How do you normally pair up your national wonders?

[MadmanAtW]

"National Park removes 1/2 the benefits of IW so these situations are indeed rare."

I disagree here- not that it should be rare, but National Park removes less than 1/2 of the benefit of the IW. It removes the +50% due to coal, but IW is good for 3 things- the two +50%s, but also the additional Engineer specialist slots, which the Park is uniquely capable of taking advantage of.

 

[mirthadir]

Pope--I agree wholeheartedly with what you say. Hence my first sentence. It's only if I fail to secure a city with a shrine (or two) that I'll stick Wall Street in a super-commerce city.

Which is still a bad move if you are are running at high combined EP, Science, and Culture sliders. As noted above; once your total slider hits 60%, WS gets less out of towns than out of merch specs; once it hits above 70% FIN towns are worse than specs. This one of the weird things that isn't immediately obvious; in a CE WS should run specs and in SE WS should run towns (perferably B towns).

 

[CivCorpse]

"National Park removes 1/2 the benefits of IW so these situations are indeed rare."

I disagree here- not that it should be rare, but National Park removes less than 1/2 of the benefit of the IW. It removes the +50% due to coal, but IW is good for 3 things- the two +50%s, but also the additional Engineer specialist slots, which the Park is uniquely capable of taking advantage of.

I am a tree chopping machine. There won't be a bent twig let alone a forest in the BFC of my IW city. I like my mines

 

[Gwynnja]

"National Park removes 1/2 the benefits of IW so these situations are indeed rare."

I disagree here- not that it should be rare, but National Park removes less than 1/2 of the benefit of the IW. It removes the +50% due to coal, but IW is good for 3 things- the two +50%s, but also the additional Engineer specialist slots, which the Park is uniquely capable of taking advantage of.

Really? I'm not going to put IW in my NP city just because it has a couple extra engineer slots, sorry. A forge, factory, and industrial park open up enough engineers to get a reasonable chance of popping one out if I really need it, although at that point of the game Great Persons are much less powerful in general. I would rather put the Kremlin and all the spy buildings in my NP city so I might be able to steal techs or sabotage my rivals.

 

[popejubal]

Really? I'm not going to put IW in my NP city just because it has a couple extra engineer slots, sorry. A forge, factory, and industrial park open up enough engineers to get a reasonable chance of popping one out if I really need it, although at that point of the game Great Persons are much less powerful in general. I would rather put the Kremlin and all the spy buildings in my NP city so I might be able to steal techs or sabotage my rivals.

One of the neat things is that you can do that too.

None of the Spy buildings are National Wonders, so your Great Spy can build Scotland Yard (or even multiple scotland yards if you want) and you can still have all of the industrial buildings you want (with none of the associated health problems).

 

[Sciguy001]

My commerce city always gets wall street and oxford.
My national park city always gets the hero epic (or whatever one gives you double great people points. I try to have my national park city in uber forest places and try to get close to the 21 free specialists. The Epic makes it an incredible great person pump.)

 

[mirthadir]

My commerce city always gets wall street and oxford.
My national park city always gets the hero epic (or whatever one gives you double great people points. I try to have my national park city in uber forest places and try to get close to the 21 free specialists. The Epic makes it an incredible great person pump.)

The Oxford/WS pairing is among the worst in the game. It is only really good in cottaged B cap or with mass settled priests. It is far more efficient to place them in separate cities and run specs in one or the other unless you are at 40-60% slider to cash.

NP has two major effects, getting you lots of specs from forest preserves and eliminating most unhealthiness. NP/NE (national epic; heroic epic gets you +100% units production) is indeed powerful with 20 odd free specs; however you pay a high opportunity costs to keep that many trees alive all game. Often you are better off placing the SP in a high gp farm and running mass specs off the higher healthy cap.

 

[fictionaryduck]

It seems most people who've replied say they put their NP in a captured capital that still has lots of forests, or save an appropriate city by not chopping. I'd just like to say in a game with a "new world" type continent I usually found a few new cities on another continent, which is inevitably filled with forests, and decide right away which one gets NP. By the time the infrastructure comes online it's usually not long before my tech catches up and I can build NP.

 

[troytheface]

According to "Attacko's Guide to Proper Civ4 National Wonder Couplings and Amphibeous Assault" the most optimal pairing is Heroic Epic and Globe Theater.

