Tech path when winning Lib is not feasible?

[Culture Bomb]

Some games you can tell quite early that winning the Lib race is unlikely; for example an AI discovers Philosophy unexpectedly early and trades it around to everyone, or you are slowed down by an early war etc and get behind.

Just wondering whether going for the traditional cuirassier breakout is a good idea when you can't Lib Nationalism or Military Tradition, and if so should a similar tech path still be followed, eg Paper - Education - Gunpowder.

It's still necessary to get Philosophy at some point to unlock Nationalism, but you can get to Gunpowder by going via Guilds instead, so I'm wondering if it's ever worth doing this and skipping the Paper - Education path. It's not really possible to bulb along this path, but it may be easier to trade for some of the techs, and this also opens up the possibility of bulbing Chemistry on the way to Steel, if you decide to go for that instead of cuirassiers.

 

[MarigoldRan]

Get Steel.

Get Cannons.

Draft. Muskets if absolutely necessary. Rifles if possible.

If you can't win Lib, you better start killing neighbors. Cannons have the advantage over Cuirs in that you can still wage wars while technologically behind.

 

[Patchface]

In that case I usually head for Engineering, and save GPs for golden ages. If you can get Guilds, workshops are a 5 hammer tile in GA. You can build 2-3 units per city during the GA running Caste, then switch into slavery at turn 8, and whip the last few. If you have 6 cities that's a pretty good army in ~15 turns with decent pop. left for whipping more.