What is the quickest way to build wonders?

[Jesus Civs]

Hi

In the early stages of the game, what is the fastest way possible to build wonders (ignoring Great Engineers)? I use the following but I think there are more things I can do:

- maximise hammer output in the city
- chop all forests
- mine any hills and resources (if there are forests on the hills, chop first then mine)

But it seems that other people here know a increase the speed by using settlers and other cities?

I understand the effects of stone and marble so no need to reply with those.

Thanks.

 

[Matty R]

Theres the Industrious trait aswell. And Organized Religion.

 

[Jesus Civs]

Oh yes, very good. Does organized religion work on wonders too?

I wasn't sure about that.

 

[Ruler]

Organized religion works for all kind of building including wonders.

 

[Leventis]

Aside from the obvious, just try to optimise your chops/overflow and whipping. Remember that high food tiles are just as important in getting those early wonders up in particular.

 

[obsolete]

Some warning about the organized trait. It is always over-estimated by players. OR gives 25% which while seems quite a bit, only works on the base. Though, there are certain exploits to sneak it into a 50% through careful timing, etc.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Early game?
High food city near hills and forests. Grow city to the happy cap and switch to work the mines and forests until you get no net food growth for the city. Build forge (+25% ).

Not industrial? Build forge and run Org. Religion for a total +50% bonus from base . Add Industrial and the bonus jumps to +100%.

Stone, marble and copper further double the speed of specific wonders. Chopping the forest will gain you a turn or two to the speed of one wonder, but you really want to keep them for the extra production if you plan on making your town a "wonder farm".

edit: If you are trying to get one really important wonder done, road and "Pre-chop" the forests before you actually start building them so you can get the forests taken down faster with a given number of workers. (Chop takes 3 turns? Chop forest for two turns, then interrupt the worker so there is only one turn left of chopping to go. Road the forests so the worker can jump from tile to tile. You can knock down a forest much faster if you had time to prepare to build the wonder.)

 

[axident]

Early: chop forests only when necessary to grab a wonder before someone else does. Try to save them for emergencies, e.g., if you have only stone and need to build Pyramids and Gr Library, build Pyramids the normal way if possible, saving the trees to rush Gr Library. Like previous poster said, high food and hills is best early on. Later on watermills kick much ass.

 

[petey]

The absolute quickest way is to go into Worldbuilder and put them into your cities. Some purists would consider that cheating, though.

 

[axident]

The absolute quickest way is to go into Worldbuilder and put them into your cities. Some purists would consider that cheating, though.

Why bother then? Just erase all your rival civs and win by Conquest, 4000 BC.

 

[petey]

Why bother then? Just erase all your rival civs and win by Conquest, 4000 BC.

Erasing the civs is the . .. .. .. .. .'s way out. It's far better to put some Modern Armours next to their Settlers. That way you get to have a fight before the 4000BC Conquest win. Not a very good fight, but at least you get to press some buttons.

 

[Mesousa]

Some warning about the organized trait. It is always over-estimated by players. OR gives 25% which while seems quite a bit, only works on the base. Though, there are certain exploits to sneak it into a 50% through careful timing, etc.

Not that the Organized trait has that much to do with the Organized Religion civic.

 

[CivDude86]

It is high upkeep so it has something do with it.

 

[AlessioCerci]

Yep but when civic upkeep is something like 3, its not a huge factor.

 

[weimingshi]

The fastest way for me, if you have lots of forests beside, train 1 worker, then chop another 3 workers, chop a settler to settle a second city, connect the stone, then chop and whip your wonder. With this strategy I was able to grab pyramid, great light house, artimise temple, parthenon, apostolic palace, on deity level. Of course being industious and had access to stone in my capital and marble in my second city helped.

 

[popejubal]

I'm pretty sure that the fastest way to build a wonder without Worldbuilder is to burn a Great Engineer on it.

Seriously, though, if you have a Great Engineer, that's the surest way to grab a wonder that you REALLY want to get. Other than that, look for the resource that adds to the wonder's speed. Most Wonders will get +100% production with either Stone or Marble.

Any production bonuses that you get will also be taken into account when you chop trees for the wonder and I used to think that it took them into account when you whipped, but I've seen some crazy stuff after building Christo Redentor, so I'm not 100% sure on the Whipping.

