I have to side with the camp that's questioning the race for liberalism. If you've specifically identified the period directly after liberalism as the troublesome part of your game, why would you race to get to that troublesome part?
Because this is the best path you can take.
If you run Se,
especially if you run it with phil. trait, there doesn't exist better path then paper -> education -> liberalism -> p.press (after which comes gunpowder and chemistry). This chain of tech can be acquired more easily (paper, education, ppress, chemistry can all be rushed with GS) on highest levels before AI then other techs.
Other very important aspect is that, if you got liberalism and a free tech, AI didn't. You will need liberalism more or less anyway so why pass up free tech?
Third, there really isn’t much choice as to what to research once you get education (and imo, education is one of rare and expensive techs you can get first to (only two GS to lighbulb it) and trade to AI for other important techs). Education is the most expensive tech at the time and if you pop it with GS you shouldn’t loose race to liberalism.
usually on highest levels you don’t really have a choice as to what to research…
So I always want to get to liberalism first, it’s just too good to pass it up.
Also there isn’t much choice as to what to get as a free tech from liberalism, it’s not like you can actually set up so you get some deep tree tech like steel or democracy……
But there are some interesting choices for sure i.e you can get gunpowder and then pop your way to grenadiers trough ppress and chemistry (like in that immortal game). Or if your playing philo. civ and managed to get great merchant, you can get nationalism and pop your way to representation with him… once you get representation its bread and butter for fe/se as far as research goes.
but to try answer your original question futurehermit, usually going up a level requires that you adapt a new better strategy as not all strategies you played on lower levels work.. well i don’t actually remember anymore what games up to monarch look like, but i guess there’s a difference between emperor and monarch.. i know when i started playing civ4 i used ce + financial because it was popular, i didn’t yet understand how game works really , and nobody really played fe/se (those advanced players who did never bragged about it here ) and it worked up until emperor+. But probably hardest thing was moving from emperor (epic) to immortal (normal) , and while i was still able to keep up with ais research wise, i couldn’t produce enough units in short amount of time. So i revised my whole strategy and started playing fe/se and since then never looked back. I can still win with ce but it's so mcuh less flexible its not even funny.
so if you are 3 techs in front of AI, how about you sacrifice some of that research for some extra production; that extra research in itself doesn’t mean anything if you’r going for domination..
since its hard to see exactly what problems you have, next time you play game, make a few saves and post , im sure you’ll get some advices
edit: btw, bellow say immortal , you can actually choose strategy you want to play but after that level you have to exploit AI, so you cant really choose strategy it sort of chooses you.. anyway all my deity games look almost exaclty the same because there aint different ways to play this level.., ive no idea if this made sense...
lol what a long useless post i just took 5 min of your life
If you've beat down your neighbors enough during the earlier parts of the game it'd be pretty surprising for them to be first to Liberalism anyway. It's much more likely that someone on the far side of the world will get it first.
