Updated Wonder Model for Civ 6 ?

Been a huge fan of the Civ games since I lost some of my childhood to the original Civ, DOS version - building the world Wonders has always been a big part of the charm for me - but I think the model used by the games could be made even more fun. (and a bit more realistic, though - that's not a goal in itself).


Problem I propose to address:

Proposed Solution:



Some proposed "Achievement Wonders" just to give you a feel for the idea:
(I'm sure these would have to be adjusted for play balance)

I'm sure others could add to / greatly improve this list!
Edit: Note that many wonders would remain as "Construction Wonders" - Pyramids, Great Wall, Taj Mahal, Three Gorges Dam, etc.

I welcome feedback and discussion - mostly I'm posting this here in the hopes that lots of people will love this idea as much as I do, and somebody from Firaxis will see this idea and steal it for Civ 6

Happy Civ-ing everyone!

That's not a bad idea. It's also kind of like how you could get certain free stuff if you were the first to discover a certain tech in Civ IV.

The easy way to implement something like that would be to have the original builder get the intended benefits, with all later builders get gold & culture for the nice tourist attraction they just built (maybe science or faith for certain wonders).

And also, the wonder models for secondary builders should be scaled down on the map to provide a visual clue whether or not they are the 'great' wonder.

This kind of feature has already been implemented in the Wonder of Ancient World... wait.. yeah. Wonders of the Ancient Worlds scenario. In order to build the wonders you need to have earned enough experience, gold and culture and researched enough techs in order to be able to built those wonders.

And I gotta admit I enjoye ddoing that, it allows the people who fall behind in technology to actually have a chance on winning, and it could potentially hamper runaway's success.

I do not like the whole "multiple civilizations building the same wonder", for I think that it detracts from inmersion and overall flavour of the game (come on, Itchen Itza is not the same as the pyramids of Gizeh), not to mention that there's a certain charm to the whole "race for glory" implied in wonder building.

However, I do love, love your idea for "archievement wonders" *send hearts and ridiculous facebook emoticons towards General_W* It reminds me of the "gold archievements" in Civ Revolution, and I think that it is a a concept worth of expanding and exploring: rewarding certain strategies and playstyles with unique archievements seems like a more realistic, funnier proposition than a mere contest of industrial prowess.

Another different approach could be a somehow mixed formula: tematic world wonders. For example, each wonder would belong to a certain category (say, "scientific", "cultural", "religious", etc). Depending on which cathegory it falls down under, a part of the city's non-production output would be transformed into hammers when building said wonder.

For example, when building the Oracle, a "religious" type of wonder, half the city's faith will be added as bonus production when building it, while on the case of The Colossus, a "commercial" wonder, half the citie's gold will turn into production instead. That way you would archieve several goals:

- You would further specialize cities, creating a "snowball effect" mechanic (science city makes easier to produce scientific wonders, which in turn will increase its sicence output, which in turn will... well, you get the idea)

- You will rewarding certain gameplay styles, making wonders and their relation to civs more organic. Commercial - focused civ? It will be easier for you to snatch the Lighthouse rather than the Great Wall, so to speak

- Production will still be relevant for cultural victories, but not entirely dominant, making for a quite cool type of synergetic gameplay (say, gold and science will help you to archieve a cultural victory as well)

Gerneral_W, I love your Achievement Wonders, too!

I always bemoaned that "circumnavigation-bonus" was dropped in CiV. A resumption of this type of achievement - or even more a glorious "Renaissance" with your proposed extension - would find my full approval!
CiV is - a racing game, somehow. There is the wonder race (obviously), the race for an early religion, the race for the best city positions, the tech-race, ect.
So, another race, the race for "the first game achivement" fits perfectly into the game philosopy! A reward for something you do, not for something you build in your cities! (Further ideas: Be the first to find all Natural Wonders / ...to connect 5 cities with (rail)roads / ...to kill 50 enemy units. So many possibilities!)

A minor note: Personally, I would prefer less "phsyical" wonders. "Malgelan's Voyage" is - as your naming suggests - an achievement and not an existing wonder (= a building). Maybe it is possible to find aquivalent names for the other wonders, too? "The spirit of freedom" instead of "Statue of Liberty", for example.

Regarding your "World Wonder"-proposal, I am afraid I have to agree with Ikael. Not only because I think that this sort of wonder race (and the danger to lose this race!) is an integral and tensioning part of the "Civilization" game itself since Civ 1.
But also, because your proposal limits the different types of wonders.

How this? Because, following your proposal, World Wonders would be nothing more than normal, but expensive buildings (not even National Wodners, as there are no preconditions) with an inbuilt Achievement Wonder (the first player to complete the Wonder gains an extra benefit).

No, I really think that one "the winner gets it all"-type of wonder is totally fine and it is exactly the evaluation of risc versus benefit, that makes World Wonders interesting in their current form.

----

Ikael: Your "thematic world wonders"-idea ist simply... brilliant!

Some more good thoughts here!

I like ikael's idea about using science/culture/gold for certain wonders - but I feel like that might be better suited to just the National Wonders, perhaps?
Those wonders tend to be on the "city specialization" front anyway, so it makes intuitive sense.

I still think the "achievement wonders" need to be specific to activities primarily outside the city screen. Deggial has some awesome ideas, I think!

Expanding on his ideas, maybe you have:




I see all of your points on restricting industrial wonders to just 1 each - and you may be right that it would lessen the fun to allow multiples... but I still think that if the gap between the "Great" wonder and the 2nd place wonders were big enough - you'd still get the fun race effect. Perhaps you're right...

