Are wonders worth it?

Disgustipated said:
They are just so fun to build, and it does feel good when you succeed in building them. Though it fills you with rage if you don't (especially if you lose by 3 or less turns). I can't help but build them, even if it isn't the best strategy. I want my empire to be grand, and an empire can't be grand if they don't have world wonders. Of course there's always the option of conquering the wonders you want. But sometimes you can't if they are too far away.



Wait, what? what nerf? I still build this, and I'm not aware of any nerf.

My list:
really really want:
Big Ben
Forbidden City
Potala Palace
Eiffel Tower
Ruhr Valley
Estadio (I can always get this if the game goes on long enough)
Venetian Arsenal (I don't often build many ships early on, usually only later, I like to pre-build some frigates and switch to them after this completes)

I will build these if I have a city available to do it:
Great Zimbabwe
Pyramids
Colossus
Alhambra (though I don't often build encampments early enough to get this)
Petra
Colosseum (lately the AI beats me to this nearly always, even on Prince)

The rest I don't care for. I don't go for early wonders. I do my initial conquests first. If Pyramids hasn't been built by the time I conquer a few cities, then I'll go for it. Same thing with Colossus/GLH.
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All the ones that give a policy slot.

1) Big Ben
2 )Potala Palace
3) Alhambra
4) Forbidden City
5) Ruhr Valley. (really nice for Germany)
6) Estadio when doing huge or larger maps. So many cities, it's pretty much a must late game.
7) Venetian Arsenal: Huge maps means a lot of coastline to cover. More from Barbarians than anything else. Ships can only be in one place.
8) Mausoleum. I never used to get this, but now I do. The extra Engineer charges: I save the wonder builders till this thing is built. After than, I want a wonder, it's a zoom zoom.
The extra charges on Admirals also means yeah, extra ships. (also fun)
9/10) Pyramids/Petra if I have desert.

Eiffel Tower is a sometimes thing. If I'm ahead, I may tell a city to build it just to keep it busy. (usually when not enough pop for another district)

Most of the others aren't needed, but I'll go for some depending on the game.

First 8 are pretty much a must for me. 9/10 are situational. (sometimes I just cannot build them at all until someone else snags it. No desert)
(the numbers are NOT the priority by any means)
 
Personally I frequently play at lower difficulty levels just because wonders are fun. Once you get up into immortal or deity levels you only build certain wonders for specific reasons; Eiffel Tower for CV, Big Ben to buy GS & GE for SV and so forth. At that level you really have to evaluate what is helping you win, and what just looks cool, especially if you want to finish quickly.
 
Lily_Lancer said:
Zimbabwe is situational if you have sth. like 10 bonus resources in 1 city. Usually we only build it for money for Science VC, only when we have a good city (so that it can finish the construction not too late) of >6 bonus resources. If I have Kumasi Suzerain I'd better ignore this wonder since actually the bonus is not that much cause you have to put all your trade routes together.(thus you may not be able to connect every route to a CS)

Venetian arsenal? You need to build 14 Frigates(140H) to recover its cost. Typically you don't need that many frigates, especially for self-producing instead of upgrading, on a standard map.
.
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Great Zimb costs 920 cogs, and roughly 800 cogs if you put that wonder policy card. By the time a player gets banking one often has 15+ trade routes. Even putting 10 trade routes to that city and assuming only 5 bonus resources, that's 10 x 5 x 2 = 100 gold, which is equivalent to 25 cogs per turn, so at most in about 35 turns one will get the investment back. Not to mention this wonder also give 5 gpt, 2 great merchant points and an additional trade route.

I read your posts in other thread you tend not to build commercial hubs and play a short game, so in that case this wonder certainly won't fit your playstyle, but for an average player this wonder is a blue chip investment >95% of time.

VA costs 920 c as well, so depending if you have any production bonus in building wonder, it's equivalent to 6-7 frigates, not 14 frigates. It's still an overkill most of the time as 3-4 frigate fleets/armanda plus one or two ironclads will be good enough to wipe out everything, but in a large map it's still a good bargain. Tell me if I'm wrong.
 
gettingfat said:
In about 35 turns one will get the investment back.
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Cash is always better than slow progress. In Civ6 usually 1 Cash is equivalent to 0.05~0.06 Profit per turn. So if sth. cannot pay itself back in fewer than 20 turns I'd rather not build it. Also, if you rush that wonder(e.g. before T110 )you'll find yourself not having enough trade routes when you finish it. If you don't rush it, there's usually not 35 more turns before finish.
 
Lily_Lancer said:
Cash is always better than slow progress. In Civ6 usually 1 Cash is equivalent to 0.05~0.06 Profit per turn. So if sth. cannot pay itself back in fewer than 20 turns I'd rather not build it. Also, if you rush that wonder(e.g. before T110 )you'll find yourself not having enough trade routes when you finish it. If you don't rush it, there's usually not 35 more turns before finish.
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That depends if you could use the money right now or you're saving it, e.g. for Big Ben + Democracy in a SV.

Also the 4 gold : 1 cog ratio is only if you're planning to use the gold to rush buildings/units. Let's say you have nothing left to bulid and your limiting factor is getting all the great people (often the case in a SV when you're far ahead of the AI). Projects convert 5 cogs : 1 GPP. With democracy, you can buy 1 GPP for 7.5 gold, and if you build Big Ben all the pre-Big Ben gold is doubled, for a conversion of 3.75 gold : 1 GPP.

That said, even if gold is often more valuable than prod. for the science victory endgame, it's not in every game that your spaceport city is also a good Great Zimbabwe city. GOTM 18, for example, is as good as it gets, with 5 bonus resources + France having bonus production on GZ.
 
