First time I post something here, so please be gentle.
My favourite wonder of the game has to be Pyramids. Free granaries everywhere!
This means quite a few things:
- In the long run, it'll actually save shields. If you get enough cities, the amount of shields normally spent on granaries becomes greater than the amount spent on building Pyramids. This is true for all wonders that give free city improvements, so I assume everybody already thought of this.
- It'll save you money. No granary-upkeep. A no-brainer; we all know this, right?
- But here's something about Pyramids that nobody has mentioned here (though I suppose a lot of people already realized this, because it also applied to civ II) : the Pyramids give free food.
Public reaction (for those who didn't realize this):
"Yeah dude, that's what granaries do."
No, that's not what I meant. You see, normally, when you build a granary, that'll take some time. If a granary is the first thing you build with a new city, it usually already has grown at least twice before the granary is finished. And every time the city grows, the food box is completely emptied. But if you have built the graves Cheops & family, those food boxes will be half-full (half-empty, if you're a pessimist).
<silence to build up tension>
So what does that mean? For every increase in city population before you normally would have built a granary, you now get 10 (20 if beyond population level 6) food for free! If the city has three inhabitants (probably the absolute minimum, barring rush-jobs), that essentially is one extra citizen! If you normally wait even longer, this bonus get's even bigger! This faster growth also means that there's more production and commerce, though that bonus compared to not having pyramids is very small. This bonus ofcourse only applies to cities founded after the Pyramids are built, so you need to build a few before this bonus offsets the slower growth of cities built before the Pyramids (since I don't think we'll build any granaries in the cities if we're planning to get the Pyramids anyway). But everybody goes for expansion anyway, right?
So, in short, with the Pyramids, you population grows even faster than it would with granaries.
Pyramids rule!