HG or GL: Which is Most Valuable Early Game?

Chris3894

Warlord
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Apr 25, 2014
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Which of these two wonders (or another ancient/classical era wonder) do you view the most valuable to get yourself off to a good start? If I had to choose I'd say the Hanging Gardens because that food early on is so huge and can help get you a super capital if you have other good sources of food.
 
It depends on what settings you use and your surroundings, but between your 2 choices I'd say HG over GL. Although neither are really that amazing
 
It depends on what settings you use and your surroundings, but between your 2 choices I'd say HG over GL. Although neither are really that amazing

I value the national college and settlers over them both. Both will keep you too small for too long.
 
Strange choice. If you can have GL, HG is yours. I don't remember a game where I lose HG after GL. But I remember a lot losing both.
 
Most definitely HG for me, the food bonus is hardly replaceable. If you go directly for it its difficult to lose it up to Immortal. IMO it is more difficult to get the perfect timing and finish GL just in time to get Mathematics and hence HG. Could lose both indeed.
 
I believe the GL is not a must have wonder when you play on lower levels. It is so easy to catch up on tech without it. Hanging Gardens I personally never built it when I was on lower levels because there was so many other things that I thought were more important like getting a small army and settlers out.
 
I don't think I've built the Hanging Gardens in a very long time. It's not very good anymore, and easily replacable by a trade route. Maybe if you don't have a river, but going to Mathematics is a pretty useless early tech path except for the wonder.
I think a lot of (early) wonders are traps, and Hanging Gardens definitely seems to fit into that category.
 
GL will help you sooner, giving you a greater snowball effect. The food from HG will give you that extra science, but only over time...
 
GL gives you a valuable tech early, but stops being useful after that. HG at least helps throughout the whole game. I'd rather have HG over GL any day. I rarely build either, but if I build one, it is HG if the AI doesn't build it before I finish the NC.
 
Artemis. Befriend some maritimes, and pretty soon artie is producing the same food in your cap as HG. But it comes with food in your other cities as well, as well as early +1 GE point and archer bonus.
 
Odd choice,
on Immortal, you rarely have a shot at building GL at all (AI's starting worker, worker techs, Pottery, ...)

While a Food Cargo Ship starts with exactly the same amount of food as Hanging Gardens and grows from there. (Cargo ship + regular garden much cheaper in terms of hammers than Hanging Gardens)
 
HG is pretty much only for when you didn't settle on fresh water. Otherwise skip.
 
You can successfully get HG on immortal if you beeline the tech and have a decent start, but this gives a huge opportunity cost in that you've avoided the science techs and will get a later national college and library (so maybe not worth it0. It's a gamble, but is a very useful wonder. Note that it doesn't give GP points of any kind though and minimal culture. Getting GL on immortal? Don't try it, you'll lose unless you have an insane start and get a free tech on the way to writing, but it is on the way to NC, so there's that, if you lose it you get a bit of gold and haven't gotten off the optimal early tech path other than delaying the library. Lose HG? You're way behind, have no NC, and delayed libraries. I'd only try if I'd already gone and gotten NC tech first and the AI still hadn't built it for some reason.

As mentioned ToA is easily better than both. A flat, pre-eat, 10% boost to all food empire-wide? Vastly exceeds +6 food in one city. Pre-eat means it will multiply ANY sources of food by 10% THEN subtract feeding pop, so later your high-pop city with 2 food ships will easily be giving you more food than a hanging gardens city. It accelerates late-game growth in large cities even more, so it can shave many turns off growth throughout the game if you are aiming for high-pop cities. Plus you get a GP point and a 15% discount on ranged units to protect yourself that alone will pay back your hammers over the years, but, diverting to get ToA can also be undesirable if it delays early settlers in tight quarters or delays libraries or NC. Also, many AI will score it early. I usually see it go 2nd after GL so you really do want to zoom straight for it if you want it (which delays science). Might make up for itself in growth later, but early science is hard to make up. If I get a free archery tech from a ruin though? Oh baby, I'm trying for it! :)

I also think that Pyramids is better than both GL and HG. You might not think it looking at it, but value of wonders is also based on how AI prioritize them. The AI beeline every wonder mentioned so far in the ancient except Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and Pyramids (same tech). So these can be successfully ignored while you get your NC and then gotten later. Pyramids requires you to open liberty, which is an opportunity cost, but +1 culture per city is always useful and pyramids is amazing. It gives you 2 free workers (basically pays for itself in hammers if you are short workers), discounts all future tile improvements by an amazing 25%! Even better with the worker tenet in liberty (50%!) this will save you so much time on improvements. If you have a fast-growing city it is basically earlier food, production, science, etc. As improvements are being completed so much faster. Roads can be as quick as 1 turn in cases so gold comes quick. On top of that you get a GE point. Since you won't be getting GS points until universities this is basically a free GE early-game around the time several useful wonders are going fast. It can easily score you an amazing wonder later like Chichen Itza, which you almost never get on immortal otherwise. Food for thought. Plus, pyramids is so much ignored by AI you can pick it up for free almost later in the medieval era. Sometimes you can finish all of tradition, then open liberty and still get it depending on the game.
 
