Insight to Prebuilding (newbies)

[Drakan]

Insight to Prebuilding (only for newbies eyes)



We all love Wonders, either by building them or conquering the city which has them.

I will explain the building path. Below Emperor level one can almost build any Wonders you like. The trouble arises when playing Emperor or above, due to the great leap between Monarch to Emperor (read Ision’s great article on the matter). One must learn to prioritise which wonders are more important to build in a game. The usual answer to this query in Civ is: it depends. Depending on whether you are a builder or a warmonger. It depends what kind of victory condition is activated (i.e. you need to build UN for a diplomatic vic), what level you are playing at……

I take for granted you already know what Wonders are key to the success in your current game; there are plenty of good articles and threads on the matter. Now the question is how can you beat the AI to building them ? This is when the concept of prebuilding comes in. I won’t mention SGL's in this article.

Imagine you are aiming for the Great Library (do not even bother going for it at Emperor or above because the AI is bound to beat you). You start building your Forbidden Palace so as to save the shields generated per turn until you discover researching or trading Literature which will allow you to swap from your FP to the GL wonder. Following this strat you are able to outbuild a Wonder from the AI.

At Emperor, normally, your first Wonder will be in the late Middle Ages, such as Adam Smith or Sistine Chappel. At Emperor I doubt you will be able to build six Wonders at most and they will mostly be late age wonders. Now you can use to prebuild the FP, your own Palace or even some other Wonder or Small Wonder. Just be sure that other civs do not beat you to it. You can hit the F7 key to know what other AI civs are building that same wonder. Look at what city it is being built on. Use then your Embassies or spies to get an insight of those cities and check how many turns they have left to achieve there goal. You can even use the spy to sabotage that city and hinder their efforts, If say, you are running behind in time and it is predictable the AI will finish it off before you do.

Timing is very important the higher the echelon of difficulty. Sometimes even your prebuilding is doing so well in fact at core cities that you are going to complete your P before even having discovered, for example, Integrated Defense. What you do in this case is go to the City Screen and turn productive tiles with plenty of shields into an artist. In this way your shield output diminishes and you proceed to adjust it with the turn you are bound to discover ID so as to build the small wonder SDI.

Beware; what may help you may also help the AI. If you have techs for building two wonders and the AI is already building one but does not have the tech to build the second one be careful when to trade this second tech. If you trade the second tech and complete the first wonder, the AI will use all the shields it spent in the first wonder and swap them over to the new wonder and beat you to it. This is most frustrating. Be sneaky and sell the tech only when you are darn sure you have the lead in shields output and you it is most likely that you will beat the AI to it; even then, you might be subject to sabotage by a foreign spy and lose building it.

One of the main reasons for selling a tech with a non-completed wonder associated to it is that AI civs pay very handsomely for it. You can, obviously, wait for just the turn before completing the wonder to sell off the tech to ALL civs (see articles on tech trading).

Following these simple advises known to all veteran players you are now able to beat the AI wonder building even at Emperor or beyond. Enjoy !

“ If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”

[Don Giovanni]

Just some small (newbie) comments:

Masonry is the prerequisite for building a new palace, and having enough cities is the prerequisite for building the forbidden palace.

Be aware, that you cannot build either one in your capital. So if you get beaten to a wonder, that you build in your capital, you cannot switch to palace/FP, and you lose a lot of shields if you cannot switch to some other wonder.

Be aware also, that some (Great) wonders can only be built in citites meeting certain criteria (Colossus in coastal city, Hoover Dam in city with river ...). Imagine having a nice prebuild for a wonder that you cannot build in that city

Note that you can switch to a new wonder, as soon as the required tech is discovered, by chossing "what's the big picture" (or something like that , I don't remember), which takes you to the science advisor, and then press F1 to get to the screen where you can change the wonder.

[Drakan]

TESTINg:

[vmxa1]

First I would not agree that your first wonder would be in the middle ages at any level. I can build the GL at Sid nearly every time and not even need a prebuild of more than 2 turns.

This is because without Masonry, I cannot use the palace as a prebuild and FP is a distant dream. If I use the capitol to build, I will not have those anyway.

I have not played much emperor in the last 5-6 months, but it is not hard to get collossus if you have a coastal city by no later than the third city.

The main thing above emperor is to get a number of workers to improve all the tiles you will need for your citizens to work.

Once they have done the tiles you add them to the city and are now much more productive than the AI in that one city.

The higher the level, the more likely the AI will keep its cities at a low pop level, cranking out settlers.

To me it is a lot harder to get middle age wonders at the highest level, than any other era. The AI will be first to all the tech in the middle age and with its massive production bonus, you cannot beat it to a wonder without a very long prebuild and it has to be timed well. This is a very risky proposition as you will have no fall back for those shields in all likelyhood.

[Dominae]

Re: Insight to Prebuilding (newbies)

Good points, Drakann. One thing though:

Originally posted by Drakann
Just be sure that other civs do not beat you to it. You can hit the F7 key to know what other AI civs are building that same wonder. Look at what city it is being built on. Use then your Embassies or spies to get an insight of those cities and check how many turns they have left to achieve there goal. You can even use the spy to sabotage that city and hinder their efforts

It costs money to investigate cities and sabotage production. In the early game that's money a player typically does not have (or, put another way, does not want to spend).

You do get a free view of a civ's capital if you establish and Embassy there. That's the extent of the spying I will do in order to gauge the Wonder race. Usually this is enough because the AI very often picks its capital as the location for it's first couple of Wonders. With one good look, you can calculate to within 1-2 turns when the AI civ will complete a Wonder it's going for. But this takes some work that most players are not willing to do.

Investigating non-capital cities to see their Wonder progress does not accomplish much, IMO. You should be prebuilding at top speed in any case, meaning your prebuilding city should be at max pop, with all the necessary improvements in place, etc. Then there's nothing you can do about losing the race to a Wonder if AI is ahead. Investigating cities will not help.

To avoid any unpleasantness, always make sure that you have the tech to switch to another equivalently-costed Wonder if you do lose the race to the one you primarily wanted; you'll get the Great Wall instead of the Statue of Zeus, but at least you will not have lost any Shields. Since the Palace is pretty expensive, you can often switch to the while waiting to research another Wonder-enbaling tech. Sometimes the Palace is not expensive enough!

[Drakan]

Thanks for the advise Vmxa1 and Dominae.

[Cookie Monster]

Good advice by all!

[gunkulator]

For the newbs I'll also add, make sure you do not do ANY forest chopping or unit disbanding in and around the city while prebuilding. You will not be able to switch to building the wonder in that city when it becomes available. This is poorly documented and most of us had to learn it the hard way.

Similarily, double check all the wonder requirements before you start your prebuild. There's no sense prebuilding for Statue of Zeus if you don't have Ivory. Likewise, the city with Hoover Dam must have a river in its radius.

[vmxa1]

BTW you may find trying to use the Embassy gambit to be of low value in some games. This is the case when you have not been able to make a lot of contacts as of yet.

It is common for me to get the notice of a wonder being built by a civ I have not met. Many cannot be reached without at least Astronomy or even Navigation.

I tend to not build any embassies, until I am in position to check on a wonder status. IOW if I have gotten Lit and will be switching to the GL, I will build embassies in the largest civs to see what they are working on (if I have the cash).

I want to know if there is any wonder cascade waiting to happen. The best for me is, when they have built all the current wonders or are only a turn or two away. So they will not be switching to the GL as they do not have the tech and no other wonder to hold the shields.