Wonders in Civ5

[Qwertqwert]

You are definitely wrong about the Colossus, it is for all coastal cities. Go look it up.

[HoldSteady]

I like much wonders. Not too much, but 7 in two era's is a bit meagre...

[The Priest]

Aside from power and number of wonders, the more interesting question is whether wonder actually change game-play and strategies.

On the whole many of them don't. Pyramids perhaps encourages you to go for a specialist economy (given representation); Great Wall might change your build priorities in SP given no need to defend against Barbs. But most of them just help with what you are doing anyway.

What would be really interesting would be Wonders which made some strategies worse while making others better. They would need to be carefully balanced, of course, but a wonder which reduced one thing (for example GP production, or cottage growth) while increasing something else would really add flavour. Of course, you woudl need the net effect to be positive, so people still bought them. But it would reduce the sense that games run along similar lines.

I love Civ but the key problem is that sense that games run along similar lines. THe only way to avoid this is to artificially restrict yourself for example by 'going for a culture victory this time'. That is fine, but is a bit sad because you are not actually reacting to the game situation. Wonders which made some strategies worse, and others much better, might really help.

[LordShiva]

Wonder spam

Go back to teh Civ2 wonder list.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Qwertqwert
You are definitely wrong about the Colossus, it is for all coastal cities. Go look it up.

Holy ****, you're right. I've been misreading "All Cities Water Tiles +1 " as "All City's..." for 3 years now.

[Arrian]

I like the way wonders are in CIV - nice but not ridiculously powerful.

about the Colossus. Yeah, it's a nice little wonder.

-Arrian

[Lord Avalon]

New wonder: Mini-Great Wall. Prevents small rodents eating your crops.

China erects mini-Great Wall against mice

Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, August 15, 2007

China is building a new Great Wall - -a relative miniature at 1 meter (3.3 feet) high - to guard against hordes of pillaging mice.

Lujiao, a town in central Hunan province that was overrun by field mice last month, is erecting a 40-kilometer (25-mile) barrier around Dongting Lake to defend against the rodents.

About 2 billion mice nesting on the shores of China's second-largest freshwater lake gnawed their way through 520,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crop land when rising water drove them from their burrows. Such plagues underline China's growing struggle to maintain a stable environment, said Yang Hualin, director of the Chinese Pest Control Association in Beijing.

"These are alarm bells amid China's economic development," Yang said. "Ultimately, the original ecological balance needs to be restored, but at the moment that's going to be hard."

China must build up numbers of predators, such as owls, snakes and weasels, which have dwindled because of farming and the use of poisons to contain pests, he said.

"At the moment, this is the only thing that can be done," Yang said of the wall.

Walls won't shield farmers from the next mouse plague, said Wen Bo, director of the China program at Pacific Environment, a conservation group in San Francisco. Mice will find holes in the cement-and-rock fortification and resume their assault, he said.
"The wall is a symbolic gesture to quiet public concern," Wen said. "It's not going to work in the long run."

The Hunan government was proactive "before and since the incident," said a government spokeswoman, who gave only her family name, Liu. "If that's not enough, then we'll continue our efforts."

Bamboo Sticks
In Binhu, a hamlet administered by Lujiao, Zhang Shouliang said she and her neighbors used bamboo sticks to kill thousands of mice that invaded their homes and crops. Her extended family of 13 lost its entire harvest of corn, peanuts and watermelon, worth 10,000 yuan ($1,300).

"We put up nets to keep them out of the fields, but they just ate right through them," said Zhang, 62, pointing to plots riddled with mouse holes. "They were everywhere."

Climatic conditions aggravated this year's plague, said Zhang Meiwen, a Hunan-based researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dongting's waters receded to lower-than-usual levels after a dry winter, giving mice more room to breed.

After authorities at the Three Gorges Dam opened sluices to alleviate flooding upstream in the Yangtze River in mid-June, Dongting Lake began rising by as much as half a meter a day, driving mice into 22 surrounding communities, Zhang said.

Prelude to Battle
"This is the prelude of a battle between mice and men," the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture said in statement about Hunan's plague, posted July 11 on the academy's Web site.

Lujiao's government is raising 6 million yuan for its wall, the state-run Xinhua news service reported July 13. It will be built atop flood levees that surround the lake.

While Dongting is surrounded by 3,747 kilometers of levees, only 1,100 kilometers are fortified against mice, Xinhua reported July 19. Those bulwarks didn't stop this year's surge, said rodent expert Zhang.

China's Great Wall, built from about 220 B.C. to fend off pillaging tribes from the north, extends more than 6,400 kilometers. The brick, stone and earth wall, which stands 8 meters tall in some parts, didn't halt Mongol Genghis Khan, who sacked what is now Beijing in the early 13th century.

In Binhu, villager Zhang remains optimistic about the local fortifications.

"Once they get the wall built, we'll be better off," she said.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=04a665fa-5efc-487f-8b7f-8934241713e7&k=57570