WONDERS (ver1.0): Hosted by EnochF

[Ecce Homo]

Yes Mark. I oppose Wonders that act as one improvement in each city. These make great civs invincible.

[Fugi the Great]

How about having your engineers/terraformers build the WoW's, that is if they go that route. Like actually building certain WoW's like the Great Wall of China and use it for what it was intended for, keeping out barbarians, now it's just a tourist attraction.

I also agree that alot of WoW's are too strong and cost too little. Make them extremely expensive, and take a long time to build, make it so their effect wears off faster (WoW's from ancient times are useless now except to rake in money), and be able to add your own for scenarios. Make it so you can turn them off in the beginning of the game, maybe a higher score if you can live without there effects.

To be fair to all nations, if we all have the same technology, why can't we all build the same WoW, just call it a different name, maybe building the wonder is disabled if the effect wears off so you can't get it added to your score. Each WoW has positive and negative effects that either helps or harms your nation depending on your nation's strengths/weaknesses and SE. In that way, I may have the technology, manpower, time, and money, but we will not build it because it will not help us or may actually harm us. Or I may not build it NOW because I am constantly at war and can't afford to build it. If your WoW gets captured and/or destroyed, can you rebuild it? If not, why not? You still have the technology to build it. I suppose that you could say we couldn't really build the Pyramids anymore, but it won't help us anyway, it's effect is no longer needed - it's obsolete, and we forgot how to build it (lost technology). If I now recapture the first one and still have the second one, the effect is not doubled - what ever it is, I just wasted my time, money, and manpower building the second one. Do you destroy one of them?

[Ecce Homo]

Fugi, I think that this problem can be solved if a Pyramid is a City Improvement and the World's Largest Pyramid is considered a Wonder.

[Viking]

The wonder moveis should be long,
CTP's were great but way too short.

[willko]

first a few suggestions for new wonders:

how about the moai (sp?) -- the easter island "heads". they are pretty wondrous. god knows what they do, or what they would do in terms of game mechanics (anyone?), but imho, they qualify as a "constructible wonder". (more on that term below).

less seriously: how about crop circles? or tabloids, or rolaids, or coffee-holders for the automobile?

more seriously:

i'm really just rehashing a familiar argument about ctp: a loose definition of what a "wonder" is. i find things like "drugs" or "contraceptives" do not fit the bill as "wonders of the world". other societies and cultures could possibly co-opt some of these achievements almost immediately (whether due to economics, trade, or through the open exchange of ideas, etc.). wonders should mostly be a "localizable" phenomena (--why crop-circles wouldn't work: too easily generalizable). they should be only locatable in one specific city, the one that built it, otherwise, why is it so wonderful and why should a group of people work so hard to discover/build it? i agree that things like drugs, contraception, the internet can be great (even "wonderful") things, but in terms of that specific civ contrivance? no. how would drugs ever be eradicated off the face of the earth by destroying the city they were first created in? or why would that city be any more blessed eventually than all the other cities of the world after mass-production and distribution take place?

this is kind of like why i thought the manhatten project in civ2 should have also had another function, perhaps boosted science (maybe only by a measly 25% -- but by something) in the city it was built (i.e. as a result of the los alamos labs that were founded by the government's collection of scientists in the desert), instead of simply (whoopee!) allowing nukes. play-balance wise, in multiplayer against humans, it is not even worth building the stupid thing if other nations are nuke capable (hmmm, a lesson we could all take to heart).

sorry to wax so ramblingly (!) on this topic, but keep some of this in mind when suggesting wonders and their effects.

p.s. i also agree that is would be a mistake to make the wonders racially or nationally based (i.e. only let the egyptians build the pyramids, or don't allow the pyramids as a constructable wonder without the presence of the egyptians in the game). in the civ series, it has always been fair game for any tribe to claim any given wonder as their own. why change that open endedness now? the point of the game is that human history is our's (the gamer's) to determine!

/willko.

[Narck]

I would like to strongly emphasize Viking's point:

Wonders are something major in the game - they don't happen often and they only happen once, so the reward for building one should be not only lasting effects but also a nice interlude, a 'sit back and enjoy' type of thing.

Wondermovies in Civ2 were really good - however, after civ2 the new games that were similar to it had bad wondermovies -> SMAC is a great game but the wondermovies are not great at all but 'reasonable' instead and then I haven't even mentioned Ctp yet - there are many movies there but they take less than 10 seconds to finish (some are even done in 3 secs) and IMO are of inferior quality. I prefer to have less movies but of good quality.

So for civ3: the movies should be at least the quality and length of civ2!

[kmj]

Maybe you should be able to name your own wonder. That would solve alot of the conflicts here while keeping the main idea intact. For example:

The world's largest damn could be called the hoover damn, or the Aswan dam, or the three Gorge's Damn, or maybe the London Dam.

For forbidden city, you have the Imperial palace, the Thronehall of Persepolis, palace at Versailles, or maybe the Atlanta palace.

For your secret police, there's KGP, CIA, FBI, KLA, IRA, or KMJKS (that's kmj killer squad).

This can be done for damn near all of the wonders. Even natural wonders. This would actually add alot to the game as far as recreating history (as opposed to just replaying the same history).

