Wonders Balancing Thread

[Orange1861]

Hello, I think the community should talk about balancing the wonders since they are very unbalanced (Huey Teocalli vs Forbidden City). I will be putting all good suggestions in this post.

Firstly, all wonders should gave +2 culture to make most of them more useful.

The Hanging Gardens should be changed to +5% food in all cities and +8 food and +1 housing in the city that built it.

Broadway, Sydney Opera House, Bolshoi Theatre should each provide a great musician/writer upon completion. One of them should buff culture outputs in all cities by 15%.

Great Library: Provides Eureka for all technologies currently known by any civ (or by two civs) in the game.

 

[Kyro]

The first thing that needs balancing is that the bonus production towards wonders that AI gets on higher difficulties should be completely removed. It's not fun to lose Alhambra to a 6 Population city.

I think that Wonders should be workable and provide strong yields so that they don't penalize working tiles.

I agee that all wonders should provide at least 2 culture each.

+5% growth is so low it makes hanging gardens worthless. Seeing how Food is severely bottlenecked I think hanging gardens needs to be buffed to +25% growth and provide +2 housing in the city that builds it.

Venetian Arsenal needs to be nerfed. It ensures complete naval domination on naval maps just by itself; no single wonder should be able to provide that kind of edge.

All Cultural Wonders should provide theming bonuses. Hermitage should not be losing to an Archeological Museum.

Broadway, Sydney Opera House, Bolshoi Theatre should each provide a great musician/writer upon completion. One of them should buff culture outputs in all cities by 15%.

Great Library comes when most of the Technologies it boosts are already researched. Quite pointless. It needs to award free technologies of choice instead.

Oxford University's +20% science to a Single City is just so, so weak. It needs to buff science for each city by 15% instead.

 

[Orange1861]

+5% growth is so low it makes hanging gardens worthless. Seeing how Food is severely bottlenecked I think hanging gardens needs to be buffed to +25% growth and provide +2 housing in the city that builds it.

I mean 5% total food not 5% growth.

 

[WorldWarIV]

Great Library comes when most of the Technologies it boosts are already researched. Quite pointless. It needs to award free technologies of choice instead.

I'd be happy if you could just build it earlier.

 

[Tech Osen]

Maybe replace the Great Library effect with a boost to all future eureka's, like the Chinese get.

 

[Rosty K]

I think Petra and Chichen Itza need some sort of an area effect (so that the neighboring cities could also benefit from them).

I don't think everyone agrees with that though.

There could also be a similar wonder for tundra, and maybe mountains (making them workable with some yield, or just giving a direct yield from them, they already can provide some indirect yield through adjacency bonuses).

 

[Amrunril]

I'm not convinced about the two culture, I'd rather mae the weak wonders better at what they do than give them all a set of homogenized yields. As for the great library, maybe it should give eurekas towards all techs that any civ has researched at the time it's built.

 

[Rosty K]

I'm not convinced about the two culture, I'd rather mae the weak wonders better at what they do than give them all a set of homogenized yields. As for the great library, maybe it should give eurekas towards all techs that any civ has researched at the time it's built.

Now that there are eurekas it may as well work the old school civ1 way: give eureka for every tech that two (or some other number) of other civs know.

 

[king of nowhere]

fully agree that venetian arsenal is completely broken. +30% to boat production would be more reasonable.
great library is useless as it is, yes.
hanging gardens is also very weak: what limits city growth 90% of the times is housing, not food, and gardens do nothing for that. their bonus is only useful after you get neighborhoods.
anything giving extra policies is very strong, particularly forbidden palace and big ben. forbidden palace has the added bonus of being on a tech that you can beeline early, but the AI won't complete until later, so you have a good chance to get it even at deity.
petra is fairly useless on regular desert (2 food, 1 cog, 2 gold is still a fairly weak yield, and you can't grow it in any other way) but it is huge on desert hills. desert hills get an extra cog, but more important, you can work them. with a mine and apprenticeship, they give 2 food 4 cogs 2 gold, which is good even in the information era, in the early middle age it is great. I love to make it on the earth map in tibet, all those desert hills there... and some even have sheep.

 

[Amrunril]

petra is fairly useless on regular desert (2 food, 1 cog, 2 gold is still a fairly weak yield, and you can't grow it in any other way) but it is huge on desert hills. desert hills get an extra cog, but more important, you can work them. with a mine and apprenticeship, they give 2 food 4 cogs 2 gold, which is good even in the information era, in the early middle age it is great. I love to make it on the earth map in tibet, all those desert hills there... and some even have sheep.

2 food, 1 production, 2 gold isn't a bad yield at all. It's on par with a lot of improved bonus resources. Considering that that's starting from a useless tile and not even using any builder charges, it's amazing (and it gets even better if you have any sort of unique tile improvement-those can be built on desert. Civ V Petra was borderline overpowered, and the Civ VI version is even stronger.

