[BERT] Playing Favourites: The Wonders of Beyond Earth

[CelJaded]

Yeah, I know this subforum is pretty much dead at this point, but I got bored waiting for Civ VI to get patched and decided to revisit my favourites list from last year before producing a new one for the Wonders.

This new list features all the Great Wonders and Artifact Wonders in Beyond Earth & Rising Tide ranked from bottom to top. The list is obviously a LOT bigger than the previous one so I won't paste it here, but if you fancy a read or discussion then you can find it on my blog: http://www.celjaded.com/best-wonders-in-beyond-earth/

As always, comments and thoughts are quite welcome.

Namaste!

 

[LORD ORION]

You're being too harsh on Drone Sphere.
If anything you want it just to reduce magrail connection time, but also Master Control + Drone Sphere + Engineering Corp lets you go full ****** on building the long build time tiles.
Drone Sphere + Slumber Slaughter makes a noticeable difference.

As for Panopticon... seriously? I figure 3rd place would be for a wonder that actually makes some sort of difference in winning the game quicker.

 

[CelJaded]

Hey, thanks for sharing. Replies below.

You're being too harsh on Drone Sphere.
If anything you want it just to reduce magrail connection time, but also Master Control + Drone Sphere + Engineering Corp lets you go full ****** on building the long build time tiles.

Drone Sphere + Slumber Slaughter makes a noticeable difference.

15/41 is not that harsh, is it?

The combo you mention is a sweet one, but it's quite an investment just to make Workers a bit faster at their job. Master Control is a whole extra Wonder requiring a trip to Autonomous Systems and Slumber Slaughter extract is a random drop that you can't reliably get in every game either.

If building faster magrails is a chief concern, well that's also going to need a costly trip to Civil Support so I don't see how you can really slot the Drone Sphere in amongst all that research. Magrails are mainly for Promised Land victories and so Swarm Robotics' Harmony Affinity is just going to slow you down if you're going that route.

If you're playing as Duncan, Chungsu, or all in water starts then you won't be able to build magrails anyway and even then I find it's much easier/faster to just build extra Workers rather than worry about cutting their improvement times down as they're cheap enough to allow this.

As for Panopticon... seriously? I figure 3rd place would be for a wonder that actually makes some sort of difference in winning the game quicker.

Well, that's just it; there really aren't any Wonders in Beyond Earth that make a serious difference to you winning the game quicker with the exception of the cases I mentioned for Benthic Auger and the Memetwork (under the right circumstances). It's much easier to simply not bother, but that's not what this list is about, obviously.

Panoptican is a mediocre Wonder, granted. But it's cheap, it doesn't have an annoying resource cost, and it comes early enough that its bonus ability and Diplomatic Capital can make an impact. No other Wonder can be gotten quicker and in a game as short as BE that makes all the difference when I assign rankings.

 

[legalizefreedom]

I thought the wonder pass they made did a decent job of making them interesting. Balancing cost and where to put them on the web is where I thought they could have been improved.

I guess the artifact effect that increases air unit range wasn't technically a wonder... There's no stopping 3-4 cities full of leveled air units with this.

 

[Ryika]

All Artifact "Wonders" are actually National Wonders, like the Spy Agency (and the Culper Lodge and the Headquarters if we want to be technical). Every player can build one.

I mostly agree with the list (and by that I'm more referring to the written text than the rankings), sadly the really interesting wonders are often just not a reasonable investment. The Abyssal Mirror has one of the most interesting effects in the game (it actually allows "1 row" of overlap, not "1 tile"), for pretty hilarious orbital unit grids - you can put Solar Collectors right next to each other. Of course the wonder is on a weak, high-cost tech, and also really expensive itself so you're never going to actually use it in any serious strategy.