You guys keep talking about higher difficulties like its a trump all condition that makes tradition just better. I've played up to immortal and won, though it doesn't show up in my achievements because I was using interface mods, and the step from Prince to King wasn't that big of a deal. Then from King to emperor wasn't either. On immortal, I was still perfectly able to set up distant cities establishing borders; I play single player on small maps because I think of it as practice for multi player, and on a small Pangaea it meant getting roughly 6-8 cities consistently with liberty. Four city tradition, the strategy people drool about, has a flaw inherent from its title: it only works for four cities.
This has always been my problem with tradition. People always talk about imaginary bonuses to growth that tradition provides, and I honestly don't know where they're conjuring this from. There are two bonuses to growth in the tradition tree: one is a 2 food and 10% growth bonus that comes as a third tier policy of tradition, meaning it takes two other policies as well as the opener to unlock, and its bonus applies to ONLY ONE CITY, your capital, which is redundant because your capital should already have a lot of food from internal trade routes, better settling position, etc. Whatever about the redundancy, though, sure it's a nice policy. But again, it affects ONE CITY in your empire. This isn't a huge massive empire wide growth advantage and people often act like it is.
Of course there is a huge massive empire wide growth advantage in tradition. It comes at the finisher policy. You don't get your finisher policy until you FINISH the policy tree. This doesn't happen until partway through medieval, right? Unless you're playing Poland, or if you got the Oracle, or if you're like focusing great writers or something, you don't normally get your first tree done until the early to mid medieval era. The Acqueducts are kind of moot because you should be prioritizing engineering for the trade route and literally for Acqueducts, meaning they're a mid classical tech, so you'll probably ideally be building them by the late classical, which is before people usually finish their policy trees. Now the 15% empire wide is a nice finisher, but again, we should examine that it's realistically coming in the mid to late medieval. What else is unlocked during this time? Workshops and universities. Now the whole point of early game growth is that it's the most important output because it leads to both beakers and hammers. Growth is probably the most important resource early game, there's no arguing that; but I don't think anybody would argue that the reason it's the most important is because they like seeing a high crop yield demographic. It's important because you need it to get hammers and beakers, the most important resources across the entire game, as in to win the game. However, when key buildings are unlocked that allow players to specialize and focus things more effectively, which happens right around the medieval era, growth is replaced with the yields themselves as the most important thing to get because those resources are the whole point of growth. This means a 15% bonus to food essentially fuels a faster population growth without a real point. Your cities should already be working their key tiles and should still be growing by the time you finish your tree. If you need your cities to gain an extra 1.5 food for every 10, ally a couple city states. It'll result in a bonus that gets modified by other percentages and also is easier from liberty because a wider empire always produces a non-scaling resource faster, like gold. More tiles to work equals more output. What ends up happening is population growth for tradition cities happens marginally faster in for cities that are already starting to waver a bit in the population game. IE, a couple of turns faster from around populations 15-20.
However, because there's a pretty clear tapering out point for most cities in terms of pop. This happens around population 20-25. Tradition manages to get here about 10-15 turns faster than a liberty city, and by the end of the game it ends up with tradition having a nice capital and three expands that are about 20-23 population versus a liberty city's 15ish going to industrial and then dropping off around the same time. It would be a really nice bonus but it comes way too late to be relevant enough to be considered some awe inducing food advantage from tradition to liberty. For food I consider them side by side; either one will have cities burning through the first 5 or so pop, calming down around 6 and then picking up when they start working their improvements and buildings lighthouses and such things. Then they start slowing down again around 11. I guess the difference with tradition is that it allows some faster pop growth in specific periods of time within each city's growth, but most of the more important ones have passed by the time you're finishing tradition. But like I'm genuinely confused as to why people commend tradition by assuming it's got better growth bonuses when in reality it doesn't. Is there some secret growth bonus in oligarchy, the worst policy in the game, to make it more bearable? How about in legalism, a policy whose worth is surpassed in five turns in a well placed liberty expand?
, the AI on immortal/deity will go for the pyramids in (rough guess here) about 25% of my games, it's not guaranteed. But I agree it's one of my favorite wonders in non-island games. In games where water is going to be lot of my tiles then pyramids are not worth it: a light house or the great lighthouse is a better investment.
