Another primitive strategy. Build all the Wonders

[Alkis2]

The idea is to build many wonders regardless of what they give you. What you aim for is the GP points they generate. Of course there are some wonders more wanted than others. The Pyramids especially can give you an engineer which means another wonder.

Obviously you need an Industrial civ. With Industrial and stone or marble or both you can build 3-4 wonders before 1 AD and have several GP really early. Pity you can't be Philisophical as well.

Compared with the slingshot to CS it has the advantage that you don't have to delay Oracle (thus risking it) till you get CoL.

It's a crystal clear plan and simple. Of course, as is always the case with ambitious strategies your expansion will be delayed.

[WoodenTaco]

I'm not sure why you'd want to do this. You lose so much potential advancement in other areas... has this ever worked on a reasonably high difficulty level?

[Sylvius]

I don't think this stretegy has worked well anywhere other than Alpha Centarui. Dominating he Special Projects was possible and valuable there, but I don't see what advantage it would give here.

[Velociryx]

The advantages are two-fold:
1) Simple denial. If you have them, and the other folks don't, you have an advantage over them (in culture and in GPP's, if nothing else).

2) Higher concentration of wonders (ie - you build them in a few, hand-picked city sites rather than seeing them spread out all over the globe = higher concentration of GPP generators, and that, in turn, will translate into more G-Men over the course of a game. Plus, you can do some fancy stuff with it, like pack all wonders that generate a specific TYPE of GPP into one city (all prophet, all merchant, etc), and have several GP pumps, geared for a specific type of G-Man.

Now...making all this work at higher levels is another matter, but the theory is surely sound.

-=Vel=-

[JackRudd]

The best rulers to do this with are probably:

Gandhi - Ind/Spi. Only Industrious leader to start with Mysticism; gives him a head start on the competition.

Qin - Ind/Fin. Financial trait gives him faster research, and therefore earlier discovery of Wonder-giving techs.

Bismarck - Ind/Exp. Expansive trait allows him to get bigger cities early on; this will help with building.

[Alkis2]

Thanks Vel for your post. I couldn't have answered better.

In my last game on Monarch it's 725 BC. I have Stonehenge, Pyramids, Oracle and the Great Library. I have the Academy and a total of 3 cities. The other two are not so good as you can imagine. I mean their sites are just fine but they are underdeveloped.

Actually that's the problem with strategies like this. You invest too much on the capital and you can't expand properly.

Now, to do it in two (or more) cities, specializing like, the art wonders here, the others there... hehe, that needs someone with skills I don't possess The art wonders, especially the Parthenon is a big dilema, I mean 50% birth rate looks great, but I was scared that I would get many artists. And and I don't want to play for caltural victory.

And yes, I play as Ghandi. I was lucky to have stone near my capital but not marble. Marble is far away. I don't dare go there, too many barbarians.

[JackRudd]

If I'm going for that strategy, I like to build the Pyramids first, if I can. Then the inevitable Great Engineer creates the Parthenon in a different city. (That way, I get a useful wonder without spamming Great Artists.)

[Alkis2]

Yes, that's a great idea. I had that engineer in my game even though I started with Stonehenge first. Maybe I would have used him for the Parthenon but I didn't think about it. It's good to know now, thanks.

[Arrian]

I've been able to nab nearly all the wonders on Prince several times. In my best games, the only ones I do not build are:

Stonehenge
Chitzen Itza
Sistine Chapel
Versailles (I'd really rather someone else built it... for me)
Spiral Minaret (maybe)

Industrious is obviously the key trait. EXP is solid too, either for larger cities or the ability to chop like crazy (or a bit of both).

The CS slingshot is great for psychotic wonderbuilding, b/c you get the Bureacracy bonus in your capital and can really pump wonders.

-Arrian

[The_Paladin]

Kind of like the OCC, it sounds like an interesting challenge too, at least for builder types.

There's something to be said for a finish where your empire has every single great work in the known world .

I'll have to give it a try (definately not for diety though ).

[Saurus]

When I first got my hands on CIV 4, I always tried to built as many wonders as possible... but soon realized that is not a winning strategy .. not for me.

Mostly I try to win a cultural victory and more often than not the wonders only mess things up.
Sure wonders produces some great culture ... but
not more than a great artist does and only in one city.
The GP produced by theese marvelous wonders end up to be great prophets, great egineers and great Merchants (who needs great prohpets during endgame anyway?)
Wonders mainly causes you to lose control of what kind of GP is beeing produced!

I want great Artists to boost my cultural cities.
I usually try to keep my GP-producing city as "clean" as possible. Wonders causes a mess since they are stuck on what kind of GP they produce.

[samspock]

My current game is the first I tried not to build every early wonder I could. I missed out on Stonehenge, the pyramids and the parthenon. It is also the first time I tried not grabbing religions on purpose. Picked up Towism since I was first to col, not because I ran to It. I was playing rome and decided to go war mongering (can't resist it with Pretorians!) I got the Parthenon when I took out the spanish and Stonehenge when I took out the Russians. Did not get the pyramids since the germans have that and it was a little too late to bother taking them out (they are #2 on the score list and #1 in power.) I am ahead by 3-4 techs and have managed to buidl everything else exept either Ancor Wat or Chizen Itza (get those confused.) This game is only on noble but it's my fist time trying out a war first type strategy. I got too used to playing civ3 and sitting back until the AI declares war while very unprepared! The kicker is that there are only thre other civs left (monty was whiped out by me and all of the rest declaring on him about the same time!) and I am friendly with def packs with 2 and pleased with the other. The only wrinkle so far is that they voted the germans as sec general since they like him a little better.

[uberfish]

I managed to build every world wonder (and three shrines) with Qin but it took me a few tries and I had to drop to Prince to pull it off. It's a tough challenge as you have to research all over the tech tree, but you end up with one impressive capital. What eventually worked was founding two early cities at decent production sites, and setting one on Parthenon and one on Great Lighthouse then Colossus. I was planning to go for the cultural victory and had a bunch of cathedrals set up in cities #2 and #3 as well, but decided that building a spaceship as the "last wonder" was just as fitting a finish and wouldn't unnecessarily prolong the game by 50+ turns.

Trying to build all the wonders actually ends up being a serious handicap in civ4, since many of them (and their prerequisite techs) end up being irrelevant to your strategy and thus slow you down a lot. You do get a lot of GPs without really trying, but they're very random.

[Alkis2]

I didn't exppress it correctly. My idea is not to build ALL the wonders. But as many as possible to get GP points. It's kind of meaningless to overdo it.

[Blake]

Latest game on Emperor I managed to build Stonehenge, Pyramids, Great Lighthouse, Great Library, Chichen Itza, Mahabodhi (Buddhism) and Kong Miao (Conf). That's near enough to "every wonder that matters" for me .
This was as Asoka, I love that Indian .