Oracle

True, but most early wonders aren't worth the effort. And it doesn't slow my expansion - I've got at least 3-4 cities before T50 and I go right into my heavy expansion phase thereafter. I didn't say it was free from opportunity cost, but Magnus + Corvee drastically lesson the burden on my empire.

 

I don't think it is completely true to say that early game wonders are not Worth it, especially due to the Theatre Square adjcency bonus which any wonder in the game provide. Effectively every wonder can give several monuments Worth of Culture just from Theatre Squares which is significant. However it is hard for me to say that Orcale is Worth the maybe +100 production over other wonders of its time, if its benefit is actually better than other wonders of its time, like Hanging garden or Stonehenge and if mysticism is Worth it early enough to get Orcale or not.

Wonders also give era score which is also an important consideration.

 

I personally think HG and SH are useless, but I can see Artemis to be worth it. I usually grab early empire first before Mysticism and so Magnus can establish while researching. Oracle is 290, while the Pyramids are 220 it's about 1 extra chop. It's fair to say there's not an instant benefit usually, but I may have a Holy Site or Campus down already. The GP snowball starts pretty quickly thereafter.

 

HG can be used ot build a megacity early, especially if you also get Artemis in the same city and the purpose is to use Pingala +1 science and +1 Culture per Citizen, also there are some insperations tied to population of a single city and there some other advantages such as having the production to build later wonders without the need to chop them out and so.

Stonehenge is Worth alot of era score, wonder + religion and can be useful if you don't have plans to build holy site early for some reason but still want a religion or early golden age.

 

Highest cost, no theming bonuses, low base tourism equal to a work of writing after printing,buildings that store them are expensive with few slots, and only gets boosted by a late game card.

You could probably delete every musician you get and be none the worse for wear.

 

They're the hardest to get and do the least.

 

Great work of Music do however get a major boost from satellite broadcast policy card, also the great works don't compete with each other anyway and the Point you can build the Sydney Opera house is a Point in which wonders don't really have much of an opportunity cost anyway.

Great work of art do compete with artefacts which give more base tourism, 3 vs 2 and also can get a 300% boost from a great scientist so Hermitage allow you to get Another archelogical museum and also Hermitage have an hidden advantage that if 2 or more great work of art of the same artist is placed in it, it wont reduce the second or third great work of art to 1 Culture, 1 tourism like a art museum would.

If you play Sweden, pretty much all wonders with great work slots increase in value since they can be themed, even great work of Writing and Music can be themed as Sweden if I'm not wrong.

 

For 90% of my civ career I thought Oracle was a garbage tier wonder that was useless.

Then I put two and two together and had a single city with oracle, a campus a library and great library with pingala generating 12 great scientist points per turn. Thats the equivalent of buildings 6 campuses and libraries, or 4 campuses,libraries,universities. Its absurd.

Its absurd, considering how powerful pingala already is, going for the oracle with him and designating a city as an uber city is a logical choice. In fact I'm pretty sure Oracle and Pingala can potentially enable "Tall Play" in Civ 6.

More research required.

 

Of those 12 Points, Oracle is 4 of those. Yes many wonders do have something to do with tall given they often only affect that city, like Petra or Chichen itza and also good farm planing can lead to +4 farms in feudalism and +7 food during replaceable parts which probably beat most other tile improvements given that such farms allow many other Citizens to work as miners or specalist and greatly help growing cities, Assuming you can find the housing, farms is much like districts and unlike other tile improvement in their required planing.

Governors also encourage large cities since more or less them all have some advantage to being placed in large cities, if even just for stuff like Communism.

Also city spamming do have certain drawbacks, settlers are not free and in fact increase in cost which do add up, also by settling close you are making each of your city worse in long term compared to optimal placement which is better I think if you have the space, if you are cramped you probably want to ICS.

Especially for military production there are good reasons to want few large cities rather than many small ones as they concentrate production better and thus make the military districts more efficient and Venetian Arsenal effectively double a city's production when building ships.

 

Absolutely, however considering that the Oracle applies to all districts you build, I feel like it really justifies its investment over the long course of the game. If you considering that a great person point has a cost price of 10-16 gold depending on the stage of the game, in a game with limited land availability +2-4 GPP per district is really damn useful over the long haul. It probably deserves to be A or B tier, but a tier list like this is subject to my own whims and opinions, and half the fun is finding what you disagree with. The video will be out later today for those interested. Great people are like force multipliers, and the oracle is a force multiplier of that force multiplier.

