Wonders Placement

[Japher]

I like huge empires with lots of cities, and who doesn't? Yet, corruption and cultural influence weakens the further you towns get from your capitol. I find that by building cultural improvements this becomes less and less of a problem.

My inquiry is on how to achieve maximum cultural dominance in a large empirer, and how to begin to do this. Mainly by using wonders and placing them strategicly or just by spreading them throughout the empirer would this better serve my goals? Or would I be better off building the wonders all within a set or sets of circles?

My main problem is that my people begin demanding the Forbidden Palace long before I really want to build, my empirer is not big enough. So to temper them I build a wonder or other cultural enhancer in that town instead. Is this a good stratagy, or am I just fooling myself? My cities always have a good cultural basis, and I rarly hear them complain or have them tipped. How far is far for the construction of the FP?

Is it wise/smart to build, or rush, a wonder on a boarding town to try and tip a town? What if they take it? Is it worth the risk? Can it be done?

Any general stratagies reguarding the placement and or use of wonders to control cultural ratings would be most forthcoming.

 

[Dell19]

You do not have to build the forbidden palace as soon as it is demanded. This just shows that you can now build the wonder so you can wait until it suits you to build the small wonder. I've never noticed any benefits of building wonders in distant cities but I guess it could allow you to increase your cultural borders. Although it may depend on whether you can rush build the wonders as it may take too long to build wonders otherwise in distant cities.

 

[eg577]

You are overrating the cultural benifits of wonders. First of all, it would be simpler to rush build a temple and a library in a border city than build a wonder there. Secondly, assimilating enemy cities is a long process and most of their cities are crap anyways. Don't forget that in negotiations (like when civs are in awe or dismissive of you) only your "total" culture matters. Your total culture is just the sum of the culture of every city, *not* at all depending on how large your borders are. For obtaining large culture, it doesn't matter that all your wonders are in one city. On higher diffuculties, it gets harder and harder to compete with the other civs for the wonders you want, so you pretty much have to build wonders in your biggest cities anyways.

 

[MuddyOne]

If trying for a culture win, build as many culture producing improvements in every producing city as you can.

I would go with rushing improvements in border towns if trying to cause a flip. Not a great loss should you lose the town that way.

And as was mentioned earlier, the FP "demand" from the citizen's is actually just indicating that you have met the conditions where you can start to build it.

On a huge map, 50 tiles away the improvement from FP will just reach the improvement area of the Palace. This is if you build courthouses, Police stations, and maintain WLTKD. Though I would actually look for a place where you can build multiple rings around the FP- somewhere central on the continent and not worry too much about distance from the Palace.

 

[Tweedledum]

I really don't think that wonder placement is particularly important, with one obvious exception - build (if you can) Copernicus & Newton ( & probably SETI) in the same place to get maximum science benefits

 

[JollyRoger]

I prefer to build wonders in the central part of my empire to prevent losing them to a flip or a suprise attack. If possible, I try to build a super-science city as mentioned by Tweedledum. Usually it is a coastal town, preferably with a couple of fish and and another tile or two with high-gold potential. I start out with the Colossus in this town. The Colossus is the only Wonder that goes obsolete that I will build unless there is an exceptional need for the Great Lighthouse. All the other early Wonders that become obsolete do not seem worth the effort to build. I used to be a fan of the Great Library, but I do not need it at the easy levels and could not build it in time to use it on the higher levels.

 

[Japher]

Thanks!

It is 1,000 a.d. and I still haven't built my FP, built the Heroic Epic though.

Thanks for the advice... I will stop worrying about where the wonders are, and more about who built them.

As for the Great Library, JollyRoger, I don't care for it much either. I generally only know two or three civs at the beginning of the game, all of which I would be at war with, and always have better tech than them. Thus, the dang book bank is worthless to me.

 

[Matt_G]

Originally posted by Japher
As for the Great Library, JollyRoger, I don't care for it much either. I generally only know two or three civs at the beginning of the game, all of which I would be at war with, and always have better tech than them. Thus, the dang book bank is worthless to me.

On a low difficulty level I always have the tech lead also, but I will still build the Great Library for 2 reasons.
#1. The Culture
#2. To keep somebody else from having it.

 

[JollyRoger]

Originally posted by Matt_G


On a low difficulty level I always have the tech lead also, but I will still build the Great Library for 2 reasons.
#1. The Culture
#2. To keep somebody else from having it.

I generally don't need the culture and if I have the tech lead, the Great Library will allow the civ that builds it to move up to a tech tie with the #2 civ. Not necessarily a bad thing. A strong #2 civ that rolls over a couple of weak civs can be suddenly dangerous. I would prefer #2 and #3 to have tech parity so that I can play them off against each other.

 

[Gaidin]

ive been wondering this....at about 1000AD i came across a goodie hut that gave me a settler halfway across the world from my main....i decided to expand....how the hell come i cant build an FP in 1250 and he can in 1k....

 

[Japher]

Gaidin, all you need in order to build the FP is 8 cities. Have you built 8 cities?

 

[zeeter]

Heres something else to consider about the forbidden palace. It cannot be moved. That's obvious, of course, but this fact alone can be used to your advantage.

I wait to build the FP until I own all, or most of the land on my home continent. At that time I will build it in the most central city possible. With my capital having the palace, and the central city having the FP I can get by pretty well.

The importance of the immobility of the FP is when you decide to expand overseas. Once I've achieved a presence overseas - and I mean about fifteen cities or so, I will build my palace in the most central city on that land. Usually I have to rush this with a GL. After that, if I conquer more territory overseas I will simply keep moving the palace to the most central stable position.

So while the FP cannot be moved, the Palace can be.

An example of the effectiveness of this method is as follows - Ulundi had 58 turns until their temple was built. Once I built the Palace six squares away in another city the temple in Ulundi was only fourteen turns away.

 

[zeeter]

PS: Too bad we cannot build more forbidden palaces!

 

[Gaidin]

les see......i have....bout 15....

 

[MirandaCore]

If u have a large civ, post the forbidden palace in the center of the continent (or on another island) FAR away from ur capital. That way ur forbidden palace and normal palace won't cover the same cities so that u can have more productive cities.

The only way to do that is to rush the forbidden palace w/ a hero. But its worth it. There is no better wonder than the forbidden palace (except perhaps the pyramids).