Early Wonders Overrated

[Aginor]

Comment on the midgame wonders thoughts:

The distinguishing characteristic of these wonders is that they tend to be specialized. As such, their utility is dependent on what you are doing/have already done.

I have to agree that Notre Dame is pretty darned pricy for what it does. Less so if you have a Stone hookup, but it's still one that I rarely build.

Chichen Itza is the turtle wonder - if you plan to establish a base of terrain and turtle through the Middle Ages to try to outtech the comp, placing your border production capacity behind the cities in the Rise of Nations style, it's pretty useful. It's like an extra two defense promotions for your City Garrison units, which with Longbowmen is pretty obnoxious and makes city defense cheap. (Couple of Longbowmen and a Knight to deal with pillage marauders and you're covered.)

Sistine Chapel has its uses - again, like Notre Dame, it's pricy. It enables one trick I find incredibly useful during land grab/conqueror phases - switch the first citizen in a city to Citizen for 5 turns and expand the borders, regardless of anything else that's going on in the city. In special resource situations (particularly after stealing a city) this can be incredibly useful, and better for the city's growth and production in the long run.

Granted, you can do this if you consistently run Caste System by making an Artist, but I find that I'd almost always rather run Slavery until late.

Angkor Wat again is specialized - if you're running a GPP Prophets game, it can yield quite a bit on the investment. Realistically, at higher levels it's probably the weakest of the wonders, though.

Don't sell Colossus short - if you're in a game where you felt it appropriate to build the Great Lighthouse, you should build it. End of discussion. It's just that good in a heavily coastal civ, as it helps greatly in keeping coastal cities competitive in tech output compared to cottage spam.

Forges comments - I find that they are a specialized improvement early, as the return in commerce cities is quite low until Suffrage. Obviously, with Industrious they go up everywhere, but without Industrious it takes some picking and choosing. I definitely agree with you that after snagging Lit for the GL it's time to head up to Metal Casting for production cities. (Though I have been known to snag Music and Drama first for Theatres and the Artist for some border pushing, since the AI tends not to prioritize Music either.)

Then it's up to Liberalism to snag Unis, Nationhood, Guns and Military Tradition all in one fell swoop to build Oxford, draft some defense/new city garrisons and spam a Cavalry assault force. I then go back and pick up Banking to slam those up once my assault force is complete so that I can support the cities I steal.

[Saurus]

I'm on a game Trying to get a cultural victory right now ... going to fail probably ... but those early wonders produce quite a amount of culture! This added with the right civics and buildings and it really helps.
However, I agree that unless you are going for a cultural vicvory ... they are somewhat overrated.

[Blake]

I'm not convinced that Forges are that important. Altough I do have a habit of running Organized Religion and also using a Heroic Epic for pumping out units. On top of the Heroic Epic bonus, the forge bonus is nearly nothing.

I only really bother with forges in the earlyish game when:
1) I have 2 or more of gems/gold/silver.
2) I need the engineer. For example in fishing villages with heaps of food.
3) Collossus.

Altough I recognize the value of combining Forges with Organized Religion, bringing that bonus up to +50% means you get a benefit in cities with only 2 or 3 hammers, so for org.rel, when you build a forge in a fishing village and create the engineer it actually quadruples hammers, which isn't a bad deal, adding a priest adds another 2 hammers, for a total of 6 hammers with no land tile being worked. That's enough to slowly build important infrastructure sans-slavery.

[Arrian]

The only wonder that strikes me as really useless is the Sistine (oh, how the mighty have fallen).

Others may be overpriced, but I'm not sure I'd build the Sistine even if it cost 100 hammers.

-Arrian

[petey]

Sistine is good for a Cultural victory, but otherise it's a waste of time. Of the early Wonders, I generally just build Stonehenge on the higher levels if I'm not Creative and none of them if I am. They're useful to have, but none of them are deal breakers and the AI generally beats you to them. Sometimes if I'm in a severe cash crunch, I'll start on one just so I'll get the gold bonus to let me keep my research up, but otherwise I ignore them.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Blake
I'm not convinced that Forges are that important.

Let me put it this way: how often are your cities "building stuff"? 100% of the time? So, with a Forge, 100% of the time your "stuff" gets finished 25% faster (most cities can scrape together 4 Hammers, and if not, that's what Engineers are for!). The Forge pays for itself very quickly.

Forges may not be as spectacular as the Heroic Epic, but they're the workhorses of your empire (well, mine at least!).

[cal_01]

I tend to agree with Dominae on forges; I've tried going early forges, and coupled with organized religion, it helps a lot.