..."there are many that will try to tell a beginning player that other combinations are superior- however, these are the types that cry home to mama during online play and are prone to bad ideas and cowardice."

 

[PaulusIII]

According to "Attacko's Guide to Proper Civ4 National Wonder Couplings and Amphibeous Assault" the most optimal pairing is Heroic Epic and Globe Theater.

..."there are many that will try to tell a beginning player that other combinations are superior- however, these are the types that cry home to mama during online play and are prone to bad ideas and cowardice."

Sheesh, I hope no newbie ever starts taking your ideas serious.

 

[CivCorpse]

"National Park removes 1/2 the benefits of IW so these situations are indeed rare."

I disagree here- not that it should be rare, but National Park removes less than 1/2 of the benefit of the IW. It removes the +50% due to coal, but IW is good for 3 things- the two +50%s, but also the additional Engineer specialist slots, which the Park is uniquely capable of taking advantage of.

The engineers give 2 hammers each, grasslandforest hills give 2 hammers each. That is 4 hammers per hill. A railroaded mined hill gives 4 hammers. Same hammer outout. The big difference is I have been getting 3 hammers all game by mining those hills early.Plus the early hammers from chopping the forest in the early game when hammers are most precious.

 

[popejubal]

According to "Attacko's Guide to Proper Civ4 National Wonder Couplings and Amphibeous Assault" the most optimal pairing is Heroic Epic and Globe Theater.

..."there are many that will try to tell a beginning player that other combinations are superior- however, these are the types that cry home to mama during online play and are prone to bad ideas and cowardice."

This is actually very close to correct. The optimal pairing is Globe Theater and You Don't Need Another National Wonder Here, You Moron.

Globe Theater eliminates :angry: from and from drafting, so you can crank out units as fast as you can regrow population. Considering that just about every empire has at least one city with 3 food resources in the Big Fat Cross, that's pretty darned quick. Heroic Epic doubles hammer output from the whip and that's certainly nice, but it's the absolutely insane efficiency that comes from drafting that makes the Globe Theater shine. Heroic Epic is best built in a city with good production and is best when built as early in the game as possible - well before Globe Theatre is available.

Also, the pairing of National Park (forests = specialists) and National Epic (Great People Points doubled) is not great in most games, too. The National Epic is available very early and can give you a ton of extra great people - especially in an economy that doesn't run many specialists. Getting those great people early is enormously powerful, so you want to build the National Epic as soon as you reasonably can. The National Park is available fairly late in the game and there's a good chance that you've already chopped down most of the trees available in your empire during the ancient era or middle ages, so the National Park is going to have to go into a new continent or remote corner of the empire that wasn't already used for something else.


One combination that I have put together more than a couple of times is National Park + Forbidden Palace. It's not that they synergize all all, but if I can get a foothold in another continent and drop the National Park in that city with a bunch of ready forests (or a bunch of forests and a food resource, even better), then I'll have a city that can produce the Forbidden Palace a lot more easily than most new cities and the Forbidden Palace will make my later conquest of the other continent both easier and more profitable.

 

[popejubal]

"National Park removes 1/2 the benefits of IW so these situations are indeed rare."

I disagree here- not that it should be rare, but National Park removes less than 1/2 of the benefit of the IW. It removes the +50% due to coal, but IW is good for 3 things- the two +50%s, but also the additional Engineer specialist slots, which the Park is uniquely capable of taking advantage of.

It removes half of the production bonus benefits from Iron Works, so those two are very far away from auto-pair like Shrine + Wall Street, but I generally find that the National Park city doesn't end up with a whole lot of production even with the specialists in most cases - at least in part because spies are so very attractive as specialists and as settled Great People. Still, it's a very decent combo in the games where it works.

One of the things that makes it more attractive than it appears at first glance is that some of the extra production you get out of the Iron Works isn't really "extra". If you have 20 population at 0 growth making some number of hammers and you build the Iron Works and the late game "get an extra free engineer and a couple of slots" building, you've just added a bunch of extra . If you are at your cap already (and it's just about impossible not to at your cap in that city), then each extra 2 is 1 less population and that's 2-4 raw hammers lost. If the Iron Works is giving you 60 "extra" hammers, remember that you also lost hammers to and those hammers get multiplied, so it's really 5-15 hammers lost. Those 60 extra hammers are now 45-55 extra and that's still quite good, but it's not quite as impressive as it once seemed.