 

Yeah, that's really the biggest point. Civ 6 has made many efforts to try to eliminate multipliers of multipliers, and this is one of the reasons why. The Oracle itself is actually a relatively balanced boost - it gives +2 per district, so certainly strong, but not insane. Take Pingala out of the equation, and yeah, it could effectively double your great scientist points with campus + library, but the later you get, the less bonus it yields.

However, it's the fact that Pingala doubles the bonus after the fact that truly pushes it over the top. Like if Pingala's boost was simply "+1 great person point for each district/building that already produces one", then suddenly the Oracle drops a couple tiers in the rankings, since now instead of giving you +50% boost to GS points in your city, it actually only gives you +33% (since you'd get campus+library=2, Oracle=2, and then Pingala giving you +2 again for the campus+library). But the fact that Pingala's bonus multiplies with the other bonuses really makes it over the top, in the same way that Magnus's chopping bonus is just crazy strong since it multiplies the base value of the chop, and not simply adding in another multiplier like the policy cards do.

And if you combine that with how great people work, where if you truly have a big edge in generation, then you can grab all the great people without ever really worrying about losing out on any, it just makes it all the stronger.

And all that is obviously not really including much chatter about the faith purchasing discount, which can be quite nice too if you're worried about losing out on any specific great person, although obviously a secondary concern due to the power of the great person bonus.

 

Obviously if we look at the gold cost of great people which I think is 15 gold per Point, Everything that generate great people Points will look very good, but the high gold cost of great people indicate that you are supposed to get great people from Points, not from gold or faith except in a pinch to get a especially important one and Oracle do help here as well due to -25% faith purchase cost.

The difficult thing with Oracle is to evaluate its true value since great people Points are not easy to evaluate and if Oracle is the difference between getting key great people or not greatly effects its value. Oracle is not unique here, hanging garden +15% growth do have a snowball effect as quicker population growth mean getting more pops earlier which translate into more resources, earlier districts and maybe in extreme cases could give you key wonders or great people, similar applies to the +10% growth Partheon.

Also Pingala double a key part of the Oracle, the great people Points which also affect its value alot, but there may be cases in which you don't get Pingala or atleast to that promotion, Liang or Magnus have strong promotions, like Liangs city parks.

I think the issue with the Oracle and some other wonders is their value is not that clear unlike something like chichen itza is quite clear how valuable it is.

 

Oracle used to be more useful before writers were halved however it gained the GPP boost in faith for holy sites which makes it quite a nice faith giver but let’s be honest here. It does not scale, it is an early game boost to GPP which used to strongly help a CV but not so much now.
I would say it’s real use is when Scotland and Korea are in the game to give you that scientist boost but even then. Maybe with lots of general being built it can be useful as sometimes just getting one general is hard.
It is a lot of production to sink into something when production is so valuable. Apadana, Artemis, Pyramids, Coliseum, Petra. So many choices.. and when you have built it you typically have 1-2 districts up before the cost of GP rockets and the +2 not so great. 25% purchase does scale but faith often has better uses. It has got me out of tight spot as a couple of times but I rarely build it now.
Just feels like another trap wonder.

 

Well, I do feel faith buying is the only way to get a Great General. Building early encampments is pretty gross. Also sometimes the AI runs light on merchants because they preferred harbors, or vice versa. Sometimes GEs are good too, but it's a gamble.

it can definitely be a trap though. If your start has one hill and no food, it's going to be a bad idea.

I do feel like it's probably more practical to simply spend the production to flash build a government building and get more promotions on Pingala. That's also probably higher value in the long run.

Also, Mali.

I must know the secret of this early Petra.

 

It's rare that I would rush it early. My current game was an interesting position - a lot of the wonders were getting taken, but Oracle and Artemis for some reason were not. I had a spot in my capital for both of them if I wanted, but opted for Artemis first. Had I gone Oracle then instead, I probably could have gotten it.

But as you said, it's more of an early game wonder boost. This was late enough that Scotland was already putting out 10 or 12 great scientist points a turn, so the extra couple points Oracle would have given me at the time probably wouldn't have made much of a difference. Plus being Inca, I kind of want to see how big I can go with my cap, so the food+housing+amenities should be more fun.