On the other hand, forges are pretty pricey at the beginning, so you might need slavery to pop a few.

[trev]

I usually build Stonehenge, a cheap wonder which pays it own way because it avoids the need to expand borders with obelisks, particularly as I do not usually have a religion early, and so cannot use temples etc, but generally ignore other wonders, there is always something else I want to build first.

[Blake]

Originally posted by Dominae


Let me put it this way: how often are your cities "building stuff"? 100% of the time? So, with a Forge, 100% of the time your "stuff" gets finished 25% faster (most cities can scrape together 4 Hammers, and if not, that's what Engineers are for!). The Forge pays for itself very quickly.

Forges may not be as spectacular as the Heroic Epic, but they're the workhorses of your empire (well, mine at least!).

I still disagree. I mean take for arguments sake a city with 4 hammers. It would take 23 turns to build a library. It would take 30 turns to build a forge. After building a forge it would take 18 turns to build the library. In total, if you were to build the forge first, it delays the library by 25 turns.

And THAT's where it gets tricky. There's no such thing as a free lunch. IMO the time to build forges is when you have nothing better to build. I'm going to build Library, Granary and a Lighthouse at a minimum before a forge, and prehaps some other stuff too, delaying that theatre hurts your culture-war...

So for me, the forges are only really desirable when they are actually adding like +2 happy, and also the -1 health shouldn't be a factor. Ofcourse some cities reach the state of "nothing better to build" faster than others, like the small military cities can pretty much start their forge right away (after the granary anyway) because they don't need nothing else (and yeah, I do like the engineer sometimes, but I'm never going to go with blanket forge coverage as a priority).

[Steve7811]

This thread is exremely helpful to me, I find. Coming from the experiences of previous Civ games where the wonders were extremely powerful, I realized slowly that wonders in Civ4 just aren't as powerful as it used to be. Remember the good ol Leonardo's Workshop?

Due to that experience, I still tend to try to get as many wonders as possible. It isn't just that I think they are vital, but that it just makes me feel so good when I actually build them. But it seems, after reading all your posts here, I will really have to alter my strategies.

I played around on noble difficulty for a few, just to get the feel of the game, not intending on winning. Then I recently started a session that I intended to play out to the end at noble. I have played emperor difficulty on Civ2 and Civ3 so I feel confident about some aspects of Civ4, but my generally peacceful-builder type of gameplay needs drastic changes I believe.

With that, I think the most important wonders are the ones that boosts your science. Anything that gets the player the edge in generating more beakers per turn seems to be the most essential. If I were to name 2 essential early wonders, I would definitely have to pick the Pyramids and the Great Library.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Aginor

The reason the Great Library is strong (and stronger than the Hanging Gardens) is that it generates GPP and research without the requirement of food support. An extra person that has to work the land (Hanging Gardens) is not that useful...an extra person that does not require support is (which is why GPP strats became popular). *If* you go up the Alphabet side of the tech tree early to fill in tech gaps, this should be a no-brainer.

I agree, but hanging gardens is still very much worthwhile. At the very least, think of it as a one-time gift of a large amount of food to every one of your cities (enough to produce another population) and if you're playing an economic stratagy and have a good-sized empire, it's more then worth the hammers for that alone, and of course the health bonus helps support that larger population.

It also seems like it's generally really easy to get. Last game I played on Monarch, I was way behind in tech because of some very expensive early wars and expansion, and I didn't go out of my way to get the technology, so the more advanced civs had the tech at least 50 turns before I did, and I still had no trouble building it. It seems like the AI never builds aquaducts until it needs them, so it ends up not building the hanging gardens either.

Also, perhaps I'm the only person to do this, but in certain situations I've been known to start working on an early wonder I KNOW I'm almost certanly not going to get, just because it's the only way to turn hammers into gold in the early game.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Blake
I still disagree.

Me too.

I mean take for arguments sake a city with 4 hammers. It would take 23 turns to build a library. It would take 30 turns to build a forge. After building a forge it would take 18 turns to build the library. In total, if you were to build the forge first, it delays the library by 25 turns.

Are you planning to build anything after that Library?! Obviously if you confine your analysis to the microcosm of "Library or Forge" the Library wins out, since the Forge does nothing unless you keep building stuff (forget the Gold/Silver bonus).

Let's try an example:

City A decides to build a Forge before proceeding to other improvements, such as a Library, Marketplace, etc. City B foregoes the Forge, favoring instead to proceed directly to the latter improvements. It takes 600 Forge-powered Hammers for A to catch up production-wise with B's 480 Hammers devoted to other non-Forge projects (the difference being, of course, the cost of the Forge).