 

[Tephros]

My most common pair seems to be oxford/national epic.

I don't think national park has to be in a city with forests to be useful. I can imagine a city with a massive food surplus where the globe theater can be used to get a massive population city with the help of the national park. And still can build all kinds of unhealthy buildings like factories and airports without limiting growth.

 

[Churchill's Hat]

Depends on the game. In my current game as England on Earth18, I have two major production cities: Paris (my capital for colonial expenses reasons) and Dublin. So, I built Moai and HE in Dublin and settled a GG there for a unit pump. Paris, which also has pretty decent commerce and more production, doesn't need HE, so I am going to put WP and Ironworks there so it can not only pump units but also increase its science and gold output.

 

[Cookie Crumbs]

National Epic goes with either National Park, or Ironworks if I don't have a good site with lots of food or forests.

My capital gets Ironworks if it's got good production or Oxford if it's a bureaucracy capital.

Wall Street goes in a city that has decent production to get Wall Street up quickly and pump out executives.

Heroic Epic goes with either Ironworks or West Point, normally the former because I usually only have one decent production capital. They go into separate cities if I have two good production cities.

 

[mirthadir]

National Epic goes with either National Park, or Ironworks if I don't have a good site with lots of food or forests.

My capital gets Ironworks if it's got good production or Oxford if it's a bureaucracy capital.

Wall Street goes in a city that has decent production to get Wall Street up quickly and pump out executives.

Heroic Epic goes with either Ironworks or West Point, normally the former because I usually only have one decent production capital. They go into separate cities if I have two good production cities.

Executives are not too bad, just build one (two) in WS itself and then ship it off to some nice high city (Maori comes to mind). Only the first exec needs to come from HQ.

IW /NE I've done this a few times solely for GE spam, but honestly that was when I was fighting a mass wonder cap in order to snag a GE in time for corps. What do you see in this overall?

 

[PhroX]

Also, the pairing of National Park (forests = specialists) and National Epic (Great People Points doubled) is not great in most games, too. The National Epic is available very early and can give you a ton of extra great people - especially in an economy that doesn't run many specialists. Getting those great people early is enormously powerful, so you want to build the National Epic as soon as you reasonably can. The National Park is available fairly late in the game and there's a good chance that you've already chopped down most of the trees available in your empire during the ancient era or middle ages, so the National Park is going to have to go into a new continent or remote corner of the empire that wasn't already used for something else.

Yeah, that's my problem with the combo. My GP farms don't have any trees left by the time NP comes around - I've chopped them to get the buildings with specialist slots.

 

[carl corey]

Well, sometimes you've got a few hills or already unforested tiles that you can workshop, and will usually work food resources + specialists for GP generation, and food resources + workshops/mines for production. So you keep a few forests around for later. Once you get the preserves and the NP up you can even pillage the mines and workshops and hope that new forests spread to those tiles too. Granted, it's not something you do often, but sometimes it can be done with good effect.

As for HE+IW, that's pretty much only useful if you want to build units and get cash from overflow. I usually have enough production to get 1 unit per turn from the HE-only and IW-only cities, paring them would mean a lot of that production would turn into gold instead of units. Plus, whenever I want to build a late-game wonder it would mean sacrificing unit building for it.

 

[mirthadir]

Yeah, that's my problem with the combo. My GP farms don't have any trees left by the time NP comes around - I've chopped them to get the buildings with specialist slots.

If tech rates are high enough, particularly I can swing early astro (double bulb), and Sci Meth off an early lib (hopefully trade/bulb for philo, paper, and edu) then you have a pretty good chance of growing forests with preserves. The most common ways I get the high preserves NP is by using philo and/or caste for early astro and settling on a forested island; the NP will be had very quickly so chopping is suboptimal. If I've skipped lit, normally because I have land that warrants caste, then I will preserve everything and get a faster turnaround; even masses of 1 are highly effective at building slots.

Alternatively having a resource tundra city where I build nothing but a courthouse and maybe a grain works. If you can hit Sci Meth early you can get some impressive growth in the tundra and really there is nothing better to build up there.