Petra - overpowered or situational so ok?

twilson1972

Warlord
Joined
Apr 6, 2015
Messages
164
Hey all

Im on my second civ v game- king, islands game

I started on an odd island 8 desert hills, all my resources and bonus tiles sea based

So i made currency a big priority, took god of the sea pantheon too.

Now my capital is absurd, truly absurd, i am building wonders in 3 turns

It almost feels like im cheating though, i could probably win with just this city

Do people feel that petras situational circumstances mean it is fine- or do you consider it game breaking?
 
It's fine. There's stackable bonuses to being on desert (folklore) but at the end of the day you're still on desert. Unimproved petra desert is still what, 2 food and 1 hammer?
 
petra gives one free trade route and a free caravan, which is a pretty good bonus.

on SP if you're playing deity, it's not likely that you'll get it. there are guides and stuff but you still need to hope the AI is busy with other stuff or don't have desert bias.
in MP it's pretty awesome, especially when you build petra it's because you have resources or hills.

If you look at it purely from a tile yield perspective, it only makes flat desert as good as plains, but in most scenarios you're building petra in a city that would be only slightly below average without petra to begin with. With 3f4h sheep, or 1f4h mines, or 3f3h hill farms, it combines good food with crazy production, and that makes your city absolutely WONDERful.
 
honestly, getting petra on deity really isn't all that hard if you play smart. getting wonders like the great library, stonehenge, parthenon or chichen itza is a lot harder to impossible unless you're playing as egypt with a quadruple salt start or something ridiculous like that.

beelining currency is a given, the next very important step is scouting. in order to build petra you need to be on or next to a desert tile. so by knowing the AIs capitals you already know who might attempt to build petra. there is a neat trick I stole from Acken where you check the enemies cities for the wonder sprite (easy with high graphics settings, hard on my trashy laptop). if you see it, immedeatly bribe another civ to declare war, or bribe the civ building the wonder to declare war. if you want to be super safe, do both. they'll stop building the wonder and start pumping out some units, giving you enough time to snitch it.
 
Under the right circumstances it is amazing. being situational doesn't take that away.
The real problem with petra is its opportunity cost. For example, as others said, it is by no means 100% gettable on deity, and going all-in on it and then missing it can really screw your game.
Overall, though, can make cities completely ridiculous.
 
yeah a really good Petra city is so OP it kind of breaks the game, check the DCL6 for results
 
Or look at DCL #25 :D :D :D
 
I didn't build it on #20 but you START with it on #25. That's why I was able to win T150ish if I wanted to. Too bad I opted for the long haul and got bored.
 
Petra on King has a much lower opportunity cost than on Deity because you do not have to beeline Currency. It's certainly a great wonder if the city placement is good.
 
I wouldn't say that it is overpowered. The fact that it needs quite a few things in order for it to be "game-breaking" and is so very hard to build on Deity is imo enough to make sure that it's not OP.

Yes, those lucky times when you do get it in a city with 7 desert hills and a <snip> of flood plains it will be glorious, but most times it won't. Consider the following: If we were to say that you would be able to build Petra in EVERY game, in how many of those games would it actually even be considered "good"? The caravan etc are nice additions ofc, but are they good enough to warrant spending all those turns building the wonder?

Don't misinterpret what I say though, because I too think there are games where Petra alone can win the game for you, but I don't consider it to be an OP wonder.

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Yes, those lucky times when you do get it in a city with 7 desert hills and a <snip> of flood plains it will be glorious, but most times it won't.

Don't mean to be preachy,but i believe the Petra bonus does not work on flood plains. :)

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I think he meant that you have the floodplains for food so you don't have to worry about whether or not the hills will give you more than 1 food. That's my guess, anyway. :)
 
Petra is definitely an overpowered wonder. The free caravan and extra trade route are good enough on their own to warrant making it every game. Now, if you happen to have desert hills around you it's just absurd. Your production gets out of hand. Desert Folklore plus petra is too strong. Desert itself is overpowered because of these.
 
Petra is an amazing wonder given you have enough desert tiles to take advantage of but on Deity you have to work much harder to actually get it especially if there are desert start civs in your game like Arabia and Morocco, for example.
 
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