Evaluating wonders.

[TruePurple]

Is there a list of wonders from must get to special circumstances to wonders to always build up to 1 turn away but fail so you get the gold.

One wonder that I've been evaluating higher and higher is Great Wall. Having to fend off a stream of barbarian axes and swords out of the blue can really cripple a game and knowing everything is safe with great wall allowing you to focus on expansion or attack of AI is very useful. Like to the point where I am making a beeline to great wall and considering restarting if I fail to get it. It also gives GE points.

If you have a unit at the edge of your territory with GW, can they be attacked from outside your territory?

 

[sampsa]

Must get:

Strong: Pyramids, GLH on certain maps, GW (for Great spy, for certain high level games)

Good: Mausoleum of Maussollos, Taj Mahal

I'm sure there are some other, especially late ones that I forget.

If you have a unit at the edge of your territory with GW, can they be attacked from outside your territory?

No, because that is moving to the tile where your unit is, which is inside your borders.

 

[TruePurple]

Are you saying GW is only good for spies?

 

[coanda]

Unless you have Stone (and maybe Industrious too), the cheaper, more cost-effective way of dealing with barbarians is almost always building warriors and positioning them properly to fogbust.

 

[TruePurple]

the cheaper, more cost-effective way of dealing with barbarians is almost always building warriors and positioning them properly to fogbust.

Please explain "fog bust" and the rest of what you are talking about

 

[Nick723]

There are plenty of other decent wonders if you have the requisite resource (Great Library, Parthenon, Statue of Liberty, Kremlin to name a few). But the challenge on higher level play can be to get the techs in time and / or conflict with other priorities.

In general good advice if you want to get better at civ 4 is to build no wonders for 10 games (assuming you are in the habit of building many of them).

 

[TruePurple]

Getting lots of production in a wonder you don't get can be equally as important, allows you to set research higher while also expanding more.

I've had games where I haven't built much for wonders and my game play improved once I started trying to get or fail build wonders. I just need to know how to use it better.

 

[antimony]

The problem with say putting hammers into the pyramids and getting gold from failing is that those hammers could have been settlers and workers instead, to add cities to your empire and cottages to those cities, which might be a better long term return than the 2 fail gold by hammer.

Someone else said earlier than the best time for converting hammers into fail gold is when your hammers are less important i.e. you don't want to expand your land and you don't want to go to war. But at the very beginning expansion (both settling more space and improving the tiles) is important and the very early wonders compete against that.

 

[antimony]

At what difficulty level and on which year in the game are you getting axe and sword barbarians? Great wall is really for handling a map with a lot of barbarians early game, or if you plan to use espionage.

 

[antimony]

Fogbusting not only means that new barbarians will not appear in tiles that are revealed (not in the fog) by any civ including barbarians themselves (I think), but they also won't appear in the fogged tiles if they are within two tiles (diagonal included) of any unit, so imagine a 5x5 square centered on each of our units, no barbs can appear there.

So the idea is that in the early game when you are not making workers or settlers you make some warriors and position them around your borders, in the zone not visible by your cities alone, to "fogbust" as many tiles as possible. This way barbs spawn further from your cities and are less likely to target you, and if they do you have more time to react.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

World wonders are contextual. Game settings, map, starting position, target victory type.

Great Person Points (GPP) are important. Some wonders with strong effects are avoided because of the wrong type of GPPs.

National wonders are simpler to evaluate, you can build them anytime you want.

I have actually used the Red Cross before, don't laugh (too hard).

 

[coanda]

Please explain "fog bust" and the rest of what you are talking about

Barbarians will not spawn anywhere visible to a player, nor will they spawn on any tiles within a 5x5 box centered on any already existing units. Combine these two, and a few strategically placed warriors fortified outside your borders can usually ensure that barbarians can't spawn close to your cities. Sometimes you can shut down barbarian spawns entirely, depending on the map layout. Other times it just means you push the barb spawns off into the distance where they'll go attack other AIs sharing the continent instead of you. And even in the worst-case, at least they're forcing the barbs to take longer traveling before they reach you so you deal with a trickle instead of a flood.

 

[TruePurple]

So should I build GW if I am alone on a continent?

 

[sampsa]

So should I build GW if I am alone on a continent?

Depends. Is the land easy to fog bust? If yes, GW is almost useless, as you have no use for the GSpy either.

 

[pigswill]

Most games fogbusting works just fine.

There are some maps with huge amounts of naff land near your territory (arctic, deserts) and no nearby neighbours which can make fogbusting expensive.

Fogbusters aren't immortal, losing a couple of fogbusters can lead to a void for more barbs to spawn.

Fogbusting units also add to your ongoing expenses

But most of the time fogbusting works just fine.

Like most everything in Civ its situational not dogmatic.

edit: GSpy is pretty naff in isolated starts but one of the not often mentioned aspects of Gspy is that it is the ultimate scout, totally indestructible by barbarians. Its also useful for exploring another landmass without the tedium of opening borders (and never gets caught) and can scout ahead of a stack during wartime.

 

[TruePurple]

What is "naff"?

 

[sampsa]

what is google

 

[TruePurple]

what is google

[/URL]

Well the results I found with search engine don't match how pigswill used the word. And in general I find it more useful to ask what the person meant by a obsecure or slang word rather than looking it up because these often don't match.


What do people think of Statue of Zeus? Does it obsolete? Doesn't seem to, no mention of that, but I've had it before with unmentioned game mechanics in game.

If it never obsolets it seems great to build, both to punish your enemies and prevent you from dealing with it on the other side, even without ivy but especially with.

 

[coanda]

The AI gets extremely high reductions in war weariness as you move up in difficulty levels. "Doubling" their war weariness, when what you are doubling is only, say, 30% of base on Immortal or 20% of base on Deity, doesn't do much. And for humans, if the war weariness is stacking up high it probably means you aren't being efficient in how you fight the war. Every turn you spend at war is a turn the AI is aggressively building and whipping out units, so if a war is stalling out you usually want to just take a peace, spend 10 turns rebuilding your army, then hit them again.

 

[TruePurple]

Well you still need to earn those peaces and I wouldn't say win with war weariness alone but every bit helps and it doesn't expire, so don't you think Zeus is worth building? At least if you got ivory?