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Wonders are reviewed on a scale of 1 - 5,
with 5 being the best.
Wonder |
Rating |
Description |
| Colossus | 4 |
Build it in your capital city so corruption doesn’t waste all those extra arrows, or else move your capital to your Colossus city. |
| Pyramids | 3 |
This will speed up your city growth with all those free granaries, plus it saves you the money of building granaries. On the down side, your cities will probably max out anyway before you discover aqueducts and again before you discover sewer system, and this suppresses the benefits of the Pyramids. |
| Great Library | 4 |
With this you are guaranteed to be no worse than in 3rd place in technology. It is best when you are either geographically isolated or far behind in technology. Though it’s tempting with the Great Library to turn your science off, you will still lag behind in tech this way. Your best strategy is to keep doing your own research, but concentrate on moving far ahead in one or two areas, and leaving as many basics unresearched as possible, as you’ll pick those up with the library. |
| Great Wall | 5 |
The effects of this Wonder are HUGE. With a free city wall the moment you found a city you’ll be able to found new cities (with one settler and one phalanx) right in the middle of war zones, or on that border where the barbarians keep wiping out your cities. Add to this the diplomatic effects of the Great Wall and you literally don’t have to worry about war anymore except when you want to attack. |
| Sun Tzu’s | 2 |
You won’t need barracks for a while in your new cities, but your new cities can’t produce military units quick enough to make this a worthwhile investment unless you have nothing better to do. |
| Lighthouse | 2 |
This is really only worthwhile if you are an island nation and need to traverse seas in your triremes, in which case its great. Otherwise you aren’t likely to need much of a navy this early in the game. |
| Oracle | 3 |
The increased effects of temples will allow your cities to grow larger before you build Coloseums. You will need either this or Hanging Gardens if you are playing on Deity level due to the extra unhappiness factor. |
| Hanging Gardens | 3 |
It’s a toss up between this and the Oracle. I prefer the Oracle, but in either case you’ll need one on Deity level. |
| King Richard | 5 |
While some people seem to dislike this Wonder, it is stunning if used properly: build it in your most productive city and then use that city to crank out all the other Wonders you want, and you’ll almost always win the race to build them. On Deity level you NEED this in order to keep up with the extreme cheating the AI gets in production. Your crusade city will also make a great military factory if you end up in war. |
| Magellan’s | 3 |
This is a good investment, but not a crucial one. Obviously you’ll want it if you are an island nation, or have many overseas colonies. If you are continental, such as Persia or Mongolia, it isn’t worth much of anything. |
| Copernicus | This will boost your science in the city its built in, which means it should probably go in your capital and certainly go in a city that is a trading center, rather than a production center. This makes it difficult to build as a trading city often has few shields. You can improve your science as much by building a few extra universities, so this Wonder is more of a luxury. | |
| Marco Polo | This can be an extremely valuable Wonder in the right circumstances, or merely a convenience. It is much cheaper to simply send diplomats to establish embassies, but if you are isolated this will do the trick. It’s greatest benefit is not the embassies themselves but the establishment of contact with undiscovered Civs, with which you can trade technologies. In certain games you will find that this Wonder benefits your technologies even more than the Great Library --- if you are in the middle of the pack in advances and haven’t run into many of the other nations. | |
| Leonardo | 4 |
The good effects of this Wonder are obvious, so much so that you ask why it isn’t a 5. Well, it would be except for 2 factors: first, when your units upgrade they lose their veteran status, and so the generally don’t benefit numerically until the second upgrade. Secondly, you will lose all of your Pikemen who are upgraded to Musketeers. Pikemen have better odds against calvary than Musketeers. In other words, a veteran Pikemen has a defense of 6 against calvary, while the non-veteran musketeer only has a defense of 3. (Though the musketeer does have more hit points). Nonetheless, this is an excellent Wonder and definitely worth the build. |
| Shakespeare | 1 |
The best use of this is if you have King Richard’s crusade in a city, build it there, then you can wage war under Republic and build all your military units at that city and you don’t have to worry about unhappiness. Other than that, let the English have their theater and you can go to the movies instead. |
| Michelangelo | 5 |
I believe this is the best Wonder up to this point in the game. The free Cathedral in every city makes a significant difference under all circumstances. It will allow you to switch to Republic or Democracy much quicker without setting Luxuries ridiculously high; it allows your cities to grow larger; it allows you to fight wars under Republic without too much consternation; you no longer need to build temples in new cities until their size reaches 7 or 8; and best of all, you can lay on your back and look at the pretty pictures on the ceiling. |
| Isaac Newton | 3 |
I cant’ even remember exactly what this does because I never build it. It helps your science (libraries +50%??). I prefer to use Wonders to improve other aspects which lets me leave my science rate high, and find that I am generally having such a hard time getting libraries and universities into all my cities in due time that it’s better to concentrate on that. |
| Darwin’s Voyage | 2 |
This isn’t worth it for the science benefit. I only build it as a defensive measure...i.e., if the game is tight I don’t want the Chinese to get those two advances as this may wipe out my slim technological lead. |
| Adam Smith | 5 |
