Vokarya's Workshop: Wonders

45°38'N-13°47'E;13901407 said:
Netherlands: capital Amsterdam, parliament in The Hague.

Hmm... That's true. But after a little reading it seems like Amsterdam only an honorary capital, while The Hague is the real one.

Wikipedia said:
The Hague is the seat of the Dutch government and parliament, the Supreme Court, and the Council of State, but the city is not the capital of the Netherlands which constitutionally is Amsterdam.[8] King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands plans to live at Huis ten Bosch and works at Noordeinde Palace in The Hague, together with Queen Máxima. Most foreign embassies in the Netherlands and 150 international organisations are located in the city,

This doesn't seem enough to separate the two.
 
I have been thinking about what we can do with the Reichstag. I don't think I can make the "one-GA-per-civ-ever" work unless someone who really knows Python comes around. However, I think there are three things that I can do.

  • Not allow Golden Ages for a master that is already in a Golden Age. A simple Boolean check for the master would solve this.

  • Cap the number of Golden Age turns. We could give shorter Golden Ages. I am honestly thinking about 1 turn per city of the capitulating civilization. The only issue here is would GA modifiers (Mausoleum, etc.) apply (I think we could do either), and the help text could not reflect this. Help text is fixed for buildings; the only game text that I can build a self-editor for is Event Help text, and that is specifically allowed by the Event XML.

  • The most drastic thing I can do is to remove the Reichstag completely. The main reason it was included in the first place was to give Imperialism two tricks (Reichstag and Crystal Palace). Imperialism has since gotten the Redevelopment civic and is going to get Safari Hunters. This is more than enough to make the tech viable.
Let me know what you think of this.
 
What is the limit of wonders per-city? I just installed version 989 and found out each city can only build 2 world wonders. I thought it's 4 world and 2 national and if I pull up the top 5 cities window they definitely have more than 2 world wonders.
 
What is the limit of wonders per-city? I just installed version 989 and found out each city can only build 2 world wonders. I thought it's 4 world and 2 national and if I pull up the top 5 cities window they definitely have more than 2 world wonders.
It depends on culture level for each city and can be increased with certain wonders like Louvre.
 
I have been playing 994 after a long time off since putting away 1.75. I am not an expert player as I can barely survive Noble so take whatever my 0.02 is worth. Basically I am not a fan of the new Wonder mechanics.

With about ~150 Great Wonders I usually lost track of whom has what even within my own cities after the Middle Ages. Also since there are so many Wonders it's pretty easy to use up the limit quickly, which means instead of getting that real sense of "wonder" of finally building one I was often cursing myself of hitting the culture cap.

I get that so many wonders mean not having one won't be game breaking but at the same time the whole aspect of wonder building became a quota management. It's playing by subtraction and that is never fun in empire building games, especially with unique items. I love Wonders because it's one of the few things distinguishing cities and everything about it was positive reinforcement. Even losing a building race is rewarding because you get the gold to beef up research. IMHO I am not having fun with the new system.
 
I have been playing 994 after a long time off since putting away 1.75. I am not an expert player as I can barely survive Noble so take whatever my 0.02 is worth. Basically I am not a fan of the new Wonder mechanics.
...
IMHO I am not having fun with the new system.

I agree. But thankfully, there's an option to disable the wonder limit: Unlimited Wonders. I think it's selected at game start only.

Cheers. A.
 
Personally I think Unlimited Wonders cheapens the fun factor of building Great Wonders as well. Basically you will have 1 or 2 specialized cities for Wonders instead of using it to make a certain city unique and memorable.

For restoring the sense of "wonder" in building Great Wonders I'd prefer a hard cap in total Great Wonders to say no more than 60 while keeping the new culture based limit. This way I still get giddy and excited of seeing a Great Wonder pop up in my building queue instead of scrambling to check my city list to see whether I want to "waste" a valuable slot. The decision should be about current resource allocation rather than timeline opportunity cost. The rest of the current and new wonder buildings should be re-categorized under either minor project, special building or preferably map resource that enhance a single city only and without cap.

I am purely looking at this from a perspective of "fun". For me Civ is always a game striving for the positive rather than avoiding failure.
 
FYI I am working on a modmod that will contain an option that is somewhere between the current culture based limit and unlimited wonders option. You get one or two slots for every culture level, plus one for every level of the Village-hall line. This allows new opportunity for your cities as eras pass by, but won't result in a few mega cities with 20+ wonders while your other cities have none.
 
I agree that the wonder limit can feel restrictive, especially when you develop an empire with fewer larger cities, and on smaller maps. I do not know if this is intentional. A solution I was thinking about was to give the "core" national wonders (heroic and national epics that you are likely to build every game, perhaps capital administration for one later in the game) some number of wonder slots, so you get 4 per city plus X, to give smaller empires some more slots than previously without giving larger empires too many more.
 
maybe make each additional wonder in a city cost an additional X% to build?

So, your first is at-cost, your second is cost + 20%, and so on (flavor X to taste).

Hence, you can build 20 in a city if you can manage it - but there' s a built-in mechanic to make it desirable to distribute them a bit? But if you *really* want that new wonder to combine with the other's you built there previously - well - you can try! It's just going to cost you that much more to put it in the same spot.

Could make it at cost if <= culture level, and at_cost*X*count_above_culture_level (where X is your over-wonder penalty factor).
 
maybe make each additional wonder in a city cost an additional X% to build?

