Suggestion: Wonder-heavy cities

[CommiGoblin]

Hello all; I'm new to the forums, but have played Civ since Civ III at a level that I would call between casual and competitive. I'm currently out of the country, so I've yet to play BNW (so excited!), but in the meantime I thought I'd share an idea that I've had since the Civ IV days.

I've noticed, especially in Civ V, that, because it is a good strategy to specialize your cities (for food, production, etc.), certain cities (usually high-production capitals) will become wonder giants, sometimes with ten or more wonders if the owner's scientific lead is high enough. Unfortunately, this usually means that in a given game of Civ, three or four players will be wonder rich, while every other player might have one or two wonders, or even none at all.

Now, I don't like the idea of punishing the player for doing well, but is it not a bit excessive that so few civilizations, so few cities, should have so many wonders? It means that if you are lucky enough to have that fantastic production city, you hardly have to choose between wonders (choice being one of the key elements in strategy) simply because you know you can get almost all of them. On the flip side (usually on higher difficulties), you find yourself doomed to one or two wonders because Egypt is successfully building 70 percent of them.

I bring this up now because I think that the devs may have chosen to assign certain wonders to specific policy trees (à la Pyramids to Liberty) partially as a way to prevent this, by limiting access to certain wonders. Maybe this addition was enough (again, I've not played BNW yet), but with the increased importance of culture (and, therefore, of culture-generating wonders), I fear it will not be enough. So, here is my suggestion:

After a city has three wonders (not counting national wonders), the cost to build more wonders in that city goes up x% per wonder (5 or 10 seems reasonable, but I'm not a maths person so I'll not make a definitive judgment on that). This would eliminate the reliance on a single wonder city in each game. Furthermore, planning what wonders should go where would become more important, heightening the strategy behind wonder-building.

Now I'm sure that the tall empire people will be opposed to this limitation, so I would be happy to compromise by reducing this wonder penalty for smaller empires somehow.

Does anyone agree with this idea, or at least think that I might be barking up the correct tree? I'm especially interested in hearing from those of you who have been playing BNW for a bit now.

Thanks!

 

[Snuffleupagus]

They have added a lot in BNW to help prevent the kind of snowball effect you're talking about (and I love it, it was my primary issue with Civ V).

I kind of like your idea, but I wonder if the limitation to wonder access isn't enough to help this. In my last game on Emperor the Pyramids were built in 1755 (I had to triple check the little notification...)

But it sounds like youre idea would really hurt tall empires, maybe it should be limitted to wonders of the same era and kick in immediately. So if for every wonder of the same era that city already has there is a 10% construction penalty. This way one city isn't building all the wonders in an era, it spreads the wonders out, but it doesn't punish tall empires as much over the course of the game (they just have to prioritize the wonders within an era).

 

[kaspergm]

No I don't like this idea. The counter to wonder hoarding is supposed to be warfare. Negative effects for doing good in a game doesn't make the game more fun.

 

[Randall_Flagg]

Venice is only allowed to build wonders in their cpaitol.

 

[CommiGoblin]

@Snuffleupagus - I didn't even think about how my suggestion might snowball by the later eras, but if the pyramids are already being built as late as 1775 we definitely wouldn't want to implement anything that might exacerbate thattrend. I quite like your idea of making the production penalty a "per era" effect though! And I'm also glad to hear that BNW has already moved in the direction of mitigating the ssuper wonder cities, and maybe this means that my idea is superfluous -- fixed is fixed no matter how it's done.

@kaspergm - I agree that punishment for playing well isn't a good thing. Rather, I'm not sure that simply building 80% of the wonders in the game is really playing well. Instead, it seems more like exploiting a technology or production lead to play without any other strategy than to build everything. Conversely, on the highest difficulties, I find myself unable to build more than a couple of wonders while another civilization builds all off the others (which I find anything, though I'll admit that many probably view that particular problem as an enjoyable challenge).

@randall flagg - True; in the case of Venice my proposed reduction of the penalty based on number of cities, or indeed, Snuffleupagus' idea to limit the penalty to wonders from the same era would make it so that Venice would have to be choosey about its wonders without being broken and unable to build more than a few total. Remember, one of my reasons for proposing this (from a gameplay perspective) is to force the player to really think about what wonders must benefit his or her playstyle - not to stop you from building wonders altogether.

 

[kwidem]

.

 

[kaspergm]

@kaspergm - I agree that punishment for playing well isn't a good thing. Rather, I'm not sure that simply building 80% of the wonders in the game is really playing well. Instead, it seems more like exploiting a technology or production lead to play without any other strategy than to build everything. Conversely, on the highest difficulties, I find myself unable to build more than a couple of wonders while another civilization builds all off the others (which I find anything, though I'll admit that many probably view that particular problem as an enjoyable challenge).

