With all due respect, your conclusions don't flow from your premises
You're introducing an argument I didn't make - I wasn't claiming that it followed that the G&K Wonder was identical to the vanilla Wonder compared with the alternatives, I was claiming
It's only "in exactly the same place it always was" relative to other wonders that grant GP's.
or, more generally, that it's in exactly the same place relative to other methods of GP generation (Pisa) or science generation (PT), whether Wondrous or not. My point being that, if you want GPs and/or science, these Wonders are exactly as valuable for those approaches as they were in vanilla. Don't think science is a good investment? That's your call and indeed you can downgrade the PT relative to other Wonders on that basis - but then if you don't think science is a good investment you'd probably do the same with the vanilla PT.
There are plenty of wonders that don't grant GPs and other hammer-priorities that don't grant GPs -- these alternatives were not nerfed (with a handful of exceptions). Pisa is unarguably worse relative to these alternatives than was Hagia Sofia. Pisa also costs more hammers and is in a worse place.
This, again, is a different issue from the point I was making. If you don't think GPs are an investment worth hammers, you won't build Pisa. This isn't due to a change in the Wonder, it's due to a change in GP generation more generally. If you want a GP strategy, you still build Pisa. If you want a science strategy, you still want Porcelain Tower (unless you're on a duel map). So the calculation relative to other Wonders still has nothing to do with nostalgia for past incarnations, but rather on what you use it for. I think it's generally considered that Great People and science remain among the better investments you can make with a Wonder. Does Pisa deserve to win? No. Does it deserve to be in the top 5? Possibly. Top 10? Almost certainly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBowles
Same with the Tower - it gives the same boost in G&K that it did relative to other forms of GS production and tech progression in vanilla. If you consider RAs have been "nerfed", they've been "nerfed" across the board. A 50% bonus to the benefit you get is still a similarly large bonus for you compared with the competition.
Again, this doesn't follow. The Tower is relatively the same compare only to RAs and other methods of generated GSs, which have also been nerfed. [/QUOTE]
More importantly, it's the same compared with any method of generating beakers, since with only two exceptions - Great Library and Oxford - all science boosts now work as strict beaker-count accelerators. RAs and GSes both accelerate beaker production by a substantial amount, and you'll have difficulty competing technologically at higher difficulties without them. =
They look at it and say "not playing the Persians, don't need to build this". Trust me, if you're going cultural CI is very nice...you'll already be rolling in happiness thanks to your Tall empire (that can build lots of happiness/cutural buildings), and CI just makes happiness more useful. GAs improve culture generation, now, remember.
It's a nice Wonder, but there's no way it deserved to make it to the top 5; low in the top 10 at best. I'm not sure how the culture (or production) boosts from GAs are calculated, but they seem very minor - I had an early-game Golden Age in my current game where my culture production went from 24 cpt to 26 or 28 cpt. The gold boost is still the primary value of a Golden Age, and there are better gold-producing Wonders (well, at least one - the sadly-departed Macchu Picchu). I would have voted it down in this round, but it's now gone.
Hanging Gardens 11
Leaning Tower of Pisa 16
Oracle 19
Petra 6
Getting easier again now, with both the weakest on the list (CI and ND) and one of my favoured candidates for second place (MP) gone. Pisa is simply overrated at this point - not because of nostalgia for the old Hagia Sophia, I suspect, but because people are putting too high a premium on Great People from Wonders. It's not a bonus to compare with any of the other remaining Wonders, and the remainder on the list all come out early and have either a valuable permanent effect (HG, Petra) or an important one-shot when it counts (Oracle). Leaning Tower is middling on both fronts - its permanent effect is certainly valuable, but awkwardly-placed for GP production other than Engineers and Merchants since the other specialist buildings are on the science tech path. The one-off effect of a Great Person just is not that important at that game stage, or even much earlier (except for the early Academy play, for which Pisa comes far too late).
Petra makes bad land good, but it still requires bad land.
Are people not reading past comments on the thread, or am I really in the minority in considering that hills, oases, incense and sheep do not qualify as "bad land"? Wheat on the equivalent of plains next to a river is in most cities a moderately good tile; in a Petra city it's likely to be marginal. And while they're somewhat rarer, there are a lot of Natural Wonders that seem most common in, or exclusive to, desert.
I edited my reply.
