Good reasons why Brazil, China, Egypt, France, and India are not in the press build

China needs seven builder charges to complete a wonder and given that China can have as many as seven builder charges per builder, China can produce one builder first, then within seven turns (or less), it can complete any wonder. Even a newly established coastal city with a harbour with poor production can construct the Sydney Opera House in a reasonable time frame.

 

It'll be rare for China to get all 7, but maybe there does need to be a cap on just how many charges they can use per wonder.

 

Or just wait until a frontier is stable before building the Great Wall.

 

That

Only if Sydney opera house was an ancient/classical wonder

 

My bad. I misread it.

The ability to rush-build the Pyramids would make China powerful regardless.

 

Perhaps they need rebalancing. We know that the developers have been tinkering with the game stats even on the latests builds, and that they have touched upon different civilization's UAs. Perhaps these particular civs needed some adjustment, while the rest were considered to be finished?

 

I noticed that when shown in the First Look, military units moved onto the Wall. I expected it to work like a fort, with special defensive bonuses given to that unit. I haven't kept up on all the playthroughs, though, so I'm unsure if there's a global bonus.

 

The Great Wall as an Improvement has definitely been one of the bigger mysteries for me! Making it hard to judge just how useful it will be - I guess that could well be historically accurate
I'll be taking a look for myself in...oh around 59 hours

 

The great wall better have some damned impressive yields if they expect people to actually make it. The problem is it will more than likely compete with farm space unless you build it in a desert or tundra.

 

Yeah. They were all among early civs to be released (I think only America and England were in the same batch) so they could be tweaking anything from special bonuses to animations (we know, for example, that Catherine now has a different agenda). Interestingly enough three out of these four have direct wonder bonuses - maybe these were too imbalanced (I can see how China in particular could steal all the wonders by rushing Pyramids).

 

Ayup, that's probably what it is. Strange in the case of Egypt, for it would seem like the most rounded up civ out of the box, but understandable for the other 3: China can hoard all the ancient wonders, France's spy bonuses seems quite subpar as well as Chateaus (specially considering how these will be competing against river farms and financial districts due to their river adyacency requirements), and Brazil was the first "overpowered civ" spotted due to its insane jungle adyacency bonuses.

Another possibility, however, is that they are just trying to figure out proper, workable leader agendas, since that was the case for Catherine, and Pedro's and Qin's agendas will make them hate you on every game no matter what since you will always be getting great people (thus angering Pedro) and wonders (angering Qin).

 

The spy is actually thought to be one of the stronger bonuses in France. Can steal gold/great works/eurekas from others who have no way of defending themselves. Also river farms are exactly the same as non-river farms

 

Could they be having issues implementing Unique improvements I wonder, either with the AI's ability to manage them, or some other issue? Every civ that is excluded has a unique tile improvement except Brazil, and none of the Civs in the press release have one, except Scythia.

 

It is as if they read this thread and plastered china egypt france brazil all over their latest "how to" playlist

 

Most likely they wanted
1. limited number of civs in the release build
2. civs that people Hadn't seen a lot of
3. still having very popular ones (America, England)

So they eliminated the earliest civs with a few exceptions

 

Spoiler Actual Map Depicting the Great Wall of China :

For those who at bothered by layers in game.

 

With France we know that Firaxis has replaced Catherine's wine to white wine instead of the original red wine. This is seen in the How To videos that were recently put out.

As for the other civilizations, I'd say it was a combination of recently revealed information, touching up on leader looks and animations and final tweaks to mechanics.

Also... Firaxis did say that the AI was worked on and tweaked in the past two weeks so a big part of that could have been in regards to the civilizations that have unique tile improvements.