 

[bite]

The two big ones are

Venetian Arsenal - enough said

The Great Library - pretty useless

 

[kaspergm]

Great Library comes when most of the Technologies it boosts are already researched. Quite pointless. It needs to award free technologies of choice instead.

Alternative for Great Library: Provides Eureka for all technologies currently known by any civ (or by two civs) in the game.

Great Lighthouse: Remove requirement for lighthouse to be present, and make GL count as a free Lighthouse instead. Perhaps add an additional +1 culture from each coast/ocean tile in the city.

 

[bbbt]

I agree that hanging gardens and great library are pretty useless. I like what the 'wondrous wonders' mod does with the hanging gardens (essentially giving it Mohenjo Daro's suzerain bonus of fresh water everywhere - tho it sort of negates Mohenjo Daro to a degree then)

All the cultural wonders need a buff imho - at the very least they should have theming bonuses and additional tourism boosts (above just being a wonder).

 

[MantaRevan]

Hanging gardens most direly needs the buff. Some great ideas in this thread, such as spreading fresh water around or giving housing. Cultural wonders are bad right now, but I think that's not always because the wonders themselves are bad but because tourism is. Bolshoi for instance, is very good, even if you don't want to win culturally because of free civics. If tourism gets to the point where it has benefits other than as an unlikely endgame currency then cultural wonders may improve indirectly. Hermitage could still be better, though.

 

[king of nowhere]

2 food, 1 production, 2 gold isn't a bad yield at all. It's on par with a lot of improved bonus resources. Considering that that's starting from a useless tile and not even using any builder charges, it's amazing (and it gets even better if you have any sort of unique tile improvement-those can be built on desert. Civ V Petra was borderline overpowered, and the Civ VI version is even stronger.

If we assume 2 gold = 1 cog, then it's the same yield of a regular worked tile in the middle age - mined hills are already better. And it's important to consider that in order to build petra, the city needs to already have decent production. You can't just settle in the middle of the desert and hope petra will make it all right, unless you are quin shi huang. So when you complete petra you will already have good tiles to work in that city. you could work that desert if your city keeps on growing, but given housing limitations in early ages, it's unlikely you will grow it much more. Until the modern era, when the tech bonuses to various improvements will make the base desert yields very bad compared to other tiles. So a city on flat desert with petra will always be no better than a city with normal terrain, and it will be worse in later eras.
there is also the opportunity cost to consider: you must settle a city near desert, try to build a wonder, if you lose the wonder the city won't be able to grow, if you get the wonder it's still no better than having settled on any other place. So I settle first on good land, and by the time I think "the only place left to settle is desert, may as well take it and try petra" petra will have been taken already.
At least that's my experience about it.
I concede you the point about unique improvements, though. In general, petra is good if you can get something in addition to that 2-1-2

 

[Victoria]

[QUOTE="kaspergm, post: 14739540, member: 233109]

Great Lighthouse: Remove requirement for lighthouse to be present, and make GL count as a free Lighthouse instead. Perhaps add an additional +1 culture from each coast/ocean tile in the city.[/QUOTE]

The great lighthouse is just fine IMO, I build it every game I am naval. Buff it if you want but trust me... +1 naval movement is quite strong

 

[Roald Amundsen]

I think they should rethink the whole concept of wonders. Many civilizations built pyramids. I have always hoped for a system where any civ can dedicate huge ammounts of hammers into projects in a more intuitive, opportunistic and less punishing manner. IT could be something similar to religion pantheons. Different wonders have different sets of possible effects to choose from and first to complete gets first pics. Earlier wonders should generate a lot more culture than later "ripoffs".

 

[Photi]

I'd like to see an Oracle buff, like maybe swapping bonuses with Divine Spark pantheon.

 

[kaspergm]

I think they should rethink the whole concept of wonders. Many civilizations built pyramids. I have always hoped for a system where any civ can dedicate huge ammounts of hammers into projects in a more intuitive, opportunistic and less punishing manner. IT could be something similar to religion pantheons. Different wonders have different sets of possible effects to choose from and first to complete gets first pics. Earlier wonders should generate a lot more culture than later "ripoffs".

From a realism point of view I agree with your post, but I think the idea of hit-or-miss wonders is such a fundamental part of the Civ series that the game would just not be the same without it. For better or worse, the rush of snatching a wonder is one of the most exciting parts of the game for many players (including myself).

 

[isau]

I think all wonders should Culture Bomb nearby tiles. I added that in my combined tweaks mod, but I think it should be a standard feature. Also, the culture bomb from a wonder shouldn't have a limitation on radius like regular Culture Bombs do, it should be able to grab tiles beyond the workable city radius. I think a culture bomb is a natural outgrowth of having moved wonders outside cities to actual tiles, and it is very fitting with what a wonder is.