weimingshi
Prince
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2004
- Messages
- 420
playing on deity and i'm a builder type. great light house is actually the most important wonder for me. It helps me stay in tech race while expand quickly before AI grabs all the land.
Apostolic Palace is my fave; I rarely win with it, but those extra hammers rock. Ungodly in combination with Spiral Minaret and University of Sankore, and I guess Sistine Chapel, though I rarely go for that. This means that settler+missionary= new city with +2 hammers, total of 4 bonus commerce usually paying for maintenance, +3 culture for quick borders!
What? You only get hammers, commerce and culture from religious buildings.
I rarely bother with Statue of Zeus, Mausuleum, great wall, or even stonehenge, I find these are nice if I can build them (but most often impossible on deity), so I tend more towards Oracle/Pyramids/GLib/GlightH/ToA/Parthenon as my early "to build" list, and later Statue of Lib / Taj I set as very high priority too.
On higher difficulties, I would put the Oracle right up there on the top as well.
Getting metal-casting for free in before 1000BC means you can often trade it around 5-6 other techs with the AI. And if your industrious, being able to build cheap forges from almost the getgo pays off huge. You also get +2 preist birth rate for the whole rest of the game since it never goes obselete.
I tend to think of certain wonder combinations being completely game-breaking rather then just wonders by themselves.
For example, in my last Deity game, with the Great-Lighthouse/Temple of Artemis combo in my capital, I was able to reach liberalism by 690AD, and I got Constitution as my free tech since I hadn't build the pyramids. Nothing will ever give you a better early commerce city then ToA/GreatLighthouse in your capital - nothing. Once you have Beaucracy/Oxford/harbour/castles, etc, I often find its possible to be getting over 600/turn from that city alone with this, and over 1300
per turn by 1000AD civ-wide. (with lots of big costal cities)
Pyramids are great for early represtation and settled specialists, goes especially well with the great library.
Another favourite of mine is Spiral Minerat/UofSankore/AP. This combo can be game-breaking as well, especially if you have alot of cities.