600 Hammers may seem like a lot, but it's not, really. Libraries cost 90, Courthouses 120, Aqueducts 120 (I think); sure there are a bunch of cheap 60-80 Hammer ones (Monastery, Temple) but around Education things start costing upward of 150 Hammers. Let's agree that, for about, 6-8 or so improvements, B is ahead of the game. I'm making no mention of military units and Wonders (clearly significant factors Hammer-wise) in order to give you the benefit of the doubt.

After 600 Hammers, A is the clear winner, and B cannot hope to catch up.

What does B gain from having a Library, etc. earlier rather than better production later on? This is a very difficult question to answer precisely, so please forgive my rough analysis here. Let's take your example of a 4-Hammer city, very close to the worst case. As you mention, it will initially be 25 turns behind in, say, Beakers, more precisely extra Beakers provided for by Libraries. Assume that the city generates 16 Beakers per turn at 80% Science during this period (that's actually quite generous, requiring multiple matured Cottages or Financial-enabled coastal tiles). A Library adds 4 Beakers per turn. So during the 25-turn period, the city (a Hammer-poor, coastal Commerce) produces 100 Beakers sooner under the plan B than plan A. Such gains diminish somewhat as the Forge city catches up in production to the non-Forge one over the 150-turn period.

As I said, this is the worst case: most cities have double or better Hammer output, and slightly less Commerce output. So the Commerce/Beaker cost of producing the Forge first is lower, as is the time it takes to make up the upfront cost. Working a couple of Mines and some odd tiles an average city produces 12 or so raw Hammers, increased to 15 by the Forge, so a more realisitc time frame is on the order of 40 or so turns, not 150.

(I think it's reasonable to assume that these cities are not fully grown yet, since they have neither Libraires and Forges in them. This raises the question of whether Granaries or Lighthouses should be built before Forges, which I'm not going to into right now. Here I'm focusing on Hammer versus Commerce/Beaker gains).

What this analysis says is, first, the obvious: namely that Forges are better in high-Hammer cities, while cities that are working mostly Commerce-rich tiles will make better use of the Library. However what it also says is that, for the average city of 10 or so Hammer output, the "cost" of a Forge is on the order or 40 or so Beakers (since the time lag between Library and Forge is significantly less, and the city produces fewer Commerce than the worst case). Furthermore, as I pointed out, after 600 Hammers the Forge cities take the lead in production - which then translates into gains in Beakers as Universities and Observatories are completed sooner.

So, what it comes down to is this: what is more valuable - additional Commerce units now, or guaranteed superior production potential later? In Commerce-rich, Hammer-poor cities, the additional Commerce is significant enough to forego building a Forge first. But in any city with decent 8-10 Hammer production, I would argue that the Forge is a worthy (not to mention irreplaceable) investment from a cost-benefit perspective.

As with all investments, they need time to mature in order to be worthwhile. Are your confidently in the lead at or around Liberalism? If so, skipping Forges is probably not a big deal for you. In my games (Immortal), I'm still struggling around then, and I'm glad that I have my Forges to rely on. Regardless of difficulty level, if you expect the game to go into the at least the late Renaissance Forges are worth building as early as possible.

And THAT's where it gets tricky. There's no such thing as a free lunch. IMO the time to build forges is when you have nothing better to build. I'm going to build Library, Granary and a Lighthouse at a minimum before a forge, and prehaps some other stuff too, delaying that theatre hurts your culture-war...

With the Granary and Lighthouse, I'm inclined to agree with you (on a case-by-case basis, of course - I hate having my Lighthouses sit there doing nothing while I work Grassland Cottage tiles instead!). I believe I've already made my position clear on Libraries and Commerce-type improvements.

As for Theatres and Culture...I disagree. I can handle a Culture deficiency in a number of "easy" ways (war, Culture slider, Artists), but a Hammer deficiency is tougher to bandage. Poprush and Draft are so expensive (ever tried to poprush a University?), I prefer to just use Forges and Mines.

[Aginor]

Originally posted by Yosho
At the very least, think of it as a one-time gift of a large amount of food to every one of your cities (enough to produce another population) and if you're playing an economic stratagy and have a good-sized empire, it's more then worth the hammers for that alone

Here's how I look at this one:

Best case scenario out of the Gardens - by the time it's built on a standard map probably 80% of the relevant land is claimed. As a consequence, the specials either are improved and worked (by some civ) or will be shortly.

