Failed Wonder Compensation

[144]

In Civ 5, when an AI managed to complete a wonder I was attempting to build, it was infuriating - especially if it was a turn or two left to completion. However, the fact that there was monetary compensation for my time and effort spent made me continue playing the game, instead of doing what I do now.
Now, in Civ 6, what I do (as a casual person) is restart the whole game. I hate this. It feels like a piece of my life has been lost. And as game developers, this is a failure of design.
You may think that it's more realistic to have failed wonders behave as they do, but I find that in doing so they sacrafice a fun player experience, and trying to justify something that makes the player experience worse is conceited, indifferent, and indicative of poor game design intentions.

[Paulytnz]

Originally posted by pitonsnaboca:

Originally posted by Azunai:

actually, building wonders for the "failgold" was a fairly common trick in civ 4.

I never did it or knew of anyone doing it. But if you say so, who am I to disprove. :)

But that would be even more exploitable, here, cause here you stop production of something and it keeps it "stored", if you change to something else in the middle.
So, all you had to do was start building any wonder, stop right before completion and wait for someone to finish it, in order to get the "refund". And you could even have a row of unfinished wonders waiting for refunds.
Now I even agree more with the fact that they took it away from Civ6. :)

This is what people did in Civ 5 I believe. I know I did it a few times by accident lol. You start building a wonder and it gets close to completion. But then something else more important comes up that you have to change to. Say for example troop building because you are attacked all of a sudden.

Well as you can imagine in the heat of battle the wonder all of a sudden is not a big concern for you. Even after the war is over and when things settle down you may have forgotten about the wonder or just don't care anymore as you begin to focus on more defence in case someone else gets funny ideas about attacking you.

Boom all of a sudden that wonder (and in some cases those wonders - plural) start getting completed by someone else. "Oh crap I forgot all about those! Oh well I get some nice gold from it at least, that can help go towards my defences".

I know it happened a few times for me lol.

It's things like these where people learn, hmmmm - I can benefit from that actually, maybe if I......

[Paulytnz]

Originally posted by Helkyn:

I just don't build them anymore. They're a failed implementation of a mechanic that Civilization has always enjoyed: one of many, many failures in Civ 6.

This is pretty much the case for most of them. However there are 2 very worthwhile going for that are actually easy enough to get.

Ruhr Valley - Gives a big boost to production. Ideally you want this in one of your main army building cities. Simply build your industrial close to a river so the Ruhr can be next to both it and a river.

Venetian Arsenal - Simply place your industrial next to the coast for any city. No matter where you build your navy or any ships you will always create 2 for the price and time of one.

Both these are excellent for most victory types. Ruhr for a big production boost and the other for defending your coasts. I don't see the AI civs building these too often so as I said they are easily worth going for if you plan ahead well in advance. Hell even if someone does beat you to them, well worth the cost of conquering them for them.

On a side note, still waiting for Staute of Liberty!

[haertsch]

Yep. Im with you OP. That's an absolute gamebreaker and the devs are a shame for not having any better idea than this.

Restarting is the only option for me.

Noobish devs

[White Shadow]

Originally posted by Paulytnz:

4 - Immersion, do you mean reality? We are talking about a game here, not real life. Many things we do here in this game we or no one could or did do through out history. Yes it does seem odd that we can take over a city, burn it down to the ground and then magically be able to rebuild everything that was in that city. Strange that feature is here in the game, yet it is there, the devs added it for some reason. Just like the odd rule "only one of this wonder can be built at any one time". I wonder what rule in the real world is in existance that they had to copy it into this game. Oh wait there is none, its merely there for game balance or what not.

5 - And last of all, if we did go with number 1 - that is get compensation in some form would that make sense? Why can't we continue to keep on building the thing? Like I said above, what is this magic rule that actually stops us from building the thing? Where would these resources come from? Thin air? How would that be for reality/immersion or what did or didn't happen in history.

A couple of quick points I'd like to respond with.

Firstly, yes, this is a game, and I understand there will always be gamey mechanics and this game will always have certain aspects to make it unrealistic. That being said, it is important to consider immersion, even as a secondary or tertiary criteria, when discussing this game. Immersion doesn't mean reality; merely, a *simulation* of reality. Without any sort of immersion, every civ would be able to build every unique improvement or unique unit, and we would all have perfect symmetrical starts on the map, with the exact same tiles. While this makes the game "balanced," it also makes the game less interesting.

Secondly, I agree with you. At least when you say "It makes no sense you have to stop building a wonder just because someone else beat you to it." Of course, people have been saying this since 1993. But like I said above, sometimes you really do have to make some things an abstraction/less realistic for gameplay purposes. But yes, I agree with you on this point.

Thirdly, yes, receiving compensation DOES make sense. Even from a historical point of view. Think of it this way: Your people invest a large portion of their time and resources in building the Eiffel Tower. They are told the government stopped funding it, and the project is scrapped. All of the steel, building materials, and other resources lying around then get sold off or dispersed into the industrial sector, boosting the economy. Yes, it's cheesy that it's just a bunch of gold, but it makes sense you'd recoup SOME of your losses in a scenario like this.

