Some natural wonders NEVER appear...

Off the subject, but I've always wondered why they chose OLD FAITHFUL instead of the insanely larger GRAND CANYON.
 
Off the subject, but I've always wondered why they chose OLD FAITHFUL instead of the insanely larger GRAND CANYON.

It's possible they felt the Grand Canyon would be too large a feature for a tile (Old Faithful is much too small - Yellowstone would have made more sense), but some omissions are indeed puzzling. Graphical assets were produced for Mt Everest, and they hate to discard old graphics (look how they've insisted on keeping the Foreign Legion and Landsknecht in the game). It may be that Everest is now just one of the generic mountain tile graphics.
 
General rule of thumb for the wonders are: The better the bonus is, the less likely it will appear.
For example, Solomon's mines and the fountain of youth have strong bonuses, but rarely appear, whilst old faithful and the grand mesa have quite a good chance of popping up. Still doesn't mean they'll be in good spots though :p

Yeah, they are most likely to happen in middle of empty desert. Even if not, I would still not really settle city there just to get their bonuses. :rolleyes: Even with Spain, they aren't that great.

on the other hand, KSM or Lake Victoria are very good start, you'll have huge advantage at the start of the game. If Spain, game over. You'll grab whatever you need with KSM. ;) +6 production (+12 with Spain), it's like having manufactury on hills, plus you can grab One with the Nature. ;)
 
is it a one-hex island?? because if it is, it could be another useless NW (hello krakatoa)
:mad:

I saw in a game Krakatoa one tile from a coast, Mayans obviously settled a city near it!
 
I recently had a game where the FoY was very near me and I grabbed it with my second city. I hadn't seen it in a game in ages and was very happy to see it and see it where I could claim it. Too bad Rome came along and captured my capital.
 
There's no reason KSM can't turn up on a one-tile island, since that counts as a continent. I've seen Sri Prada in that kind of situation before now.

I checked the XML files...

Occurrence frequencies...out of 100:

FoY 1
Eldorado 2
KSM 4
Potosi 5
and as best as I can tell everything else is 10....

There is also a lot of stuff on the conditions surrounding the appearance of a wonder.... Krakatoa can have no adjacent land tiles and KSM can have no adjacent water tiles....so I think that would mean KSM must have at least six surrounding land tiles. I have seen it on large and small continents, though never on small islands....

And for those who care you can modify these files if you really want to get any particular wonder out of your games.... search using Assets or DLC in the path Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common ....at least that should get it started.... the files are called CIV5Features and there are three different files...
 
I checked the XML files...

Occurrence frequencies...out of 100:

FoY 1
Eldorado 2
KSM 4
Potosi 5
and as best as I can tell everything else is 10....

There is also a lot of stuff on the conditions surrounding the appearance of a wonder.... Krakatoa can have no adjacent land tiles and KSM can have no adjacent water tiles....so I think that would mean KSM must have at least six surrounding land tiles. I have seen it on large and small continents, though never on small islands....

From experience, I'd guess another restriction is that Gibraltar must have one adjacent land tile (I've seen it on two-tile islands, in one case where the other tile was a mountain and so the NW was unworkable, but from recollection never alone).

It looks from the above as though the intent is to reflect the mythical status of the fantasy NWs, not particularly to reflect power differences (which vary a great deal among the 'common' ones). Clearly Firaxis has wanted to make the mythical NWs among the strongest, but that seems a side effect rather than power being the main consideration.

That doesn't explain Potosi, but I think that was rarer than the others even in vanilla, so this may be a holdover from the time before the fantasy NWs were added. At the time it was considered probably the strongest of the NWs (sure, if you can settle Krakatoa it's better, but a settleable Krakatoa is probably at least as rare as El Dorado).
 
Oh, I also had King Salomon's mine in my last Carthage game, also on a small island, though pretty well centralized.

