... it gives +6 combat strength to an archer, not to be sniffed at.
And no, since the UI culture buff build a 4 long wall with a builder and get 8 culture as well a 12 gold ...which is not tourism.
Yes it could be cooler but it’s good enough for me
Bonus gold does not make the Great Wall seem particularly compelling or unique. How could it? Gold is the yield the devs clearly feel the most comfortable showering the players with, so it gets used as a "filler" yield. I mean, where is the thematic connection here? How did building a big wall to keep out barbarians generate income? Slapping on bonus gold is routine for that whole sub-category of "gets-boosts-after-Flight" UI's, so in that respect it goes hand-in-hand with tourism AFAIC.
The wall acts as a fort, but if you're playing China, your early game is focused on producing wonders and, by extension, builders, right? That's in addition to the customary acts of laying out districts. What China needs from the wall is to give the player some relief from having to build a defensive army. Instead, it's sucking charges out of builders--requiring multiple charges to get the benefits of the chaining effect--and then the player is still having to produce units to man the walls. And it's sucking up space where a player should be dropping wonders, districts, and even basic stuff like mines (to say nothing of charges-for-chops).
So, it winds up being sufficiently low in utility (and therefore priority) that it's generally not really something to build in the early game unless you're feeling indulgent. It's something players should wait to build in the late game when their borders have expanded, builders can be churned out easily, and Flight is at hand.
A simple change to give the Great Wall be genuinely unique and provide early-game utility would be to have the UI be impassable terrain for barbarians. As for its culture/tourism benefits, those should actually accrue over eras, making it enticing to build them as early as possible. In general, such design would be a welcome way to ramp culture/tourism yields, at least for civ's with a footprint in antiquity.
The improvement isn’t worthless as a defense either... you just have to staff it. If you can fortify units along a length of wall with a narrow border into your own territory, it can be a pain to break through. It’s not automatic, and doesn’t scale well with border size, but it’s far from useless.
A similar argument can be made for forts, yet in practice forts occupy a very low priority. Something far-from-worthless that a player isn't enticed to actually avail themselves of is effectively as worthless as something
genuinely worthless. Feel me?