If you want to play a game where you build lots of Wonders, start with a Philosophical leader or with an Industrious leader. Start a game and hit [esc] and choose "Regenerate Map" if you don't see either Stone or Marble in that first turn. Some people will see this as cheating (and it is in a way), but if you are looking for a particular game experience, this is how you can be sure to get that experience.

Build the Pyramids relatively early and then use the Great Engineer that you get from the Pyramids to buy another Wonder (especially one that generates Great Engineer points). Soon you'll be swimming in the things. Forges also let you assign an Engineer specialist, so you can go that route as well.

 

[vale]

As long as we are on the subject of cheating I wanted to dredge up one of the funnier posts I read in the strategy forum a while back:

There are many more fun and "evil" ways to cheat, e.g.

Animal farm trick: Ctrl+W at the beginning, then add 10 bears and 20 panthers near each of your opponents.

Barbarian trick: Turn on the raging barbarians, huge pangnea map, humid weather to create more jungles, then Ctrl+W, add the Great Wall to your capital. Occasionally open the world builder to enjoy the sight of your enemies' suffering.

"Rambo" compaign: On a pangnea map, give yourself 6 Combat IV Medic II Guerilla II Woodman II Commando Blitz axemen (= Rambo) at the very beginning, simultaneously declare war on all AIs and send 1 Rambo to each of the AI's land. Just pillage and kill and don't take any city.

Middle East retribution trick: You play Saladin, pick an AI leader from America, England and Japan, respectively, then delete all the oil tiles in the whole world except the one in your cultural border.

Then there was the custom game from one of the other civ sites where everyone got to choose one free tech at the beginning of the game with the caveat that you didn't get the "first to" that tech bonus except for religions. That was kind of interesting because there were many interesting ideas about what would be the most effective tech to take. Biology was a popular choice as was Communism if I remember correctly.

Anyway, totally off topic from the OP, but some of the replies reminded me of this and forced me to search it out.

As far as pushing for a wonder, the thing that will help the most by far is to make sure you have the bonus resource for the wonder you are going after. That singlehandedly is equivalent to basically all the other early game city boosts you are likely to have (forge, OR, Industrious). Mathematics is another huge boost early on because it gives you a 50% boost to chop hammers that is multiplicative with the other boosts you have.

Prioritize wonders that are not as coveted by the AI for whatever reason. The most famous example is the Great Library although the Hanging Gardens can sometimes be had pretty late in my experience.

If you really really want to be an ultra wonder hog, try to prioritize Priest and Engineer sources and settle the resulting hammer producing people in your wonder hog city. Rushing a wonder with an engineer is right if you really want *that* wonder, but nothing beats the settled engineer over time for massive hammer potential (3 base + up to 7.5 more from bureau, OR, forge, industrious, bonus resource).

 

[JujuLautre]

I'm pretty sure that the fastest way to build a wonder without Worldbuilder is to burn a Great Engineer on it.

Some wonders can't be constructed by a great engineer alone

US + cash is the way to go, 20000 the big wonder, perhaps even more

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

But it seems that other people here know a increase the speed by using settlers and other cities

Not directly, no.

A single city that is responsible for training all of your units, constructing all of your wonders, and generating all of your research is necessarily going to be "slow" at some aspect of this.

Training a settler offloads some of that work, so that this city can focus more specifically.

But that, and the acquisition of production boosting strategic resources (already mentioned above) is about all the second city can do to help with early wonders.

The one piece I didn't see you mention is the use of the whip - either directly (to finish construction of a wonder) or indirectly (building something else, and applying the overflow to the wonder). Sacrificing population to complete a wonder shaves a couple turns off of the construction time. Trying to leverage overflow is usually going to be slower then just constructing the wonder straight out, but there are cases where overflow production is greater than what you can achieve through more normal means (in which case, you probably aren't going to win the race to an early wonder).

 

[Diamondeye]

In my latest game (duel) I tried to grab pyramids even though my enemy had stone and I hadn't... I chopped like hell and got pretty far very fast... Idiot as I am, I refuse to whip to win a couple of turns, and when I lack 8 hammers (1 turn ofc), it is build by my enemy. D'oh!