Is it viable to mass wonders?

[Vanderkaum]

I play with a small group of friends, and one among them is attempting to develop a strategy involving massing wonders. Hes told me that his build roughly follows:

After settling, he builds a scout, and then immediately works on a settler. He opens with Tradition. He sits on those two cities for quite some time, rushing hanging gardens, colossus, machu picchu, oracle, notre dame, red fort, himeji castle.. And so on, immediately working on building wonders as soon as he researches them.

Am I overestimating the strength of this strategy? I prefer to have many cities, and i'm a bit of a warmonger, but i'm perfectly willing to adjust my strategy to stay relevant. How best would I counter his mass-wonder strategy?

I appreciate it.

 

[Aaron90495]

It entirely depends on the difficulty level. In high-level (King or Emperor+) single-player or multiplayer, you simply can't win by massing wonders. You'll get beaten to the punch too often, and eventually you'll be behind in infrastructure and start to flounder. Plus, in multiplayer, someone will just build an army, march in, and take those 10 wonders you just spent the whole game building.

On lower levels, this approach is fairly viable, but most approaches are viable on the lower levels, anyways.

 

[Rob5000]

Well, I imagine that if he is busy with building wonders, he likely has a small military. If you know he always does this, attack him early. Start out with a few raids, pillaging his mines or any other high prod tiles. Stick and move. When you have a good sizeable force, take a city, then the capital.

 

[Ritzy Cat]

Yes, you are overestimating the strength of this strategy. Wonder-spamming as its called, although makes a single city very successful, a small portion of wonders affect all the cities in an empire. This would greatly centralize his empire's wealth and production in the capital. If you know this is his strategy, bully him very early in the game. Steal a worker of his, or steal his first settler (if you can find him by that time.) That would royally screw him over, since his city would have limited growth by making the settler, the population would be low, production would be low, therefore slow speed on making wonders. Then he'd be gimped for anything when everyone else starts building them all.

The idea here is to screw him over before he can amass tons of wonders.

While a city like this probably would be hard to take -he wouldn't have much of a military. Aggressively expand around him, he won't be able to do much about it. Use proper judgment on what you think would be detrimental to him. Bully his city-state allies, or buy them away from him.

If you can get a strong early army (Classical-Midevil Era ish) you can probably just siege his city. If you can't take it, raze all of his tile improvements on your way out.

It can be viable in a game like this: probably not in a normal game where in high difficulties getting 2 ancient / classical wonders is a miracle because the AI rushes stuff like Great Library.

 

[Drawmeus]

It entirely depends on the difficulty level. In high-level (King or Emperor+) single-player or multiplayer, you simply can't win by massing wonders. You'll get beaten to the punch too often, and eventually you'll be behind in infrastructure and start to flounder. On lower levels, this approach is fairly viable, but most approaches are viable on the lower levels, anyways.

Depending on your micro skill, you can pull it off at Emperor (I have half of all of the wonders in the game right now in my Emperor difficulty turtle empire Morocco game), though it gets really hard... at Immortal you really have to prioritize and on Deity getting even one wonder is an accomplishment.

 

[Aaron90495]

Depending on your micro skill, you can pull it off at Emperor (I have half of all of the wonders in the game right now in my Emperor difficulty turtle empire Morocco game), though it gets really hard... at Immortal you really have to prioritize and on Deity getting even one wonder is an accomplishment.

Yeah, I did that in my last Emperor game too. After moving down temporarily from Deity, I think I became too enthralled with my newfound ability to actually build wonders. It CAN work on Emperor, but you can also get really burned if you happen to have certain wonder-spamming opponents.

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

Wonder spaw works pretty well on Emperor if you play as Venice. Make Venice a megacity with incoming trade routes of food and production, and you can build new wonders in very few turns. Trying for the wonders doesn't even hurt much if you fail, since you've already bought any buildings that you could have been building instead.

 

[Scott Jegg]

I stopped playing Emperor because it was too easy to build just about anything I wanted and beat off enemy assaults with minimal army. I can only imagine it's even easier on BNW if you get trades set up with the AI and give them even more reason not to attack.

Build the wonders that you will really need, then take the rest by force.

 

[Vanderkaum]

I appreciate the advice, and admittedly its a bit of a relief. I allowed the "x built a wonder!" notification throng to disconcert me a bit. Will put your advice into practice and see how it goes.

Settings that I accidentally omitted: We play on Emperor, versus 8 (or so) other AI on Large Continents.

 

[Randall_Flagg]

The only counter you need is lower Tech tree and build units. It is a horrid strat for an MP game imho.

 

[mabalogna]

I play a lot of multiplayer with some coworkers and whenever i see that they're building a lot of wonders I start focusing on pure hammer/gold production, build up a sizable army from any era, and win the game.

If you're building wonders in multiplayer with a small empire, you're not building enough units.

 

[rodrigoq]

and on Deity getting even one wonder is an accomplishment.

LOL

You should play Diety more. If I get beaten to Glib, gardens and petra at start, i throw a fit and make a new game. I don't get beaten to those wonders. Parthenon is a tricky one, stonehenge can be a hassle, machu, greatwall and lighthouse are 50/50, I always get all 3 theocracy wonders. I wonder wh0re for the +2 faith per wonder belief. This also counts national wonders, and by mid game can account for upwards of 30-40 faith per turn, if you can beat the AI. I chop trees, starve citys, even go to war with civs to stop their wonder building(using spies). Wonders on diety are easily doable, you just cant use an immortal or lower strategy and expect to do well on diety.

 

[Aaron90495]

LOL

You should play Diety more. If I get beaten to Glib, gardens and petra at start, i throw a fit and make a new game. I don't get beaten to those wonders. Parthenon is a tricky one, stonehenge can be a hassle, machu, greatwall and lighthouse are 50/50, I always get all 3 theocracy wonders. I wonder wh0re for the +2 faith per wonder belief. This also counts national wonders, and by mid game can account for upwards of 30-40 faith per turn, if you can beat the AI. I chop trees, starve citys, even go to war with civs to stop their wonder building(using spies). Wonders on diety are easily doable, you just cant use an immortal or lower strategy and expect to do well on diety.

And there's your problem. It's not really Deity if you restart any time something doesn't go your way, is it?

 

[GKShaman]

I can mass wonder easily on Emperor. On Immortal I have to pick very carefully to get Artemis, Petra and Colossus. I usually try to pick up Stonehenge and Mausoleum along the way but thats pushing it.