Spoiler :

There's actually a continent just to the left of it with all the other civs, grabbed east india company and those elephants for Carthego Nova, would have been such and awesome trade hub, but I accidentally overwrote the save one morning :(

Why would you build those 2 junk cities with nothing but fish? :O
 
...on the other hand, KSM or Lake Victoria are very good start, you'll have huge advantage at the start of the game. If Spain, game over. You'll grab whatever you need with KSM. ;) +6 production (+12 with Spain), it's like having manufactury on hills, plus you can grab One with the Nature. ;)

Yeah...though playing Spain at the Emperor level it seems that no matter what I do, if I don't abandon the game out of boredom or tediousness, the game will eventually be won....the natural wonders just make the process more interesting. I'm probably overdue to move up a level...;)

In the tough games as Spain, if I start falling behind in the "world wonder-race"...particularly the culture-oriented ones....then I ramp up my military and go after the AI with the most appealing wonders. It seems, though not always, one AI...and usually one close by will be the "wonder-hog"....

There are other interesting things about taking the military route....it seems quite often a strong-looking AI will give you a significant city as a peace settlement...often out of all proportion to the threat you think you may be posing....

Playing as Spain, if I can't dominate the game through wonder-building and culture, then the recourse is the military. And in that situation I don't care about being tagged a "war-monger". [Aside: Though I usually try to avoid totally wiping out another civ...well, Alex might be an exception and maybe Rammy...though it's probably better to try to leave things so that some small remaining city will be wiped out by one of the AI.]

I think a major key is getting several good city sites and if that requires harassing nearby civs early in the game...so be it.

But the "toughness" of any particular game seems to depend on factors and events that are not known in the early game....and which natural wonders Spain may or may not have doesn't seem to be critical....important, yeah, but not critical.
 
Yeah...though playing Spain at the Emperor level it seems that no matter what I do, if I don't abandon the game out of boredom or tediousness, the game will eventually be won....the natural wonders just make the process more interesting. I'm probably overdue to move up a level...;)

In the tough games as Spain, if I start falling behind in the "world wonder-race"...particularly the culture-oriented ones....then I ramp up my military and go after the AI with the most appealing wonders. It seems, though not always, one AI...and usually one close by will be the "wonder-hog"....

There are other interesting things about taking the military route....it seems quite often a strong-looking AI will give you a significant city as a peace settlement...often out of all proportion to the threat you think you may be posing....

Playing as Spain, if I can't dominate the game through wonder-building and culture, then the recourse is the military. And in that situation I don't care about being tagged a "war-monger". [Aside: Though I usually try to avoid totally wiping out another civ...well, Alex might be an exception and maybe Rammy...though it's probably better to try to leave things so that some small remaining city will be wiped out by one of the AI.]

I think a major key is getting several good city sites and if that requires harassing nearby civs early in the game...so be it.

But the "toughness" of any particular game seems to depend on factors and events that are not known in the early game....and which natural wonders Spain may or may not have doesn't seem to be critical....important, yeah, but not critical.

Well, you have to go-a-viking sometimes on AI if you want good city locations. Doesn't mean you have to be a insane and kill everything on sight like Shaka, but it doesn't mean you have to play peaceful all the time. Go-a-viking sometime. ;) If you don't want to be considered threat to the world, pick the most hated AI in the game, usually Zulu, Mongols or the Huns. England is a good choice, since everyone always hate England. :lol:

One thing that I've noticed about warmongering penalty is that you shouldn't conquer too many cities at once. If you do it one-two cities per war, then wait about 20-30 turn, it seems that warmongering penalty is slightly lesser. :confused: For some reason, captured cities or gain in peace deal count as expansion, so AI gets cranky for both warring and expending.
 
Way to troll :goodjob:

But BoT, I've seen that NW are pretty scarce on water maps, especially tiny islands. It'd also be fun if all of them were in a map :mischief:

It's possible the more recent Earth maps feature all the real-world ones, but I don't know if they do (the vanilla one features Fuji in the right place, however from recollection it doesn't include Krakatoa although that's a vanilla Natural Wonder).

I think in vanilla they tried to balance the NWs so that there were a fair number of water-associated ones, however neither G&K nor BNW (nor Conquest of the New World) added any new 'sea' NWs, so it makes sense that they'd be harder to find on water maps. I believe any map of a given size should have a set number of NWs, though.
 
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