Since we're not talking special tiles here, the typical best case scenarios for net output of the additional citizen (given that the citizen takes 2 food to live) are:

1 Food and one Coin (Irrigated Grassland on a river)
1 Hammer (Grassland Forest)
-2 Food and +4 Hammer (Plains Hill Mine)
0 food and 2 commerce (3 if Financial) growing over time (Grassland Cottage on a river)
0 food and 2-3-4 commerce (depending on Financial and the Colossus) (Coastal)

So, you're putting in 380 Hammers (230 with Stone) (calculated as Gardens + Aqueduct) for an investment that does eventually pay off across the board in your cities. However, it takes quite a while to repay you. I'd conclude that IF you are Financial and have Stone it may be worth the time cost. Otherwise, you're forgoing a lot. 230 Hammers = nearly 7 Axemen or 6 Swordsmen. That's a whole invasion force right there. I'd rather steal multiple size 5 cities to boost my empire's production, and pay for the maintenance with the commerce seized and the city capture loot. This way a rival is weakened while I grow stronger.

Special case of Floodplains - if you've got a ton of 'em in your empire unworked, this is a different ballgame. Unimproved they're just as good as Irrigated river Grassland tiles, and most likely you put the Cottage on it...this speeds your growth in the city AND gives fat commerce, which is flat out amazing. If you've got small cities and you're fortunate enough to have scads of Floodplains this Wonder becomes very, very strong.

Note on Dominae's comment that the draft is expensive - how large are the cities you're drafting in? I usually try to draft most heavily in the 10 and below cities in order to minimize the amount of time until the city grows again. Granted, it takes some serious horizontal expansion to pull this off, but if you've put on your warmonger hat since early on you'll have the cities to abuse. The draft alone doesn't win the game for you...rather it ensures that you finish the win from a strong position established early on.

As for Leonardo's Workshop - gone because it was waaay overpowered. My old cheap Warriors that I used to garrison cities for the happy bonus under Monarchy are now modern Infantry. Have a nice day.

Abusive in the extreme. Played Rise of Nations? The Statue of Liberty worked exactly the same way, and was considered one of the 1-2 most powerful Wonders. In fact, there was a whole strategy revolving around abusing it by spamming out comparatively cheap Heavy Cavalry which instantly became highly expensive Tanks once Tanks became available. Sadly, free upgrades is a broken mechanic and just cannot be permitted.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Aginor


Here's how I look at this one:

Best case scenario out of the Gardens - by the time it's built on a standard map probably 80% of the relevant land is claimed. As a consequence, the specials either are improved and worked (by some civ) or will be shortly.

Since we're not talking special tiles here, the typical best case scenarios for net output of the additional citizen (given that the citizen takes 2 food to live) are:

1 Food and one Coin (Irrigated Grassland on a river)
1 Hammer (Grassland Forest)
-2 Food and +4 Hammer (Plains Hill Mine)
0 food and 2 commerce (3 if Financial) growing over time (Grassland Cottage on a river)
0 food and 2-3-4 commerce (depending on Financial and the Colossus) (Coastal)

So, you're putting in 380 Hammers (230 with Stone) (calculated as Gardens + Aqueduct) for an investment that does eventually pay off across the board in your cities. However, it takes quite a while to repay you. I'd conclude that IF you are Financial and have Stone it may be worth the time cost. Otherwise, you're forgoing a lot. 230 Hammers = nearly 7 Axemen or 6 Swordsmen. That's a whole invasion force right there. I'd rather steal multiple size 5 cities to boost my empire's production, and pay for the maintenance with the commerce seized and the city capture loot. This way a rival is weakened while I grow stronger.

You're also assuming no libraries/marketplaces/forges ect. to boost commerce or production. Anyway, let's say that each city person gives you 2-3 extra commerce, for the rest of the game. If you put all those new people on commerce squares, that's a better payoff/cost/turn ratio then building a courthouse in most cities with a 10-12 city empire, even one without a forbidden palace.

It's also not really fair to add in the cost of the aqueduct to the wonder, as in city you're building the wonder in (probably either your capital (yah beurocracy) or a big production city) will probably need to build the aqueduct eventually anyway.

And of course, I'm talking about peaceful economic development. If you're in a war, or are planning to start one, it's probably a good idea to focus on millitary units, but personally I always tend to have long periods of peace between wars where I generally spend at least half of my hammers on peaceful development. (shrug)

[Aginor]

I add in the cost because I almost never build Aqueducts. Seriously. If I do, it's in a Floodplains commerce city which has health issues.

I do not always play Expansive, either.