 

The power of Oracle seems inversely proportional about how wide you can go. Smaller empire will gain more from it. Pyramids is the opposite: more powerful if you have a big empire. All the Production you do not put in the Settlers / Military because you know you cannot spread safely, must be used somewhere.

Pingala/Oracle is stronger in a populous cultural city. More population = more science and culture, and more districts = more great people point. But the power of Pingala do not stop here: a lot of wonder also give additonnal points, allowing Pingala to shine even more. Those wonders are mostly the arts slots wonder*, which synergise really well with Pingala even more because one of his Title can also double the Tourism output of arts.

Basicly, Oracle is at the start of a powerful style of playing. If you build it but not use it efficiently (putting the Government Plaza and Entertainment Complex that yield no GPP instead of Campus and Theatre Square, not getting Pingala and do not go for Grants, do not build wonder that give the additionnal GPP in the Pingala city...) then the Oracle seems kind of weak.

* list of all wonders with additionnal great people points : Broadway (+3 Writer/Musician), ASRS (+5 Scientist), Sydney Opera (+5 Musician), Bolshoi (+2 Writer/Musician), Big Ben (+3 Merchant), Casa de Contratacion (+3 Merchant), Hermitage (+3 Artist), Oxford (+3 Scientist), G. Zimbabwe (+2 Merchant), Terracotta Army (+2 General), U. Sankore (+2 Scientist), Arsenal (+2 Engineer), Alhambra (+1 General), Colossus (+1 Admiral), G. Library (+1 Scientist), and the G. Lighthouse (+1 Admiral).

 

I wouldn't put too much stock into that.. Just my personal opinion.

Oracle imho is a very strong wonder, though it does not belong in the same tier as Pyramids. Oracle is S tier when you're playing Russia/Japan, or when you're doing religious science, or cultural victory with religion, because only in those cases will you take big advantage of the faith recruitment bonus. The extra GPP is great in pretty much any scenario and makes Oracle a reliably strong wonder and is enough to push it into A-tier by itself.

you make a very solid point. Big Ben / Potala / Forbidden all scale massively with size of your empire, because most policies scale with every city, which is what makes them so good. Oracle doesn't scale with wide empires.

also, how freakin sad is it that only one wonder in the entire game gives Engineer Points. Civ 5 did that much better, where early wonders payed off later via GPP.

 

Well Oracle can in practices scale if the Oracle mean you get someone like Hypathia. However it is a bit more situational. I don't know how valuable the Pyramids are, I suspect Venetian Aresenal may save more production in the long run but Pyramids comes earlier and is much more flexible.

Card wonders are nice but consider you will pick the best card first which mean the card wonders simply allow you to use cards you would otherwise not use anyway if that make sense and you do get more and more cards with government which probably mean these wonders lose a bit value overtime.

Stonehenge is probably underestimated. It is a wonder so +4 era score if you are in ancient or +3 if past the ancient era. Found a religion is +3 era score if first and +2 if not if I'm not wrong. Also it give +2 faith and +2 Culture to adjacent Theatre Squares and insperation for drama and poetry.

Otherwise to found a religion you need at bare minimum a holy site which is atleast 54 production but once you consider all other stuff to be pretty sure you can get a religion, you may very well be looking at a similar production cost of Stonehenge.

Holy site will most certainly produce more faith and allow recruitment of religious units but Stonehenge have many advantages of being a wonder. You are not just building a wonder for its effect as any wonder give +1 appeal to adjacent tile, +2 Culture to adjacent Theatre Squares, +4 or +3 era scores, some tourism and is tied to one eurka and one insperation.

Sometimes you can place two wonders next to each other or with one space between which allow for 2 +4 Theatre Squares or if you can get 3 wonders in a triangle with the middle Square empty, you can get 1 +6 Theatre Square and 3 +4 Theatre Squares.

 

Pyramids is incredibly valuable, especially if you have any chopping you want to do. Getting a +1 build charge and chopping once with each builder for example can make the value of a builder in terms of empire wide infrastructure skyrocket. It's value as someone said is basically the inverse of the Oracle, the more cities and land you have the more valuable the Pyramids since you will need more builders over the course of the game.

I have never once needed the Venetian Arsenal to win a game, and in fact if I delayed building my navy to get it It would have simply slowed me down. I think its massively overvalued by the majority of players.

Stonehenge is just newbie bait unless you know what you're doing.