Making the Hanging Gardens one heck of a Wonder

[BjoernLars]

While there are some nice Wonders of the Worlds in Civ V, many of them don’t deserve the title of Wonder. Take the Hanging Gardens.
The current benefits are a bit underwhelming:

+1 Population in all existing cities, +3 Happiness, +1 Culture, +1 Artist Point

In some cases, if a person has four cities and 0 surplus of Happiness, the Hanging Gardens actually becomes counterproductive. Congratulations! You’ve built the Hanging Gardens! Your citizens are now unhappy!
I think what would really dice this Wonder up is to change the benefits to the following.

+1 Population in all existing cities, +1 Happiness for each existing city, +1 Culture, +1 Artist Point

To maximize the benefits of this wonder, people would want to wait awhile to let the civilization grow in size before they build this. Wait too long and some other civilization will pick this up. I think this would definitely add some extra dynamics to the game play early on.

 

[Biz_]

it shouldn't recalculate the benefit upon adding more cities

 

[rune42]

When you're at -1 to -9 unhappiness, the only thing that changes is growth. Hanging Gardens gives you a burst of growth along with 3 permanent happiness. Whats the problem?

 

[Diamondeye]

I think this suggestion would make the Hanging Gardens the most powerful wonder in the game. It works very well as is. The unhappiness threshold is not something disastrous; Having four citizens more will probably enable you to produce 16H, 12Sci, or 12G. How is this a bad trade when the only downside is slower growth (when growth is to be avoided in unhappiness)?

Besides, currently, the Gardens are great for happiness if you have few cities, and great for population if you have lots. Doing this would limit its use in a small empire. I don't like that.

 

[Bandit17]

I like the idea! I always avoid this wonder because population is usually a negative at this stage of the game. I'm too busy expanding via settlers or war to afford any more unhappiness. Once collisiums/theatres/circus's come into play along with newly acquired happiness resources than I want a population boom!

If this wonder is meant for only small empires (1-3 cities) than maybe it's worth it...maybe.

 

[Tutkarz]

Growth is pretty pointless in this wonder since your cities are too easy growing anyway, you may get population even from ruins and in top of that most your game you dont want more population (which is really wierd to me). So only good in this wonder is +GP point. and some culture.

 

[Shmike]

Yeah, that stopped me from building the hanging gardens in two games.