It's not so much "goes against what I know" as I don't think Wonder-spamming is a particular interesting strategy. It ignores too much of what Civ is about--anytime you focus too much on one thing, it's an issue, because it implies that other parts of the game aren't all that important.
But that's once again Civ V tall. The idea is not that you sit around building wonders, the idea is that, if you expand slower, it's easier to weave in more wonders, and thus your empire that is lagging behind in Cities a bit can keep up with another empire.
That does of course require wonders to be designed in a way that they support exactly that, and as I said in a previous post somewhere, I think it would actually be great if they made wonders into something that is more directly competitive than randomly losing the wonder race.
An example for such a mechanic:
Have a "marketplace of ideas", where you can buy boosts for certain wonders that have not yet been built but are or will be unlocked soon by at least one player.
Wonders cannot be built until at least one player has bought a card associated with the wonder, and then all players who have unlocked the tech can construct it, thereby the victory race is officially started. Maybe even add a somewhat randomized progress-timer. Losing out on too many wonders would crash your empire's ability to more forward as much as having half a dozen cities conquered by a neighbor.
(Again, that was just a quick example.)
That's a single decision point, not an overall strategy. And it's one I can agree with--to an extent. Rather than say they should both be valid decisions, I'd say they both have the possibility to be valid decisions, but there are many factors to consider in that equation: can I get the land later, how high-quality is the land, who else might claim the land, could I still get the wonder if I built a settler first, etc.
Yes, it's a single decision. What I'm saying is that the game should be full of those little decisions of tall vs wide. The way I'd want it to play out is that, if during the game the stars align in a way that you can get a lot of bonuses that grow your cities, then your empire should be a lot taller in the end, while if you make decisions that boost your empire's capacity to be productive with many cities, then your empire should end up as a sprawling landscape of cities. Both should not go hand in hand, you should be able to mix and mash, but going wide should not inherently boost your capacity to go tall as well.
Beyond Earth did that exactly "wrong" - every city meant you have more trade routes, more trade routes mean that not only your other cities get more direct trade route yields, but it also meant that the trade routes benefited from each other, which just makes it that in order to grow tall you HAVE to go wide. That's the extreme version of what I want to prevent.
There's way too much going on there for the developers of the game to try and make the options "equal". Instead, what they should be doing is making both options beneficial, and leaving it to the player to evaluate which would be a better play, given the specific situation.
You want the players to always want all the things, because that's what creates the true tension--that's why I say "more land should always be better", because if it isn't, then the players don't want it, and you've removed a source of tension.
Yeah, again... that's true as long as land is the only form of tension. Is does not have to be, that's what I'm saying. The strength of taller empires must simply also come from mechanics that are competitive in nature for this to work, and what you end up is even more tension, because not only do you want to have more land, but you now ALSO really want to win the wonder races, maybe also want to take as much out of the global economy as possible, want to have the best academic circles, etc.
That's again competitive mechanics that would just need to be created. I realize they don't exist yet, but just thinking about the possibilities that are untapped until now makes this whole "More land, more land!"-gameplay seem very simplistic to me.
