Not Enough Ancient Era Wonders

[Usana]

From my experience so far, there are too few Ancient Era wonders for that path to be completed by either player or AI on anything other than the lower difficulties or if the player selected a difficulty well beyond them and can't contest it and one of the AI's runs away with it. Or I guess if you want to play on a super tiny map for some reason(almost completely forgot that even smaller maps were an option and would have fewer players thus making this more doable).

I have had like 4 games in a row now with the leader stuck at 5-6/7. Not just me, but the AI's as well. Part of it is definitely wonders being grabbed by the non-interactive players at this time. But Culture in antiquity and modern both has this issue of 'can't complete' because there is just a hard limit. That doesn't feel good to me. Artifacts could have a special project in museum cities to find a new artifact to go dig up, and a really project could become available after the wonders are built that after spending an amount of production comparable to the last unlocked wonders grants a point. It would still be a serious disadvantage since not a wonder it wouldn't get any production boosts, but at least one wouldn't be annoyed stuck at 6/7 every game where the AI is even remotely competitive.

[TheNightglow]

yea the culture legacy gets way harder the more empires there are on the map, I guess that might be one of the reasons why they locked away the large and huge maps, as culture would become impossible on those with a lot of players/AIS

[Ishau]

Why not play on an 8 player map, but reduce the total number of players to 4? No need to pick a smaller map, you can just reduce the number of players in the second tab on the advanced settings.

I tend to play continents plus with 4 players (3 AI and me), which results in having the second island completely empty that we all race for in the exploration age.

[DadouXIII]

Originally posted by TheNightglow:

yea the culture legacy gets way harder the more empires there are on the map, I guess that might be one of the reasons why they locked away the large and huge maps, as culture would become impossible on those with a lot of players/AIS

That makes so much sense.

Would be a very clever idea to scale the number of wonders depending on how many Civs are participating.
You could even draw them randomly from the pool, make each game a bit different!

[magnumaniac]

It seems that you didn't get the memo... wonders are DLC features now. You will have to buy every DLC they ever release to be able to complete wonder based objectives.

Sorry, no getting to play the full game for just £60 / $70.

[plaguepenguin]

Some of the legacy pathways are sideshows, while others are core.

By "core" I mean that progressing along the pathway is something you would want to do anyway, to advance your progress in core game mechanics. The economic paths in Antiquity and Modern are good examples. No matter how you plan to win, you want to have an empire with lots of slots for resources, and lots of resources to put in those slots. Success at this also gets you up the legacy pathway, but you would maximize the number of resources you slot in anyway, even without the nice perks you get for getting milestones.

By "sideshow" I mean that the legacy pathway is something you have to go out of your way to achieve. You need to do things to move up the pathway that aren't much help at all to your strength in the game's core mechanics..

The culture pathways in Exploration and Modern are pretty much sideshows. The two types of great works are some help to happiness and culture yields, but, really, there are better ways to get those yields than going off on the sideshow quests for relics and artifacts.

Both of those culture pathways aren't really hard to get all the way to the end, but you have to pursue the little games that both set up. Neither missionaries nor explorers are terribly expensive to get in numbers and and at the right times to get your relics and artifacts, but you have to be on it in the sideshows to succeed at them. Get piety as your first civic so you can snag a relic belief that makes it easy to get relics. Get natural history first, and have the map fully explored by the time that's done (you have to do most of this map revealing in prior ages), and you can scoop up more than your share of artifacts in the time interval before your competitors finish natural history. Repeat at hegemony, and your're done. Other than the diversion away from civics you might want to have researched first, and trivial expenditures for missionaries and explorers, getting to the third milestone in each only requires that you pay attention to these two sideshows.

The Antiquity culture pathway is a bit of both, core and sideshow. You need 7 of them as trophies to get to the third milestone, but they are also valuable (some more than others) in their own right to the core game. They also require more diversion of resources from the core game if you want to snag them before your competitors. I've finished 5 games so far and have yet to get there.

I haven't been terribly motivated to get the Antiquity golden age, because I don't find it that powerful. Science golden age is much better. But then I viewed One More Turn's video of that age's wonders, and noticed for the first time the pattern that many of them grant leader attribute points. Those are quite golden, and to the core game. In my next game I am most definitely going to go for more wonders, at least the ones that grant attribute points. If I end up with the trophy number of 7, fine, but even if it's only 6 attribute points that I get along the way, I will be quite happy.