One unfun aspect of Civ that prevents me to found new cities at mid game

There's one issue of Civ 5 that I consider it hurts the mid game gameplay: the requirement of needing to build the prerequisite building in all of your cities to build a National Wonder. In previous versions of Civ I enjoyed so much to explore uncharted lands (once researched the appropiate technology: optics or navigation) and find a sweet spot to build a new city and develope it. With Civ 5 I can't, because at that time I can afford the hapiness and cultural costs to found a new city, but it prevents me to build key National Wonders in my core cities. Also, at that time, I usually don't own the necessary gold to rush buy the prerequisite building in new cities (at late game, with lots of GPT, this is not a big deal).

So I propose to remove this requirement from the game and use the approach I've seen in several mods: if the prerequisite building is not present in some cities, just increase the hammer cost of the National Wonder by a fixed amount for each city without the prerequisite building and a multiplier for the number of cities that don't have it. For example, to build a National College with 3 cities and the library only built in the capital, increase the cost of the NC by the hammers needed to build a library in both cities, multiplied by 1.20 (a 10% increase by each city without the prerequisite).

What do you think about this idea?.

I'd rather the setup stay as is because national wonders are meant to give tall players a boost and be inaccessible if you go wide.

I like it. Although TBH none of the early national wonders are worth it other than the college, so you might want to just get that ASAP and then build millions of settlers.

Especially annoying is the National Wonders with anti-synergy like the Heroic Epic. You have to build Barracks in every city, but once you get the Epic then you only want to build units in one city! Frustrating design.

Nicasen said:

I'd rather the setup stay as is because national wonders are meant to give tall players a boost and be inaccessible if you go wide.

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I think that would be the case before BNW, now there is little reason to go wide.

Bed0 said:

I think that would be the case before BNW, now there is little reason to go wide.

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Oh? How so?

For national wonders, the minimum should be set at 4 or 5, instead of all cities.

It's fine as it is. Op wants his cake and to eat it too. Also it's not that hard to hit most national Wonders with 4 unpuppetted cities.

I've built the national wonders even when I had like 40+ annexed cities. Including the oxford university.

I generally just build them in the lull before I go to next war. Sometimes I just drop the gold and get all the buildings I need built finished in low prod cities while having high prod cities build them then I can get my national wonder snapped up fairly quick.

Its easy when ur income is like 700+ gpt

Alzadar, you are spot on. I'd like that 15% bonus to apply to all your cities, or at least one more city.

I see no problems with it. Delaying/skipping a national wonder for a good expansion spot is totally worth it in my experience. If you like settling bad locations just for the purpose of going "wide", that's your problem and not the game's. Everything is situational and these decisions need to be carefully thought through. I often find myself cash rushing say a workshop or market in a mid-game expo so I can fit in the appropriate NW. Don't really see the problem.

Matthew. said:

Oh? How so?

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Science penalty, unhappiness, synergy with liberty ( tradition is better), lost time with settlers, warmongering penalty, harder to defend territory, harder to get gold from territory... there is much more incentive to go tall than wide. The OP is just one more reason to go tall...

Thats my opinion based on my experience with the game. It's ok if you don't agree, but keep it to yourself.

I was more inquiring about the "before BNW" part.

Didn't say anything about agreeing or disagreeing and I'm just as welcomed to post as you are

Matthew. said:

I was more inquiring about the "before BNW" part.

Didn't say anything about agreeing or disagreeing and I'm just as welcomed to post as you are

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Sorry, i didn't mean to be rude.

National wonders are a reward for stopping your expansion. You can easily (YMMV) outproduce all national wonders by having more cities, including science from National College. Generally, people are less at home with expanding, because its quite different from going tall. Initially at least.

I think part of the problem is that in past Civ version city spam has been a completely dominate strategy. As many viable cities as possible .

National wonders are meant to counter this. As having a new city brings lots of benefits, they have added costs. National Wonders you can't get being one.

Also, it seems that BNW helps to counter this a bit by allowing trade routes to pump new cities up quickly in the mid game.

Tradeoffs make for interesting gameplay, in my opinion. The reason Civ is fun is that rarely can you do it all, you have to make choices. If you're going to warmonger, you'll get hated. If you're going peaceful you'll lose out on some opportunities to expand your civilization through conquest. You can go wide and get more cities, more luxuries, specialists and science, more places to build units and etc., or you can go tall and avoid research penalties, get social policies and tenets faster, and can more easily build some nice national wonders. You can scout the map for colonies near Natural Wonders/Luxes or stay tight in one cohesive empire. You can puppet and give up control and avoid some penalties, or you can annex and assume control but have more upfront problems.

But you can rarely do it all! That's what makes it fun.

I don't mind the disincentives to building National Wonders if you have more cities, but HE in particular bugs me.

Here is the optimal gameplay: build barracks in all cities, build HE in your desired unit/production city, when it pops immediately sell all your barracks in other cities. That's just demoralizing and makes you wonder, wtf? None of the other NWs perform such an effective removal of benefits from your other cities.

I suppose the devs would say that you can still make units in your other cities... you just have normal units plus a few elite ones.

But in practice that really makes it a very narrow \ strategy. It not only is limited to a Tall strategy, but Tall where you are spamming units to win a one-time war or else in a bid for Domination. All other kinds of Tall strategies should stick with the sell-back-barracks optimal gameplay.

So to me it's very limited, much more so than all the other NWs. There are plenty of other possible benefits. The one they picked (free promo in HE city only) is just wrong.

I'm not sure that hard building and selling 3+ barracks is worth it to get the HE. To be clear why not produce T1 upgraded units from your other cities?

dexters said:

It's fine as it is. Op wants his cake and to eat it too. Also it's not that hard to hit most national Wonders with 4 unpuppetted cities.

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What good is having cake if you can't eat it????