A Legacy Written in Gold: Civilization 7 Strategies and Bonuses

Take your Civ 7 game to the next level by understanding certain major aspects of the game. This guide aims to talk about different tactics and strategies and to take a look at the different bonuses within the game. Currently, this mainly refers to generic strategy, Legacy Paths, Wonder power, and Attribute Point Breakpoints. In the future this will also include sections on Leaders, Civs, and Mementos as well.

Introduction

Civ VII may have changed up its approach towards city development and strategy as compared to older titles, but it still has plenty of strategy to sink your teeth into. A lot of this strategy isn't that hard to understand once you take the time to work certain things out, but Civ VII almost goes out of its way to keep you uninformed. As an example, the palace adjacency bonus, which grants you science and culture per adjacent quarter, wasn't broadly understood for days. There was an endless barrage of people wondering why their granary was giving them science and culture, and even many content creators were slow to catch on.

This isn't because the game mechanics themselves are actually bad or unintuitive, though some certainly are. Once you have a broad understanding of how some mechanic works, it's fairly easy to understand and implement it. It is entirely the game's fault for not explaining its mechanics broadly, and even sometimes having UI elements that mislead the player. The most famous case of this religion, the screen for which implies you can have more than 1 founder belief. If you can, I've never experienced it, the game doesn't tell you how to access it, and it's so rare that I've yet to find a thread where someone demonstrably attained more than one. Apparently it's only accessible through extremely rare narrative events, so so much for strategy.

There are other examples, and while I would happily complain about not getting to see your civ's personal civics tree before selecting them (or even worse, before chiefdom in antiquity), this guide doesn't exist to complain ad nauseam about all the unnecessary obfuscation within the game. It aims to drag these strategies and ideas into the sun. Civ VII is a game that can be beaten without full knowledge of the game's strategies and interactions, even on the highest difficulty. The AI, while not the worst I've ever seen, isn't particularly bright. Occasionally it will stumble into noticeably high yields, before flooding your region with missionaries to fight other missionaries over a religious system that barely matters. However, a game like this is far more fun when you're not making decisions with an eye plucked out of your head.

This guide isn't a tier list or meant to dump on certain strategies. If something is worse, and believe me there are plenty of things that are not so good, we might look at why it's that way, and we might have a little fun at its expense, but if there is some potential noticeable upside to utilizing it then we will try to explore that. With all of that said, let's dive right in. We'll start by looking at how you might want to evaluate things in the game.

This guide is version 1.0, in that everything I wanted to have in this guide before publishing it is in there.

There are some other things I want in it as well, but they will be coming in the future. These are:

1. Pictures. A bit of this being put off is laziness, another bit is not wanting to make a game to just mass build wonders for pictures like I did in civ VI, as that was, and is, quite boring.
2. Commanders and Commander trees should get their own section. This shouldn't be hard, I just don't relish sitting in front of different commander trees for an hour as I type out 'why we love the green tree on army commanders against the AI' or something.
3. Civ and Leader bonuses: This is just a lot more work and therefore not something I want to do before I publish the guide. If I do this Civs would probably come first since I can talk about them by age.
4. Mementos. Simply put there's a lot of them, and a lot of the power of different ones and combinations can be intuited in different ways. There's also the whole 'needing to unlock them to use them' thing. I actually enjoy that kind of progression in a civ game, but unless I decide to drop by the one more turn discord and grab a bunch of saves to unlock them this would probably take a while. If any of these is a 'maybe', it's mementos.

The guide will also be updated randomly in small ways if I discover ways in which the current information is wrong or have new thoughts about certain strategies, wonders, etc.

Newest Addition: A section about the Science/Culture/Production saving exploit, which lets you save all of these resources forever. This section will hopefully be deleted one day when said exploit is removed.

Also, I’m slowly removing the memes about Geographical Society now that high culture is actually relevant for winning that way. Also, this means Hermitage and maybe even Chengde deserve some little re-writes.

How to Evaluate Things within Civ 7

A crucial skill for any strategy game is understanding why we evaluate the things the way we do. Why, for example, is The Oracle a bad wonder? Which town specialization do we want to choose? What makes a good city? How good are all the different resources? Why are specialists so busted, and will the AI ever place any? Etc.

If you understand the logic behind these ideas, then it becomes a lot easier to actually determine the correct decision. While we will go into depth on many of these topics in the next sections, starting with the Legacy paths, it is important to actually talk at some length about why we think the way we do. Here are some ways we evaluate these different bonuses.

