I like wonders too... But I don't usually build the ugly ones. I've had restarts simply because I've decided my capital looked too ugly. Wish you could raze your own cities.
In one of my current games, tsl, my main force, Greek, has been liberating cities all over the place because I hate Civs dying off, but in this game I can't settle and then gift cities fast enough. So it was a march from Athens to Paris, up to Amsterdam, back to Vienna, over to Moscow where Darius had built a castle, north to free Novgorod from Sweden, back down to the Black Sea to free Munich from ghengis, sail south to liberate two more cities from Persia - and repopulate/upgrade force since I was close to home, then head east to liberate Delhi and Mumbai. Jeez. Meanwhile I've settled about ten cities for Spain, Portugal, France, India, Germany, Austria, and William.
Happily, as Greece, Darius is my main problem. Waiting to see if my proposed embargo of him will pass. He's making over 200gp a turn, and despite my peace treaty bounties from him, still has almost 20k gold. And my point of this game is to be the wealthiest civ based on 'sea trade' - settling nearly only all single tile island cities.
It's the giant not yet another map too, so these are not short marches. Started off when I had engineering, on marathon speed, took Delhi 2 techs into industrial. And Darius is happily spamming castles in (strategically) inconveniently located (for me) cities.
Fun game.