I nearly always get the HG, GL and the ToA but that is probably because I usually play on king. I find that if you build the GL you can build the NC right after and then the game snowballs from there and you will always have the tech lead
 
I don't get the argument that HG isn't good because a Cargo Ship can give the same amount of food. There's no reason you can't build the HG and send a Cargo ship for even more growth than either by itself.
 
I don't get the argument that HG isn't good because a Cargo Ship can give the same amount of food. There's no reason you can't build the HG and send a Cargo ship for even more growth than either by itself.

That early in the game, your capital is the only one with decent production.
If you build Cargo ship in capital first, then you run risk of missing the wonder.
If you build Hanging Gardens first, it's a long delay for either the capital to finish producing it so that cargo ship can start, or else the cargo ship is going to take a long time to build.
Remember that BNW turned off the 240 gold for selling each luxury in early game.
For that matter on high difficulty levels, Hanging Gardens interferes with timing of National College as well.
 
That early in the game, your capital is the only one with decent production.
If you build Cargo ship in capital first, then you run risk of missing the wonder.
If you build Hanging Gardens first, it's a long delay for either the capital to finish producing it so that cargo ship can start, or else the cargo ship is going to take a long time to build.
Remember that BNW turned off the 240 gold for selling each luxury in early game.
For that matter on high difficulty levels, Hanging Gardens interferes with timing of National College as well.

Yes but the same can also be said for the GL:
That early in the game, your capital is the only one with decent production.
If you build Cargo ship in capital first, then you run risk of missing the wonder.
If you build Great Library first, it's a long delay for either the capital to finish producing it so that cargo ship can start, or else the cargo ship is going to take a long time to build.

So that doesn't seem like a valid reason as to why GL or HG is better than the other.
 
Yes but the same can also be said for the GL:
That early in the game, your capital is the only one with decent production.
If you build Cargo ship in capital first, then you run risk of missing the wonder.
If you build Great Library first, it's a long delay for either the capital to finish producing it so that cargo ship can start, or else the cargo ship is going to take a long time to build.

So that doesn't seem like a valid reason as to why GL or HG is better than the other.

The thread has kinda diverged by this point. Really, they're both terrible wonders compared to what you can be doing at that point in the game. One free tech from GL seems pretty big - until you realize that you basically lose out on building settlers at that point, or vastly delay NC. How it's going to go is you beeline writing, and along the way you have time to build 2 scouts, a shrine, and maybe a granary. Then you start building GL. You have no settlers at this point. You finish GL and then you open Philosophy (because you researched Calendar while you were building it). What do we do at Philosophy? National College. So you build that next, because why wouldn't you? That's the whole reason you're doing this in the first place.

Unfortunately, in the 35 turns you spend building GL and NC, you've lost all the good settling spots. Furthermore, even if you didn't, now your satellite cities are 25/15/5ish turns behind where they should be at this point in the game. That's a long time to get all those workers built to get those luxes hooked up to get that happiness up so you can grow population. That's an incredible opportunity cost. You've gotten to the classical era, and an early NC, but it's inferior to having a little bit later NC with 4 solid, growing, productive cities.

HG is even worse, because it requires math. Math is on the tech path to friggin nowhere. Only if you were heading to Civil Service instead of Philosophy first would you ever beat an AI to Math, and that's just sub optimal. You're giving up on libraries and the NC and probably the Oracle and delaying your Writing Guild all for 6 food? That's a very poor trade.

Now, ToA -- that's a different story entirely. If you find an early ruin with Archery, and have a semi productive start, it's almost always worth it to try for it. Beg, steal, borrow, chop, whatever -- ToA is incredibly powerful and pays for itself very quickly at very little lost cost. Yeah, you'll probably not get the shrine up for awhile, and may have to rely on ruins/CS's to get your pantheon going. But you'll have a MUCH stronger civilization later.
 
My rule on HG is to build after NC if other civ's are not building it. I won't sacrifice for it, but if it is there for the taking, I'll take it. The game I'm playing now, I build NC, Petra and after a couple infrastructure items, I build HG because no one else built it.
 
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