I usually do play late, my laptop can't come close to handling large. The reason I voted down GL is because the caravel is so great to begin with for exploring, I don't really feel the need to make it even faster and I don't DOW that often so I will usually only use the bonus for a small space of time anyway. After everything has been explored, I usually have to need for ships at all. On the rare times I do attack overseas, I can protect my embarked units and run over the occasional enemy one just fine without GL. Also, the AI always get it really early, it's almost impossible to get. Besides, I'm not explicitly stating that GL is worse than ET or ND, my eliminating GL was more of a way of getting this game moving, it was about to go anyway.
I've got a friend that I recommended the game to that only has a laptop. He has the same play style in strategy games I do (ie, patient), but he can't use any of my strategies. The game is more demanding than I sometimes realize with my souped-up desktop machine.
Why do so many people vote for the pyramids ?!?! I don't get it.
* It's very expensive for its age (175 hammers compared to Stonehenge = 125 hammers or 2x workers = 140 hammers) and slows down expansion.
* In the early game, masonry is a useless tech (unless you have marble) and delays more important techs.
* Workers only cost 310 gold which is one of the best hammer/gold ratios.
Sure, it's a decent wonder but you have to pay a huge prize in order to get it. I'd only consider it if I had marble in my capital and even then, I'd rather build stonehenge, great lib or oracle.
Your observations are only valid for smaller games (where "Standard" is a smaller game.) The Pyramids benefit obviously scales with game size.
From the game size/speed polls, roughly 42% routinely play the game at "Large" or bigger (43% if we count the guy who plays with the "gigantic" mod), and a slightly larger number said their first game was on "epic" or "marathon" speed. I'd guess these are the same people. Likewise, these are the same group that will probably play as a "builder", not a "rusher".
Almost all disagreements on threads like these are due to playing environment. Fire up the game at Huge/Marathon, build the pyramids - then you'll "get it".
ps - whatever wonder wins this elimination contest will be good for both large and small setups, I'd guess.
Edit:
But you are right with masonry. And at begin the return effect of pyramids is low and slows somewhat the early expansion, but can later give far more.
Marble is one of the single most important resources contributing to an "excellent" capital city, though. I typically don't try for a lot of wonders - I'll pick key ones to "rush" with a Great Engineer. But if you do have Marble, you can slow-build and beat the AI to wonders consistently as long as you keep the tech lead (which isn't very hard with an NC start). One of the posters (I forget who) says he always plays for wonders, getting both the Aristocracy +20% and re-rolling his starting pos for the Marble +20%. I'd say that if you do have marble, going for Masonry early is a must.
btw, one advantage of the Pyramids isn't scale related - it's the absolute time you need to repair a key resource, like a damaged Aluminum mine. A worker action that takes 17 turns for a "normal" worker (w/citizenship) takes 12 turns for a Pyramid-boosted worker. That's a pretty common situation once you get to Nukes.
Pyramids is one of the most scaling wonders.