[Paulytnz]

Originally posted by Wilhelm Steinitz:

Originally posted by Paulytnz:

4 - Immersion, do you mean reality? We are talking about a game here, not real life. Many things we do here in this game we or no one could or did do through out history. Yes it does seem odd that we can take over a city, burn it down to the ground and then magically be able to rebuild everything that was in that city. Strange that feature is here in the game, yet it is there, the devs added it for some reason. Just like the odd rule "only one of this wonder can be built at any one time". I wonder what rule in the real world is in existance that they had to copy it into this game. Oh wait there is none, its merely there for game balance or what not.

5 - And last of all, if we did go with number 1 - that is get compensation in some form would that make sense? Why can't we continue to keep on building the thing? Like I said above, what is this magic rule that actually stops us from building the thing? Where would these resources come from? Thin air? How would that be for reality/immersion or what did or didn't happen in history.

A couple of quick points I'd like to respond with.

Firstly, yes, this is a game, and I understand there will always be gamey mechanics and this game will always have certain aspects to make it unrealistic. That being said, it is important to consider immersion, even as a secondary or tertiary criteria, when discussing this game. Immersion doesn't mean reality; merely, a *simulation* of reality. Without any sort of immersion, every civ would be able to build every unique improvement or unique unit, and we would all have perfect symmetrical starts on the map, with the exact same tiles. While this makes the game "balanced," it also makes the game less interesting.

Secondly, I agree with you. At least when you say "It makes no sense you have to stop building a wonder just because someone else beat you to it." Of course, people have been saying this since 1993. But like I said above, sometimes you really do have to make some things an abstraction/less realistic for gameplay purposes. But yes, I agree with you on this point.

Thirdly, yes, receiving compensation DOES make sense. Even from a historical point of view. Think of it this way: Your people invest a large portion of their time and resources in building the Eiffel Tower. They are told the government stopped funding it, and the project is scrapped. All of the steel, building materials, and other resources lying around then get sold off or dispersed into the industrial sector, boosting the economy. Yes, it's cheesy that it's just a bunch of gold, but it makes sense you'd recoup SOME of your losses in a scenario like this.

I will just respond to your last point for now, short on time atm.

I do agree there should be something. But instant gold like it used to be is probably a step too far. Maybe a big pile of rubble on the spot or something that may need a certain amount of builder charges to gather?

We must remember that there may be more than one civ all building the same wonders. If you start giving out a chunk of gold to every civ that fails at each and every wonder I think it just devalues the value of gold some what.

There could be 5-8 civs maybe even more (depending on how many you have in your game at once) all trying for say the Pyramids. Hello one wins, that's 7 civs all getting gold. Not good imo....

I would be perfectly happy with a big pile of rubble that you use builder charges on. Say each charge gives you a certain amount of the production back up to a certain limit? Maybe 5 charges for 5% back each charge used? 25% total. That's just a simple silly little idea from someone not even trying to hard to come up with something. Yet it would be better than what we have now.

In fact what we have now may even just be a game bug, I only ASSUMED all that I have written previously, because well, sometimes I just give people too much credit or the benefit of the doubt. That's a flaw on me.

I am sure the devs could come up with SOMETHING better than what we currently have.

[White Shadow]

Originally posted by Paulytnz:

I will just respond to your last point for now, short on time atm.

I do agree there should be something. But instant gold like it used to be is probably a step too far. Maybe a big pile of rubble on the spot or something that may need a certain amount of builder charges to gather?

We must remember that there may be more than one civ all building the same wonders. If you start giving out a chunk of gold to every civ that fails at each and every wonder I think it just devalues the value of gold some what.

There could be 5-8 civs maybe even more (depending on how many you have in your game at once) all trying for say the Pyramids. Hello one wins, that's 7 civs all getting gold. Not good imo....

I would be perfectly happy with a big pile of rubble that you use builder charges on. Say each charge gives you a certain amount of the production back up to a certain limit? Maybe 5 charges for 5% back each charge used? 25% total. That's just a simple silly little idea from someone not even trying to hard to come up with something. Yet it would be better than what we have now.

In fact what we have now may even just be a game bug, I only ASSUMED all that I have written previously, because well, sometimes I just give people too much credit or the benefit of the doubt. That's a flaw on me.

I am sure the devs could come up with SOMETHING better than what we currently have.

This is more or less where I'm at, as well. I think we should look for more of a "middle ground" when it comes to wonder compensation. I understand your point of view. I do remember a time during the Civ IV days where people would abuse the system for free gold boosts. Very cheesy and very gamey. I really like your idea, to be honest. Spawn a "rubble" resource that appears in the spot intended for the wonder, and allow you to "harvest" for a small production boost. Sounds like a great idea for a mod, for those folks who are savvy enough with some free time on their hands.

[Shahadem]

When you get Wonder sniped you should be able to apply 100% of the lost production to another Wonder of your choice.

[Paulytnz]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

When you get Wonder sniped you should be able to apply 100% of the lost production to another Wonder of your choice.

That could be tricky...

1 - What if there are no wonders left to build?

2 - What if the wonders that are available to build you can not build anyway due to some of their strict requirements?

Basically what they would have to do is store those resources somewhere, until you can build a wonder. Even then you may not even want another wonder. I know its something, but I don't think it would satisfy a lot of people who have the issue with the current system.

But then again, there are so many things that people don't like about this game so what's just another "one" anyway right lol?