I'm not against changes that spreads out Wonders, but it has to be done in a good way. First off, you need to know that BnW has several changes that does exactly that. For one, there are the policy specific wonders, which you can only build if you have opened that policy tree. Secondly, trade routes that allow you to move production will mean more civs can enter the race for wonders.

I felt your suggestion for a solution was bad. Something which I think could be a good solution is to change the way Marble works. I'm not keen on having Marble work as a boost to any wonder - that makes it too much of a hit-and-miss. Instead, different wonders should be boosted by different resources, similar to how it worked in Civ4. Marble, Stone, Iron, Gold and Copper are all resources that potentially could improve the construction rate of certain wonders. This would also work to spread things out a bit - but would probably have to be coupled to an overall restructuring of the resource system (which I'm all for, but is not a minor tweak).

 

[Kwami]

Eh, Civ IV (or was it A New Dawn?) had a hard cap of five wonders per city. I didn't like it. I don't think that I'd like this suggestion, either.

If I'm building wonders, then that means that I'm not building other things like military, science buildings, etc. There's already a drawback to wonder spamming.

 

[Tilarium]

I think they should have expanded the idea they started with assigning wonders to policy trees. Not just assign 1 wonder to each tree, assign wonders to specific tenants inside of the trees. That would help stop one or two civs from monopolizing the wonders. The other problem is to many wonders in one city (usually the capital) is harder to fix. I always spread them out between my cities.

 

[CommiGoblin]

@kwidem - Thanks for the welcome! I think the difficulty in making the penalty empire wide is that it would at that point become excessively punishing; if you can found several cities with enough production to build a ton of wonders then, I think, fair enough. It's the fact that a lucky start (and the AI tech boost) allows one city belonging to one player to hog all of the wonders that frustrates me.

@kaspergm - Actually, I believe the relegation of certain wonders to certain policy trees that you mention is definitely a step in the right direction, though having not been able to play yet, I can't ascertain exactly how effective this step was. I'm still but convinced by your arguments that my solution is a poor one, or indeed that it does punish one for playing well as you asserted, though I will eagerly concede that a reworked resource system, part of which would focus on a variety of resources related to the production of certain wonders, is a fantastic idea and a change that I have wished for since Civ V first came out. Unfortunately, short of another expansion, I fear this will be a feature for Civ VI.

@kwami - It was indeed A New Dawn that implemented the hard limit to wonders-per-city, and I also hated that feature! This is why I'm inclined toward a penalty rather than a hard limit - something that makes wonder speaking more challenging without saying outright that you can't do it. Still, the principle behind the limit in AND was sound - take wonder spamming away from the player (or, as is more often the case, from the AI) and force intelligent choices about what wonders are more useful to be made, even when you have a production giant of a city and a technology lead. And honestly, I imagine that this would feel less like punishing the player than keeping the game challenging, even when you're in the lead (which, as most people know, is a problem as Civ V's victory conditions tend to snowball into an anticlimax).

 

[Yzman]

This isn't something they can really change too much in this current game, but in the next Civ, assuming they change the benefits of some wonders, I could see them making wonders VERY powerful, but only allowing one per city.

It could make it more strategic in that you have to choose where to put your wonder instead of just spamming them all in 1 city. It would also encourage growth as small empires would be limited on the amount of wonders they could have. There could be some exceptions like "projects". For example, you could have the United Nations and The Manhattan Project in one city because one would be a project etc.

 

[ahawk]

The counter to a city with high-production hard-building a lot of wonders is to hard-build an army in the mean-time, as others have said. However, a very few wonders do make it tougher to respond via warfare:

1) Great Wall
2) Himeji Castle
3) Red Fort
4) Terracotta Warriors

Otherwise, the hard-counter to wonder-spam is usually warfare, as others have said. Only when the wonder-spammer has Great Wall are they really that protected by any of the wonders they build, though the other 3 can be a nuisance.

Either way, welcome to CFC

 

[cinattra]

I don't agree with a hard cap of limiting wonders per city. Prosperous cities should not be punished for being prosperous.

Cities build wonders for a reason. There is a reason Rockefeller Center, The World Trade Center, the Statute of Liberty, the Empire State building etc were built in New York City. Because that city has the population and probably the tax base to support such feats of engineering and imagination.

Why can't the system for wonder building change to one not just geared around manufacturing ability? Maybe certain wonders (not all just some) could have certain requirements be met before they can be allowed to be built in a city?

Some wonders are already limited in where they can be built. Some have to be built in a coastal city. Some have to be built within a certain number of hexes of a mountain. So the system is already in place, just saying maybe it could be expanded a little.