Interestingly, France's wonder production bonus is generally more useful for science (Great Zim, Big Ben) than culture victory. For culture, Forbidden Palace is nice, but the best wonders are modern (Cristo and Eiffel). The wonder tourism bonus in contrast works best with early wonders.

With the buff to Greece, I'm curious to try Apadana + wonder-heavy capital with Pericles.
 
So I go to thinking, perhaps the only way to test this would play a hotseat game against myself with balanced starting positions and have 1 civ build lots of wonders, and the other civ build 0 wonders and see which comes out on top. This wouldn't be easy, as I'd have to keep everything else as equal as possible (barbs would be off of course). For example I wouldn't have 1 civ keep warring while the other built wonders, that wouldn't be fair, and I'd have to choose similarly tiered civs. Might be tempting to do my next game since I'm pretty bored of this patch (a pretty poor patch if you ask me).

I'd like to find out how much I'm gimping myself by building wonders.
 
Ruhr is worth it or at least it used to be before they nerfed it for SV. It doesn't matter if it pays for itself or not, you have the gap in time where your still researching rocketry and have nothing else relevant to build so you might as well build it to knock 20 turns off of SV.

I think people are getting to hung up on things paying for themselves.
 
I think Ruhr used to be better value because you had to put more production in the space projects than what the great people could provide. Now the project production is less, and you can build everything with Kwolek + Sagan and a few chops.
 
antimony said:
That depends if you could use the money right now or you're saving it, e.g. for Big Ben + Democracy in a SV.

Also the 4 gold : 1 cog ratio is only if you're planning to use the gold to rush buildings/units. Let's say you have nothing left to bulid and your limiting factor is getting all the great people (often the case in a SV when you're far ahead of the AI). Projects convert 5 cogs : 1 GPP. With democracy, you can buy 1 GPP for 7.5 gold, and if you build Big Ben all the pre-Big Ben gold is doubled, for a conversion of 3.75 gold : 1 GPP.

That said, even if gold is often more valuable than prod. for the science victory endgame, it's not in every game that your spaceport city is also a good Great Zimbabwe city. GOTM 18, for example, is as good as it gets, with 5 bonus resources + France having bonus production on GZ.
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The production bonus of Ruhr Valley also applies to the trade routes, so putting Great Zimb and Ruhr Valley in the same city can create a monster city very good for spaceport.
 
Olleus said:
Does the GL apply retroactively or not? It didn't seem to apply to my old navy units but I feel like my land units are embarking faster.
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Yes, RNDY does not ofc.
Land units embark faster with the lvl 2 promotion and also a couple of civics.
 
Hmm, my experiment for a Hotseat game isn't going well. I had a the idea of playing Pericles and Gorgo which are about as even as Civs as you can get in this game currently. But I can't see a way to disable barbarians in a Hotseat game. And Pericles had some bad luck with barbs. :( I can see already Gorgo is going to pull ahead (not to mention her combat victories over barbs already got her code of laws earlier than Pericles). Ack, I forgot you can play against the same civ in this game, though I don't know if that advanced option can be selected in a Hotseat game.

edit: I just realized more advanced options can be had by scrolling down. I'm just not familiar with the multiplayer menu.Regardless, I may give up on this idea since 1 civ got a free envoy with Auckland, and 1 civ got a free envoy with a commercial civ. It's hard to keep things even.

Oh well, I suppose now I'll just play a SP game and build 0 wonders whatsover. I'm divided over whether building more districts will be beneficial since there really are only 3 districts that I consider must haves. But perhaps building entertainment districts earlier will be more beneficial since I tend to neglect these too long. Having some ecstatic cities could be more useful than a wonder. I mean, what else can I build instead of wonders? I could do district projects, I'm still divided over how useful these actually are.
 
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Wonders are weak aside from the already mentionned wonders.

I think they should buff all wonders tourism output. It would also make sense as IRL they are probably the biggest source of tourism in any country. I also think natural wonders should generate tourism even if they're not part of a national park.

It should be doable to get a culture victory by relying on wonders as your biggest contribution to tourism. It also would make AIs a lot better at getting a culture victory at higher difficulties.
 
If you are playing on a huge map with lots of coastline, or the even larger maps, then VA is useful. Barbs will sneak up on you, and of course, late game, ranged ships are nice when CS start spawning rebels right next to you. (those are really, really annoying)

Also, if you get the wonder that gives promotions to ships, you want to build many many ships early. (1 promo per upgrade adds up. don't form fleets/armadas out of them either, wait till later and add fresh units. they get the promotions)
:)

Course, pity the AI is so dense about ships. (barbs just spawn tons of them)
 
I never could finish a game to do a proper test. Lately I've been getting bored of my games halfway through, sometimes before the halfway point. Oh well. I still struggled to get entertainment districts up early. There's just so many other things to do. I did find I was better at getting workers out as I wasn't wasting time with wonders. So my improvements were better developed.

Other than that, I couldn't see a whole lot of advantage to not building wonders. In the future, I may try to build less, but there's still some that I really like. And as mentioned above this post. Coliseum can be really useful. I just have trouble getting it because I don't prioritize entertainment districts early enough. I really only need to build 1 in a good location though. I still like Forbidden City and Big Ben a great deal. Potala Palace is nice too, but it's difficult to get sometimes since the AI likes to go for Astronomy. And of course Eiffel and Cristo for Cultural victories. Any other must haves?
 
As to the original post, i found when making the jump to emperor that it was much more beneficial to focus on military in the early game than wonders.

Often times your military will capture the wonders you've forgone away.
 
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