It's fitting that you also listed ToA and Petra, because that is where the early garden power really comes into play, modifying the GE points from those two wonders (if you can get both or just one with HG) so you can pop a Great Engineer before your scientists take over, if you want. Therefor granting the same "free" GE for a bonus-wonder as Leaning Tower.
Yes, I found this in my Maya OCC - I also had Stonehenge in the same city. From recollection my Engineer popped in time to give me Sistine Chapel as my free Wonder.
Reading back over the early votes, what surprises me is the dislike for Mausoleum. Even with just two quarries, 4 gpt plus ~4000 for great ppl for 185 hammers (probably 161 with marble boost) is nice. Also if I'm only aiming for 3 cities then Mausoleum can usually fit in between teching Masonry (for the wonder production bonus) and teching another wonder like HG, without disrupting my growth, even on Immortal.
Yes, I use it quite a lot - I did even in G&K, but with the new GWAM system it's stronger still.
Great Mosque of Djenne is a quite horrible wonder. It requires Piety, a known bad policy tree. It does not give you anything to spread with, so you require more faith to get spreaders, when your faith output may not be that high. The extra faith from the Mosque and the wonder itself may help you get more,but usually after enhancing and spreading to maybe 4 cities (one prophet or two missionaries), I find the best strategy is to save up for GP.
Piety is not a "bad policy tree" if going for a religion, and otherwise GM is still in absolute terms superior to Hagia Sophia, which effectively gives you +100 'free' faith over the Mosque (300 faith-equivalent Great Prophet instead of 200 faith-equivalent Mosque), while having an ability and extra output. You want to wait for the Medieval Era to build a Wonder that just gives 3 faith a turn? Can I introduce you to
Angkor Wat- Honestly, why do you really need to expand your borders faster? This is one of the reasons America is bad, as well as the Krepost. They all do basically do the same thing, because the Krepost is just a building, and America dosent need to do anything to get it.
Expanding borders faster is heavily underrated; America isn't bad, it's just bland. Expanding borders faster when you hit Education, when you aren't settling many new cities and even if you are you then have the money to buy tiles if you need them, is the reason Angkor Wat is bad. It's like making Stonehenge a late Medieval Wonder - that 5 faith is only useful with no other bonuses in a very specific timeframe; same with Angkor's tile purchase.
If I had to do my bottom 5, I'd go with something like Terracotta Army, Himeji Castle, Red Fort, Angkor Wat, and Statue of Zeus. None of those finished very high, but that CN went out before Himeji kind of shocked me. How would you rank your bottom five?
On the highly subjective basis that I never build or feel any incentive to build them (except once each for the vanilla ones for the Wonder Years achievement), I'd go with Angkor Wat, Himeji Castle, Pentagon, Great Firewall and perhaps Red Fort (not very sure what it does...). Statue of Zeus is poor, but has a niche use for domination play - the same I suspect would prove to be the case for Terracotta, but I haven't built it in BNW (I've tried for it a couple of times to give it a try, but it's highly prioritised by the AI which can afford the upkeep)..
There's a general feeling around here that wide empires are suboptimal. I suspect that it's incorrect, but if you do go wide you need to be prepared to do so very early (in my current game I had 5 cities by turn 75), and to wait for the payoff (until you hit Education, you're getting few advantages from science since five libraries in five cities don't produce any more science than a single library in a city with the same overall pop). You also have to go Liberty for the settler, and the tree is otherwise rather weak (and lacks gold boosters or a happiness effect as good as Monarchy, despite the fact that economy particularly is hard to sustain in the early game as a wide empire just maintaining the essential monuments, granaries and libraries).
Other than that, I went back and read the first couple of pages of this thread, and the arguments made against CN tower are fair. It's not terribly good even in wide empires because Telecommunications is so late. For most strategies and victory conditions, Radio will be your entry to the Modern Era, but Telecommunications is only beelined for cultural victories and is several techs away even then. This gives a long period to build broadcast towers, and when going cultural specifically you want them sooner rather than later (by the time you hit Telecommunications, your musicians should be too busy touring to produce Great Works). If you're defending against cultural victory, Telecoms is verging on too late to help, while for any strategy the boost to culture output comes much too late to give you social policies of any relevance.