 

[CommiGoblin]

@ahawk - I usually find in my games that the civ with the gross majority of the wonders is also the most militarily powerful (as well as the largest, the most scientifically advanced, etc.). I suppose the underlying intent of such a mechanic, though I did not originally say it outright, would be to curb the across-the-board lead of runaway empires. I like the idea that to build lots of wonders you have to forgo other things, but the AI never seems handicapped in this way. That being said, I do play relatively peacefully, so I will acquiesce to the notion that perhaps what I'm sacrificing by my playstyle is the ability to limit some of the AI advantages.

Oh, and thanks for the welcome!

@cinnatra - I, too, oppose the idea of a hard limit on the number of wonders in a city, so I think that perhaps, in your haste, you may have misread my original post. And I also agree that there is a reason that certain cities, like New York, have several "wonders" in real life, which is the reason that I initially proposed a production penalty in a city after having produced a certain number of wonders, rather than after having produced but a single wonder. That being said, while the cities with three or four wonders are by no means a rarity in real life, cities with ten or more are uncommon to non-existent (depending, of course, on what one considers a wonder). This is, I suppose, the realism side to the strategic change I am proposing. Finally, I'm not sure the more arbitrary requirements for wonders do all that much to enhance strategic gameplay - the primary determining factor for whether one builds a wonder should be whether it aligns with one's strategy, not whether there are mountains close by. I'm fine with a handful of wonders demanding such requirements for the sake of variety, but having most or all wonders require some feature our another would be restrictive in an arbitrary sense, not in a strategic one.

 

[kaspergm]

I'm still but convinced by your arguments that my solution is a poor one, or indeed that it does punish one for playing well as you asserted ...

Arguably, there is always a difference of tolerance with these kinds of features. For some it might be good, while others might find it obnoxious. I know some people like the Civ5 espionage/tech stealing system. For me it's horrible, because it's boring, passive, and essentially only does one thing, namely punish you for prioritizing technology by giving your techs to those who prioritized something else, or just didn't play as good as you. Now I know some people say it's vital for playing on deity, but that doesn't make it a good feature in my opinion (if anything, it just goes to show that the idea of making game more difficult by giving AI a greater head start doesn't work very well if you have to essentially break the core game mechanism to make it manageable).

 

[Vidszhite]

No I don't like this idea. The counter to wonder hoarding is supposed to be warfare. Negative effects for doing good in a game doesn't make the game more fun.

This. If someone else is wonder spamming, his army will be terrible. Steal his wonders and punish him for his hubris.

 

[Vidszhite]

The counter to a city with high-production hard-building a lot of wonders is to hard-build an army in the mean-time, as others have said. However, a very few wonders do make it tougher to respond via warfare:

1) Great Wall
2) Himeji Castle
3) Red Fort
4) Terracotta Warriors

Otherwise, the hard-counter to wonder-spam is usually warfare, as others have said. Only when the wonder-spammer has Great Wall are they really that protected by any of the wonders they build, though the other 3 can be a nuisance.

Either way, welcome to CFC

Great Wall also becomes useless once someone gets Artillery, so it won't last the whole game, and it also doesn't make you invincible, it just makes it harder for a warmonger to ram his units down your throat. I've taken capitals with Great Wall before as the Huns, though, so it's hardly impossible.

(Hah... built to keep the Huns out, ended up keeping the Huns in).

 

[Furycrab]

They've put almost a dozen wonders that require specific social policies/tenets. Many wonders can end up being sniped by Engineers. As far as hammers vs use, most of them aren't that crazy in terms of bonus power for the risk. If someone gets really wonder heavy, taking his city is a great option too.

Not sure I'm seeing any major issue.

 

[CommiGoblin]

@kaspergm - I think you're correct in deducing that our difference of opinion comes down to differing interpretations of player punishment. As someone who has always played Civ games with winning as a secondary goal and playing through a fictitious world's history as the primary one, I've always been a fan of features like science leakage (of which the espionage system is an unnecessarily complicated but somewhat effective facsimile) that reproduce real world spread of technology, even though they do make maintaining a significant technology lead difficult even when that is your focus. Nonetheless, I now understand your playstyle, and thus, why my suggestion doesn't appeal to you.

As for everyone else, we're starting to become redundant in our discussion. I could point out that I know certain wonders are now restricted to certain policies, or that I'm not convinced that the AI has to sacrifice military to build wonders (or indeed, that this is even necessary on the part of the player if one city is devoted to wonder production and another devoted to military unit production). I feel, though, that the relevant points have been made and a case for either argument compiled. Thanks, all, for participating!

 

[kaspergm]

As someone who has always played Civ games with winning as a secondary goal (...) I now understand your playstyle.

Ironically, I would also classify myself as one for whom winning is a secondary goal. For me, that means I don't need features that "helps levelling the field", as it is often put, because I don't think the field should be level. If I'm a runaway, good for me. If another civ runs away, I probably should have played differently, or maybe luck just favored them, and no biggy either way. That's not saying game shouldn't be balanced, though, but that's an entirely different story.