Expansionism, aggresive resource trading and the odd Grocer are how I deal with city health. It's rare that I have issues in this area, at least until Biology, anyway.

All right, let's go with the absolute best-case scenario here. Hypothesize that we've got a ten city empire. Every point of pop goes on a cottage on a river which we've already built. We're playing as Financial, so we get 3 points of commerce per city. Becomes 4 in ten turns, 5 in thirty, 6 in seventy. It's early in the game. We've got one Academy and 4 Libraries at this point.

We invested 230 shields if we have stone. Hammers translate to commerce at 3:1 sans Kremlin after first production turn. Thus, the equivalent of 690 gold invested.

30 commerce/turn comes online. Bumps in ten turns.
300 commerce later rate is 40/turn. At 20 turns, Wonder is paid for in its commerce price (assuming Stone). Now, if we've got the Academy/Libraries, it gets complicated. 30 commerce/turn at 70% research basically means 2 research and one coin per city. At the Academy city it becomes 4 research. At the library cities we'll call it 3. Both bump with the commerce bump at 10 turns. So you actually get 35 commerce, increasing to 50 after 10 turns, then 65 after 30, etc.

350 + 350 = 700, paid for in 17 turns.

Note that I'm not counting several things. I'm assuming that *every* citizen that comes online is happy. I'm assuming that you've got ten cottages built that are unworked, and I'm not charging you for the Worker or two needed to have them online already.

OK, now for the GL. We're not Philo, we've got one Academy and are waiting on the second great person. We don't have the Pyramids and we didn't steal the Pyramids from someone in order to run Rep. To be fair given the Stone assumption, I'll assume Marble. Cost is 175, or 525 in commerce.

When the GL hits we get +6 beakers per turn. We get to launder that through the Library and Academy (we did build this in the #1 research factory, right?). So it's 11 per turn. Takes a good long while to pay for itself - 48 turns, right?

Not quite. Say we started at zero on GPP and the GL brings 8/turn. We need 200 for another Academy, or 25 turns. After this point we send the Scientist to a commerce city producing, say, 36 commerce per turn with a Library. (If we don't have that, we put it as a scientist in the capital - I'll give that math as well). Then we get an additional 25x.5 = 13 science per turn. (In the capital with Library and academy, we get 6x.75 = 10 + 1 hammer (3 gold) = 13/turn, which is the same from a pure commerce translation standpoint).


So at 25 turns we've got 275 beakers, then 24/turn following. Takes 36 turns to pay for itself.

In the same time frame you've racked up (50x13) + (65x6) commerce from the Gardens. 650 + 430 = 1080 commerce looks pretty darned sexy, doesn't it! After that you're accumulating (with Financial, on rivers, mind you) at a considerably higher rate per turn. (50-24 = 26/turn).

But, in the real world you've never got those great river cottages unused. Say you haven't got Financial, and they're standard grassland Cottages. You get 10 points of base commerce, grown to 20 after ten turns, 30 after thirty, and forty after seventy. Call it 12, 24, 35 and 50 after Academies and libraries.

Now you get 120 over ten turns from the Gardens, and 480 over the next twenty. It takes 33 turns for the Gardens to pay for themselves. By the time the Library pays for itself, you're up 105 commerce, accumulating at 11/turn faster. Again assuming no happiness issues and an unworked grassland cottage in the empire.

OK, now for the really fun part of the math. This is the important kicker on the Gardens. ***EVERY time the city grows a point of pop, you have to have ANOTHER grassland cottage for the city to work or the Gardens are wasted!*** Also, the times I've run it, I believe my cities have grown at the adjusted rate (ie: a newly founded size 1 adjusted by the Gardens to size 2 grows like a size 2, not a size). The upshot of that is that you get the pop points right away at the cost of retarding growth somewhat across the board...which further reduces the benefits of the Gardens!

The point of the lecture is this: The Gardens admittedly can situationally be better with Financial...but you have to have the Worker base to keep ahead of the Gardens *and* the requisite happiness solutions. The GL is fire and forget, and the more developed your core commerce cities are, the more valuable its GPP points are for Academies (and thus the more valuable it becomes).

Also, your production on the GL is already 100% improved - other than a Uni, Observatory and Oxford (which you're building anyway in the #1 science city), there's no need to throw anything else up to get additional benefits.

Peace is overrated. Especially early peace around when you would throw the Gardens up. I'll cheerfully turn my capital's production over to the GL for 10-12 turns for the GL...after my army is built. Smack the AI in the mouth before it smacks me is my motto ;-)