Prestige and Wonders

I've been having a few ideas mainly derived from epiccivfreak's thread but that got a bit messy and this is a different system to the one he proposes.

The first part of this is the prestige system. You gain different types of prestige points for different things. The different types are Military, Cultural, Economic, Religious, Scientific and Growth (for lack of a better word). They can also come locally or globally.

You can gain global points for doing things like:


Locally:


You gain VP equal to twice the amount of prestige points you have. The AI will also use prestige points to value civs as potential allies/enemies. The will also factor in military points before deciding to declare war.

The second part of my idea is slightly changing the wonder system. All wonders will have a higher production cost but prestige points can counter that.

Ancient wonders increase by 50%
Classical/60%
Medieval/75%
Renaissance/90%
Industrial/100%
After then/120%

However, all wonders will fall under one of the same types of prestige point. Each global point you have will take 5% off the cost of that type of wonder. Each local point takes off 15%. Each wonder you build in a city adds on 10% to all other wonders in that city.


Any thoughts on this?

The main problem, just in general, with this is snowballing effects. You do lots of military stuff that gives you lots of military bonuses that makes it easier for you to do even more military stuff that gives you even more military bonuses...
...and you're snowballing by reducing the cost of wonders based on doing (for example) military things to then get a wonder that gives you more military benefits.

Back when civ3 was released, a lot of people railed against uniqueness of the civilizations, they wanted no UB, no UU, no unique civ qualities, etc. and wanted such bonuses to emerge during gameplay. But it always came back to that snowballing problem, if you focus on one and only one aspect of the game, you'll eventually become unbeatable in that aspect. Military is almost always the worst offender because if you're got the might to take what you want, you'll eventually lead in all the other categories as well.

Now, I happen to be firmly in the emergence camp and dislike the push towards more and more unique stuff being tacked onto every civ in every version since 3. I'm certain that 6 will be even worse in this regard, because the majority continue to push for it. But there is a simple solution to snowballing that I've also been a part of advocating since civ2, and that's tangent benefits.

Rather than building military stuff getting you more military benefits, do stuff like have a message pop up when you've crossed some threshold:
"Yay, your people are so infatuated with your military achievements that military cults have sprung up throughout your empire - +1 Faith per turn from military buildings."
or
"Yay, your people are so infatuated with your military achievements that military epics are being written throughout your empire - +1 Culture per turn from military buildings."
and other such things.

This will turn CiV into a turn-based Paradox strategy game ... don't like where this is going