are pretty neat to take the city at the end of your battle). You can also trade 5 iron/horse for 1 lux, if the AI needs them. Enjoy Immortal!
 
I don't really know about Liberty in MP though. First issue is that MP likes smaller maps and Liberty scales with size so that's already a bad start. The second issue is that I'd guess human players are better at settling good spots fast than the AI.

It's very doable actually on MP, yes the humans are better at settling than the AI, but they're also slower, so when you go liberty you should almost always have the upper hand on the "2nd class" of best settling spots. You'll also end up with a lot of hammers which is really important in MP (because medieval war is almost impossible to dodge).

I'm talking with the NQ mod of course, in basic civ 5 you should almost always go tradition.
 
Liberty is much, much better for domination games. Tradition takes too long to get going. If you capture a city early, you can snowball throught the game very easilt. and my best wins are when I start war early and win before anyone could win peacefully. It's much less likely with Tradition.
 
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