Wonders Shield Price - Too High?

[Eli]

I played for roughly six hours stright now, on chieftain level with the greeks. Great game, there are some minor issues that I would've prefered them to be different or changed, but as a whole, Civ3 is THE game.
I experienced only one problem when I pressed the Yes button to leave the game. Some error in the sound.dll IIRC.

And now to the issue, the wonders are pretty much two times more expensive to build than in Civ2 and it's much harder to rush build them.
Yes, wonders are now also very heavy culture suppliers but I found it absolutely useless to build them during the early expansion period, mainly because it takes like 50-60 turns to do it and damages the city growth.
I managed to build the Chapel(40 turns with my largest city), and in 40 turns(out of 50) I'll build Mike's Workshop and hopefully I'll finish 3-4 more wonders before the game ends.
My point : Wonders should be at least 20-30% cheaper.

[Cougz]

You could be right, it all depends on what kind of game you want to play, and what challenges you are looking for. In Civ2 a player could easily build ALL the wonders AND have a civ twice as large as all the others combined. But no more! Like you say, it looks like it will be fairly good going to build 6 wonders in the game with a competitively sized civ.

I'm aiming for 10 wonders, playing as Persians, Warlord, 12 civs, HUGE earth map.

[KoalaBear33]

As you mentioned, the wonders give fairly high culture so it is probably good that they cost a lot of shields. One good thing that I like about the game is that it is more diverse than before (still not what I want but oh well). You can pursue more strategies in Civ III compared to Civ II. In Civ II, almost everyone built the same units, buildings, and wonders. The high cost of wonders, high corruption, unique units, etc forces people to use different techniques now. You can't be a master of everything unlike in Civ II (to some extent).

In addition to all this, if you lower wonder costs, cultural civilizations will be worse off. That is, if everyone can build a lot of wonders then what's the point of cultural victory or even going for culture?

KoalaBear33

[Eli]

After some more thinking, this was a correct move.
As KoalaBear33 said, when you cant build all wonders and manage to get 6-10 there are many more different strategies based on what wonders you get.

But, I really dont want to know what will happen on the higher levels.