So, your first is at-cost, your second is cost + 20%, and so on (flavor X to taste).

Hence, you can build 20 in a city if you can manage it - but there' s a built-in mechanic to make it desirable to distribute them a bit? But if you *really* want that new wonder to combine with the other's you built there previously - well - you can try! It's just going to cost you that much more to put it in the same spot.

Could make it at cost if <= culture level, and at_cost*X*count_above_culture_level (where X is your over-wonder penalty factor).

I think it'd be hard to explain this in-game. When I click through the cities and see the same Wonder listed with build costs varying by location, it'd make me wonder why that was the case, and unless it were immediately obvious without more clicking around, that would be annoying.

Cheers, A.
 
Heh - you could add -production "bonus" to all wonders as an upkeep issue. That would reduce folks desire to pile them high in a city!
 
There are a few World Wonders that I'm still not happy with as far as their effects go. I am not about to actually change anything right now. I am more concerned with getting all the graphics changes in place. When I do that, it's now or never since it's going to be big. Once the graphics are in place, then I want to round up any last changes and bring my work pretty much to a close.

Here are the Wonders I am thinking about changing:
Silk Road
A mix of boring and overpowered in its current format. It generates a lot of gold but that is all it does. First of all, I would prefer it moved to Calendar AND Aristocracy and fold the Silk Farm back into Plantation. I don't see why Silk should be treated differently from other Plantation-requiring resources and I don't like having single-resource improvements. I can handle them if they are late-game and strategic resources like the Well, but not early-game improvements and not luxuries.
I have Python code that would turn Silk Road into a real road; lay roads connecting the building city to all sources of Silk in your territory, then to your Capital, and then to the largest city on the map that you have seen. It might be good to use that and a foreign commerce bonus instead of the big gold bonus.

Copernicus' Observatory and Leonardo's Workshop
These desperately need to be differentiated. Copernicus is close to a Cathedral-class building, not a National Wonder and certainly not a World Wonder, so it needs something. 1 free tech is off-limits, though: that's limited to Oracle, Cheomseongdae, and Computer Center.
I'm thinking of making Leonardo a jack-of-all-trades; delete the Science bonus completely just so that it is different from Copernicus and Newton, but add +1 culture per specialist and -25% cost to upgrade units. Art of War is the only Wonder that does this right now.

Reichstag
I've been convinced this is overpowered in its current format. I couldn't make the check for only 1 Golden Age per civilization work. I think to restrain this, I can limit the Golden Age to 1 turn per city of the rival (scaled by game speed, but can't display this in the help text) AND prevent the Golden Age from triggering if the player is already in Golden Age status.

Women's Suffrage
Again, this is a dull Wonder. It has the same effect as Mt. Rushmore (although it does stack). I'm speculating on shuffling around Cristo Redentor's No Anarchy and Statue of Liberty's free Specialists around with Women's Suffrage to make them fit better. This just occurred to me, so I haven't thought it through completely.

A lot of this is musing on my part, but I want Wonders to feel like they are worth the effort to build.
 
All sound very good, especially the Silk Road.

But I have to mention Abu Simbel again. It feels greatly under-powered.
A few ideas to add on its current features:
-some bonus from state religion buildings
-production bonus for Temples (like the other one with the bonus for Cathedrals)
 
Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Babylonian captured cities do not get free arenas with Olympic Games, only free gardens in native cities.

This is with rev994.
 
Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Babylonian captured cities do not get free arenas with Olympic Games, only free gardens in native cities.

This is with rev994.

I think it's a problem with Assimilation. The game switches free buildings from a Wonder over to your civilization's UB if you have one, but assimilated cities get their builder's UB rather than the conqueror's. I don't think it is anything I can fix. I'm not capable of doing very much with the DLL code.
 
I think it's a problem with Assimilation. The game switches free buildings from a Wonder over to your civilization's UB if you have one, but assimilated cities get their builder's UB rather than the conqueror's. I don't think it is anything I can fix. I'm not capable of doing very much with the DLL code.
To tell the truth, I think it's OK this way and not worth changing. If you want your own building, just don't use Assimilation. [emoji4]
 
45°38'N-13°47'E;14117749 said:
To tell the truth, I think it's OK this way and not worth changing. If you want your own building, just don't use Assimilation. [emoji4]

I don't think that's what he meant.
Example:
Building the Piazza San Marco gives a free market in every city, but not in the ones you have taken from the Romans (their UB Forum replaces Market). You have to build Markets manually in every ex-roman city.
And vice versa: If you play Rome you get free Forums, but nothing in the cities you have captured from other civs, which can be quite annoying if you are a warmonger conqueror.

It feels like that the mechanism is checking for BUILDING_TYPE instead of BUILDING_CLASS.

Not a game-breaking bug but a bit annoying.
 
I don't think that's what he meant.
Example:
Building the Piazza San Marco gives a free market in every city, but not in the ones you have taken from the Romans (their UB Forum replaces Market). You have to build Markets manually in every ex-roman city.
And vice versa: If you play Rome you get free Forums, but nothing in the cities you have captured from other civs, which can be quite annoying if you are a warmonger conqueror.

It feels like that the mechanism is checking for BUILDING_TYPE instead of BUILDING_CLASS.

Not a game-breaking bug but a bit annoying.
Are you sure it works like this? I always thought that it works as supposed to, i.e. for piazza san Marco both markets and forums are built in respective cities.
 
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