Wonders Strategy

[Victoria]

yeah my test showed production loss

Oracle is one of the few I always consider based on early possibilities of spamming it in.

GP can be a huge pain having too many but you can always kill them off. However they do have some unique and fantastic abilities including spamming wonders. Denying GP is like denying them to people following the same strat as you.

I was carefully watching as I spammed in great scientists last game and poor Sumeria was creeping up his GP but never getting there before I did. Even then, when Mary Leakey come round I bought her with spare faith as I just did not want Sumeria to get her. Mary and England dovetail to snowball the english benefit. So yeah, I like Oracle as it helps.. a bit.

Pyramids being left is a nice have for China... and if you think about Oracle and pyramids, they sort of reflect Civ traits. I guess its a way of counteracting some of your opponents benefits.

 

[mazz0]

Having lost 4 wonders, a few turns from completion in the same game, with no recovery of production, I'm not sure any of them are worth bothering with.

That happened to me yesterday. I was so annoyed I cheated! Went back a few turns and cut down a forest.

 

[mazz0]

The big disadvantage of wonders is that they'll often take up tiles that you would really want a district on. So you have to decide -- do a want a nice district place or a wonder. ME? I find that 9/10 I'd rather the better district location because most wonders aren't better than raw yields.

I think if they really wanted to make wonders worth it, give some wonders +% yield increases like how Oxford has +20% science. % modifiers are quite rare so more wonders that have them would be useful and would specialize the city more.

You wouldn't be giving up the district, just (some of) the adjacency bonus. What adjacency bonus is worth as much as the Pyramids or Hanging Gardens?

 

[Siptah]

This is halfway off topic, but it might still be interesting:
if you are playing as France, it might be very profitable to get as many early wonders as possible because of the doubled tourism yield. A french wonder built in ancient or classical era rivals a national park (but of course has generated much more tourism over the years before national parks become even available). It is even possible to win a game before parks/resorts and without theatre squares if you just built whatever you can get as France - although this is only possible because the AI doesn't build much theatre squares. In the game I won like this I had Pyramids (which I always try to get), Hanging Gardens, Colossus, Colosseum, Great Lighthouse and Great Library from the earlier wonders. Since I wanted to play a wonder focussed game, I reduced difficulty to King to manage that. On higher difficulties, this is much harder/impossible. Later on I used Frances wonder building bonus and a long autocracy bonus to somehow get almost all wonders.

In normal (and on emperor) games, I still try to get some. As mentioned, I go for the Pyramids, if possible. Somehow I also manage to get Potala Palace, Colosseum, Colossus and Forbidden City in most games. For the others, I usually go for it if it feels cheap (as in much later as discovered). I wish the AI would be more competitive here. It's ok that some wonders with hard to meet requirements (Great Zimbabwe) are not taken in modern times. But the Hermitage and the Terracotta Army? Those should be grabbed by the AI. For some reason the AI is always focussed on Stonehenge and the Oracle, so I never even try to get those.

 

[Victoria]

if you are playing as France, it might be very profitable to get as many early wonders as possible because of the doubled tourism yield.

I tried this once, not enough wonders got and wonders are not great tourism nor get good culture with them. I won in the end but not as smooth as other culture Civs.

You say you won and named 6 wonders which may be around 120 tourism. What other tourism did you get? Getting a few early and combining them with squares works. I am very interested as I am just finishing up a guide and any detail you can give for a French victory would be great. For example did you use any Chateau's for the flight bonus?

The french advantage that can come in more is the diplomacy / spies. It needs to work well and I have not played it enough to comment more but did you use diplomacy and sabotage well?

National parks are normally not built in number due to the high religious price.

I have got oracle a couple of times, you need to focus to get it. It has its benefits.

 

[Siptah]

I tried this once, not enough wonders got and wonders are not great tourism nor get good culture with them. I won in the end but not as smooth as other culture Civs.

You say you won and named 6 wonders which may be around 120 tourism. What other tourism did you get? Getting a few early and combining them with squares works. I am very interested as I am just finishing up a guide and any detail you can give for a French victory would be great. For example did you use any Chateau's for the flight bonus?

The french advantage that can come in more is the diplomacy / spies. It needs to work well and I have not played it enough to comment more but did you use diplomacy and sabotage well?

National parks are normally not built in number due to the high religious price.

I have got oracle a couple of times, you need to focus to get it. It has its benefits.

I've built some Châteaux (sorry, I can't stand writing another plural form), but I won very quickly after researching flight, so they were only the last thing to get to the last few tourists faster.
I've built lots of wonders, let me see what I can remember. Despite the one's mentioned, which are all ancient/classical there were: Chichen Itza, Alhambra, Mont St. Michel, Oxford University, Great Zimbabwe, Big Ben, Potala, Bolshoi, Hermitage, Forbidden City, Ruhr Valley, Big Ben. So really almost all I had researched. But this is just because of the 'King' difficulty, otherwise it would not be possible, I fear.
My only other tourism output besides wonders were two great writers that I mostly bought with faith (didn't go with a religion but picked the faith from quarries pantheon, because I had lots of those and most other useful pantheons were taken, later built a few holy sites to befriend Saladin). So I filled GL and OU with great works and had a relic from Jeanne d'Arc.

I didn't do sabotage. But I used the diplomatic visibility bonus to stay peaceful and declared friendly to almost all civs through the entire game. You can see the hidden agenda right after sending a delegation, which is a huge plus if you want to play peacefully. Sure, I got DoWed by Teddy in the beginning for no reason, but after that everyone befriended me - except for Monty, because he was having only a small empire and I had lots of luxuries and his hidden agenda was also hard to please. I was lucky that there was no China. But even when one agenda doesn't fit what you want to do, seeing both right at the beginning makes it possible to go straight for the other one to make friendship easy. Of course, I could have siphoned some funds or stolen eurekas early on, when no one can defend against my castle spy.