This is incredible if you can build it early enough. Try to get an early discovery of economics and build this baby, and you’re economy will immediately go from limping along to booming. Generally you’ll see your support cost drop from about 60 to about 25 or something like that, and all that extra money can go in the bank, and be used to hurry the construction of Universities and libraries in all your cities! So it really helps science a lot in the long run. |
| J.S. Bach | 4 |
This is the second best happiness wonder after Michelangelo’s Chapel, but I’d go for the Chapel first and consider this one an additional benefit. If you can get them both you’ll be able to easily generate We Love the President parties in all your cities and watch that population boom. This one is also an excellent substitute for Women’s Suffrage in case you don’t get that Wonder, allowing you to fight wars under Republic. |
| Eiffel Tower | 2 |
This really only gets built when you aren’t doing well in the game. If you’re on the defensive against hostile neighbors all the time, this may help bring you some much needed peace. It’s also good if you’ve been naughty and broken all your treaties with sneak attacks. If you play that way this is worth a “4” rating. |
| Statue of Liberty | 3 |
How much this is worth depends largely on your playing style. If you like to switch governments a lot it’s worth a 5, but if you’re like me and you settle into a Republic or Democracy for the long haul then it isn’t worth much of anything. |
| Women’s Suffrage | 4 |
This was the single most important Wonder in Civ 1, but since you can now build Police Stations to create the same effect, it isn’t absolutely necessary. Also if you plan on staying Communist or Fundamentalist it’s worth little or nothing. But for most players this is still one of the major goals of the game. |
| Hoover Dam | 5 |
Actually, I’d give it a 6 if it wasn’t off the scale. I consider this the one absolutely necessary Wonder. It’s combination of increasing production and lowering pollution makes or breaks the modern stages of the game. It’s worth spending all your money in the bank to rush-build it if need be. |
| United Nations | 3 |
This is good under two circumstances: You are continually forced to wage wars that you don’t want to fight, or secondly, you want to continually sneak attack your neighbors. In either case the forced peace comes in handy. Hopefully, however, by this point in the game you have stable relationships with your neighbors. This is also great if you’re far ahead of the AI’s, because they’re going to be mean to you if they’re behind. |
| Manhattan Project | 0 |
i.e., don’t build it!!! Why would you do such a thing to yourself? You opponents will simply nuke you into oblivion the minute they can. Spare the world. Beat swords into plowshares. This is the only Wonder that you wouldn’t want if they gave it to you for free. |
| SETI | 3 |
Give you a large increase in science, but given my continual low ratings for science wonders, (except the Great Library), I continue here. With the SETI there just isn’t much technology left to discover, so it isn’t’ that important. Furthermore, if you are doing well in the game at this point your discoveries are coming once every 4 turns, and building this will only reduce it to once every 3 turns. This is the drawback to all the science Wonders: if you’re doing well they have very little impact. They are always more valuable if you’re struggling, i.e., if you are only getting advances every 15 turns this will reduce it to 10 turns which could be significant. On the other hand, if you build SETI you could conversely use the science benefit to turn up your tax rate and keep those discoveries coming every 4 turns with less investment while generating more cash. This is one of the big tricks to the game, btw: you have to realize that a 50-50 rate of taxes to science is optimal. The more lopsided your rates get the less productive you are. For instance, if you have 90% science and 10% taxes, your are still less-than doubling your science but you’re cutting your cash to one-fifth of it’s optimal (50%) rate. Sometimes the best use of a Wonder is to use it not to help it’s field (science or taxes) but to free up resources for the field that isn’t helped...thus if you have your taxes set at 80% just to get by, you can build Adam Smith and turn your taxes down to 50% to more than double your science while only lose about 1/3 of your tax money. |
| Cure for Cancer | 3 |
You probably don’t need it by this point in the game with all your other wonders and/or cathedrals, but it will make fighting a war in a democracy easy, and also will help with those late game We Love The... days to get that population super-high if you’re playing for points. |
| Apollo Program | 2 |
Of course somebody has to build it, but why you? I wait for one of two circumstances to build Apollo: 1) With embassies in ALL of my competitors cities I know for a fact that they don’t have the advances necessary to complete a space ship; or 2) Although my competitors have all the science for a successful launch, I’ve built Manufacturing Plants in EVERY city, and either have Hoover Dam or individual Power Plants in EVERY city, AND I have cranked my taxes all the way up for several turns giving me a huge (say, 5,000) sum of money in the bank to rush those spaceship parts. If you aren’t in one of those two situations you run the risk of losing the space race, especially on the higher difficulty levels where the AI’s production cheats allow it to build spaceship parts on the cheap. |
| Republican Convention | 4 |
This one is.....what do you mean you don’t have this in your copy of the game??? Well, your copy is defective then. This one is pretty good if you have a lot of unhappy citizens, unless you’re going for a high population score. It’s almost worth it simply to being deported to Mexico and Eastern Europe. On the down side, it kinda sucks that building this one destroys all the libraries and universities in your cities, but you watch the great animation of all the unhappy citizens can always build those back. |
| Democratic Convention | 3 |
Let me guess you don’t have this one either? Well, you don’t know what you’re missing. Building this one allows you to have a Democracy but like a Fundamentalist government all your unhappy citizens become normal. On the downside, it doubles the upkeep cost of ALL of your structures, plus you pay an extra 150 per turn so that you can give out free lunch to all your citizens. A questionable build, but sometimes worth it. |
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