I like the idea of achievement wonders. It is annoying when you are well and above any other Civ in culture per turn, but someone beats you to Cristo, just because they happen to have slightly faster science/hammer production than you.

I also like it because it is a way of capping wonders without actually having a cap, which would help with scenarios where one Civ gets all the wonders of the world in one city, which for both gameplay and realism, it isn't a very appealing system.

I wouldn't find non-great Wonders very appealing because it would feel like a consolation prize for losing.

I personally like to play with a large number of Wonder mods, so the odds of needing to compete for the specific Wonder I want are lower.


However, I really like the idea of acheivement Wonders.

It would feel great to gain a bonus for an active accomplishment, and it could create a lot of Empire diversity as the game goes on.

(Pursuing one acheivement may make it harder to get a different one at the same time.)


Heres some suggestions for Acheivement Wonders:

(Mostly Acheivement/ Reward ideas, the Wonders themselves may be off.)


The Palace of Versailles

Achievement: First player to ally three City States.

Reward: Influence decays 25% slower.


The Olympic Games

Achievement: First player to enter their third Golden Age.

Reward: Golden Ages last 50% longer.


East India House

(HQ of the East India Trading Company.)

Achievement: First player to trigger three We love the King! days.

Reward: +1 from luxury recourses.

i think this idea is excellent

it always made me sick how pyramids required 1000+ years of production, being usually built around 500 BC

it also would diminish the role of scientific/industrial progress in the game.

i really enjoyed the ancient wonders scenario and i think the wonder progress screen should be introduced to the ordinary game so you could see if you have a chanse to complete a specific wonder and your desisions were more strategic.

i also like the idea of building wonders with other yields than production

say you could unlock pyramids with culture and build with faith (which would translate to hammers in 3:1 ratio)
1. build monument
2. build shrine, then temple
3. get stone circles as an early pantheon, work 3 quarries
4. build pyramids quickly
also, exceeding requirements may provide a production bonus
e.g. if you have accumulated 200 culture and pyraminds require 100, you get (200-100)/10=10% bonus

stonehenge
unlock with faith (or, maybe, science?)
build with faith

great lighthouse
unlock with number of tiles explored by sea units, discovering cities with sea units counts for 30 tiles each
build with gold from sea plots

colossus
unlock with number of sea units (?)
build with XP gained by sea units

great library
unlock with number of researched techs and adopted policies
build with culture and science

hanging gardens
unlock with city size
build with culture and population growth (+X hammers per each new citizen in the city)

oracle
unlock with city state influence
build with faith

This is a very nice idea, but what if one city had a bunch of thr "reject" construction wondors (regular pyramids, wall, etc.)? Wouldn't the city become a super-city none the less?

Nice ideas Galgus and Killmeplease!

@Galgus- I added some of your ideas to my main post!
@Killmeplease - I like the thought, but I'm not sure how that would get implemented... would it just be an auto reward if the city generates a certain amount of gold/science/culture? Or are you suggesting that the city would divert those resources from accumulating normally into building the wonder instead? I think you'd want to be careful that this didn't turn into a runaway thing, where a player just keeps getting bonuses without making any strategic choices to get them.

I'm kind of thinking I should edit my first post to focus more on the Achievement Wonder idea... since that clearly has more community support!
update: done!

i have got really enthusiastic about the achievement wonders idea
i want to make a mod itroducing this feature
could you throw in more ideas of possible achievements?

I love the idea of achievements. There are just so many wonders in the game, that they really lose their wow factor. And the AI really seems to be cluless as to which ones to build. In my current game on immortal, both the great lighthouse and colossus were built in foreign cities w/o a single water resource.

Looks like BNW actually added an achievement-wonder:
Be the first to discover all other nations + invent printing press = found World Congress (and gain the ability to propose resolutions).

I like this idea as long as you remove the "first" aspect. It will be too easy to abuse the AI out of nearly all these wonders that way, if you can secure them forever without a single hammer spent.

I actually greatly dislike the current implementation of Wonders. Blindly throwing tens of turns of hammers into a well, and hoping that some other civilization you haven't met yet doesn't beat you to it? That's just not a fun game mechanic. I don't get the thrill of outsmarting my opponents when I finish a wonder before them (because I can't tell that I beat them, unless I happen to have a spy stationed in that city), and I feel like a sucker if I get beaten to it. The consolation gold converted from the lost hammers was a good gameplay balance solution, but it's unsatisfying: you can't plan around it, and it doesn't make much sense. (So what if the Chinese built a big wall in Asia? Hadrian built a pretty good one in England too!)

I'd been trying to think of a better way of enforcing the "one per world" constraint without having a completely boring mechanism like "the first one to start building it gets to claim it" or "you can always see exactly how much progress has been made on every wonder currently under construction, even in cities you've never seen."

One idea I had was that there could be a race to complete the "foundation" of the wonder, say, at the halfway point, and once a civ has built half the wonder, the other civs must abandon building it. For example, the Pyramids cost 175 hammers. The first civ to get to 87.5 hammers contributed towards the Pyramids would get a claimer on it. The other civs would be refunded at that point. This would cut down on the number of turns of production that are thrown away chasing wonders that you had no dream of completing.

But your idea of tying wonders to achievements is actually a pretty great one. Instead of spending a bunch of hammers to complete the "foundation" that I described, you would do that achievement. So, maybe to build the Colossus, you must have four ships. Whenever a civ became eligible to build the Colossus, it would trigger a global notification. ("An unknown civilization is eligible to build the Colossus!") You'd still have to construct the wonder with hammers, but the hammer cost would be much lower once you've unlocked it. If two civs are close, they might both spend ~6 turns trying to be the first to build it, but at least they're not blindly gambling away 20 turns of production.