Building Wonders

[the_gasman]

Does anyone have any good methods of building Wonders?

I never seem to be able to build a wonder, because some other civ always seems to build it about 3 turns before I`ve completed it. Then I have to change to building a bank or something, wasting about 400 shields.

This has happened to me 4 times in my current game, and I`m getting very annoyed

 

[Gray]

pick several cities early on and set them up as wonder builders. you may want to rush a granery and temple (use the rush build under despotism which takes pop instead of gold), but then start building your wonders and let some of your other cities build workers and settlers and military. assign several workers to imporving the city squares in order to maximize production. the best cites are those that may have a few plains/grasslands-some hills and maybe one or two mountains. If there are special tiles like iron, wheat, cattle, gold---more the better.

while in despotism, never irrigate your grasslands, always build mines (mix mining and irrigation for plains). build mines on your hills and mountains, and build roads through your forests. you may want to cut down a forest or two, but that is not always the best idea...

this will max your shield production and still allow you to grow...
rivers are also helpful for growth... (no aqueduct so you can grow beyond 6 while build wonders).

 

[Ruffin]

Set a city to build a small wonder you don't reallly need (forbidden palace... only five spots over from my capital in my case) but adjust the workers so it never finishes. When you get the tech available to build a regular wonder, switch all the production over to the new wonder (no penalty in Civ3) and set it for max production. That can give you a 20+ turn jump on regular wonders.

Setting all the squares around a city to mines or forests helps.

Keeping leaders in the hole instead of using them for armies works too. You can get a tech one turn and have the wonder the next turn that way.