Another idea I like is require a certain type of terrain for certain wonders. (Dams in city on or near a river, Lighthouse only in coastal cities, Palace only in capital, etc.) Of course for nation-wide wonders, such as the great wall, it wouldn't matter.

Ecce- I really like your ideas on the Olympic Games and the Internet. While I think the civ that invents these should get some sort of bonus, I think that all civs should get benefits, provided they are technologically advanced enough. (Obviously the Olympics wouldn't require too much tech to be able to participate.) I think these too should be renameable by their creator.

meowser- I like your idea of a civ-wide project, it can be done just like allocating public works in CtP, but maybe with a maximum %? And for city-specific wonders, you should definitely have to choose where to put them.

I agree that the wonder movies in CtP were way too short. Especially since 13 gig harddrives will be commonplace by the time CivIII is released.

Ecce- don't you think that it would be weird if every city had pyramids. They only exist in two geogrphic areas in reality, don't they? I don't mind that once a civ builds a certain wonder, noone else can build it.

I agree that the whole "race to build xxx" is silly, but it is mainly used as a warning, so that you don't get 3/4 done with a wonder to find out that someone else just built it. I think it would be better if when you decide to build a certain wonder you get a message like: "Advisor: 'Sir, there are rumors that the Egyptians are working on a similar project, are you sure you want to build this?'"

[Sieve Too]

A few more suggestions for the Industrial age Wonders

The Queen's Dominion: Allows for more rapid expansion and terraforming by granting double movement to Settlers and Engineers (but not double speed work)

Admiral Nelson's Fleet: Allows quick building of the navy by cutting the cost of every naval vessel by 20 shields.

Imperial Naval Shipyard: The city that builds this wonder never pays shield support for naval units.

The Gateway Arch: Allows rapid city development by reducing the cost of each city improvement by 20 shields.

[frankdog]

The Internet: increased Science, increased happiness, BUT... costs a sheild or two in productivity. (Better get back to work before my boss catches me surfing again).

[Trachmyr]

If the Internet had a disadvantage, it would be increased risk of valuable Teck leaking to other countries...


Namable Wonders is a GREAT idea, providing that the game suggests a few for you...

[VaderTwo]

Some people have mentioned drugs as a possible wonder - how about anti-biotics instead? It would increase all civilizations' growth rate and increase the happiness in each city by one.

[Ecce Homo]

willko, you are absolutely right that a Wonder shoud be something unique and possible to place on the map. One of the things I hate the most with Civ 1/2 is Women's Suffrage being a Wonder. It is harly unique or geographically limited. It can neither be regarded as a great project of a Civilization.

[Lancer]

The Alaskan Oil Pipeline
The Trans Siberian Railroad
The North Sea Oil Platforms (wery wery beeeg)

[JaC]

Drugs certainly must play a part in Civ III but DEFINITELY not a wonder but an advance ( Medicine perhaps :-) )
you should have to build a hospital or pharmacy to reap any benefits and maybe the civ that first discovers the advance could get a trade bonus for passing it onto other civs.
Negative side to the drugs advance - crime / unhappyness / kgb capturing citizens smuggling.....

JaC

[willko]

this may or may not be a joke, i can't decide:
the chunnel: "connects" two "nearby" cities on the map together separated via a body of water... hmm, must be built in conjunction with another (hopefully allied) civ? increases trade in both cities as a result of tourism, easier shipping, etc.

two (relatively serious) thoughts on wonders:

1)

should you really be able to "switch" in mid-production? i mean think about it: you're working on the great library (scribes from all across the lands are gathering texts, architects laboring, etc.) when your network of informants from neighboring country x tells you that they have completed the darn thing, so next year (decade, century, etc.) you switch your labors towards the colossus. hmm. those books make a pretty mean foundation for that big guy. i dunno. it's a tough thing to do, but when you decide to put your people's efforts towards constructing such a huge breakthrough in human achievement, i don't think you should be able to pull a 180 and turn all their collective work into something else at the drop of a hat. electing to build a wonder should be a do or die kinda thing in my book. not to be taken lightly.

2)

on another topic, seeing how many architectural "wonders" that have been in civ games (from sid's to ctp), isn't it feasible to name tons of possible "wonders" that more or less only do one thing, namely increase trade (ie. the space needle in seattle, the eiffel tower, the leaning tower of pisa, mount rushmore, the pyramids, stonehenge, the moai of easter island, etc.). i say if we are to have arbitrary effects based on these architectural marvels ("what? our great monument to our ruler, the pyramids, has magically placed a granary in every city in the land? rejoice!") why not just pick a whole new slew of them just to have some different movies on this game.
on the other hand, i think a lot of these "repeatable" wonders don't add that much more to the game other than "flavor" if they were to extend only the "real-life" effects of their real-life counterparts. or maybe they could just be another generic city improvement: tourist trap. i dunno.

my opinion is that if it's going in the game, let's make it a wonder that has some palpable benefits that are somewhat rationally explainable (i.e. isaac newton's college, the great library, marco polo's embassy) as opposed to the ones with outlandish benefits slapped onto one of the great monuments to human constructive ability.

my two cents.

/willko.