Great Wonders with poor foundations...

Several people I know use a cheap tactic to build GW's quickly and to steal them from more advanced civs...They will have a city start building a palace, and then as soon as they research the required tech, they switch to the wonder and build it in only a few turns...Does anyone know of a way to mod the game so that you cant build GW's over improvements? It doesnt make sense that wonders can sit on top of the foundations of a palace.

 

I like building a Great Wonder over a palace....for one simple reason. If you play Emporer or Higher AI Levels it's often the only way to sneak in a Great Wonder here and there.

For Example you're playing Emporer level and say 5 AI Civs are ALL building the Great Library. You are building the Hanging Gardens because you figure you can't build the Great Library fast enough. Suddenly Babylon completes the Great Library so China switches immediately to Hanging Garden and completes it before you. There are no more GW's for you to switch to.

ATLEAST you can dump the resources into the Palace and get a leg up on the Sistine Chapel (assuming you can research Monotheism quickly enough before the palace completes). If not, you'd rarely have a chance against the AI on higher Levels.

Truly the only fix on higher AI levels would be a SEVERE ONE in which the only thing you could convert your failed GW's shields into would be a military unit or even worse just wealth to stop the Chinese and the other AI's from switching from Great Library to Hanging Gardens and hosing you once Babylon has completed the Great Library. So, be careful what you're asking for.

 

In Civ2 there was a production penalty to the amount of production already completed when switching between units/improvements/wonders. Dunno why they didn't keep this feature and make the penalty variable from the editor.

At least you can't switch to a wonder if you have rushed current project. Sadly they also made it impossible to help wonder production by disbanding units.

You could mod Palace to be cheaper to build - though that could open up for other abuses (easy border protection etc.)

 

I feel the palace is cheaper now, than it was in PTW.

Haven't checked with the editor, though.