1. First and foremost, try to figure out the actual yields something gives you when it is not obvious. This is perhaps your biggest concern when considering wonders and specialists. Let's talk about one of my least favorite wonders in the game, a wonder even the AI tends to skip out on. The Oracle. The Oracle gives you 2 culture per turn at base and carries the standard adjacency of any other wonder (which is to say, everything save for warehouse buildings gets an adjacency from it). It counts as a point on the cultural legacy path in Antiquity, which inherently makes antiquity wonders more desirable. The oracle gives you 10 culture per age (so 10/20/30) every time you get a narrative event. This is a trivial amount of culture outside of the very very start of the game, during which you aren't building wonders. Even then it's not even half of a hut. The lowly monument, even without adjacency, is probably worth more than the Oracle, due to its base yield of 1 influence on top of 2 culture. Strictly talking yields, The Oracle is bad.

Compare that to something like Borobodur, a wonder that makes every quarter (combination of 2 current age buildings on one tile) in your entire empire produce 2 food and happiness. This is clearly a lot of yields for an empire, and yields that functionally fuels more specialists over time with that specific set of yields (before specialist upkeep reduction, every quarter is paying for one specialist by itself). The difference is night and day.

Other wonders can be extremely strong situationally if you look at their yields. The serpent mound, an early exploration wonder, can really shine to anyone that was playing a civ in antiquity with a spammable unique improvement, such as China, or anyone who picked up something like the megaliths from city states. The Tomb of Askia is more attractive to a player with a lot of camels or to players who got the Monk's Mound or Colossus. This logic allows you to look at these wonders in your specific situation to determine whether or not they will be effective.

2. If the thing doesn't produce any yields, try to convert it to something you understand to value it. The Gate of All Nations gives you two war support on all wars forever. What is 2 support worth? 2 combat strength, certainly. That's pretty valuable considering it debuffs everything. What is the cost of 2 war support? Well in the antiquity age that would be 150 influence. So is it worth 150 influence? Well no, because it is on top of your other war support, meaning if you spend influence on the war to get more war support we could effectively say it's worth the two next instances of war support. So if you don't spend any influence on a war it's worth the 150 influence, but if you were going to anyway to further that lead, it's worth the next two levels of war support instead. Whichever way you look at it, a ubiquitous combat bonus is good if you ever plan on going to war.

Similarly, merchants can be thought of as worth the bonuses they'll grant you (which tend to be far more than the asking price). Pick up 2 horses and a gold with a merchant? That means that that merchant is worth 2 cavalry strength and 2 more against Infantry (And we love our cavalry) as well as 20% towards purchasing buildings. That's an insane return. It also helps mollify the AI which is something you're always aiming to do in higher difficulty games to some extent.

Here's another example: El Escorial. El Escorial has the civ 6 Colosseum-esque effect for +4 happiness in a radius as well as 3 relic slots and 3 happiness. The relic slots do tend to feel nicer in the exploration age, but regardless, that's probably not why you see people building this. It also gives you 1 settlement limit. What is that actually worth? Well, let's say you had 12 settlement limit when you built it. If you would settle a 13th settlement with 12 settlement limit, you would lose 5 happiness everywhere. That means that this wonder is worth 65 happiness based off the settlement limit alone, as well as the yields you would lose by settlements going into the negative due to oversettling. However, if you're not settling at or above your cap, it's not worth that happiness.

Here's something tougher. There is a memento in civ VII that gives your scouts 3 extra sight range when using search or lookout. The search range for discovering ruins and such is double whatever search gives you, so you see those from much further out. How much is this worth? Probably about 4 or 5 extra ruins early game, maybe? The savings on making a third scout? The difference between settling a better location or not, as well? Regardless of the exact averages (It would take a statistical analysis) it's obvious that this makes most generic starts a lot better. There is one downside here, however. In some games the imago will cause you to meet lots of other civs earlier than otherwise. Due to your limited influence at the start, meeting lots of back to back civs may mean that you can't do a friendly greeting to all of them. That can sometimes really matter. So regardless of the upsides, that detriment is something you have to take into account. In any case, remember you can swap out mementos between ages. There's no real reason to keep the imago around going into exploration.

3. If something comes with a downside, look at it very carefully. To be frank, the civ VII devs have tried to balance certain things that they believe are very overpowered with detriments. They've also almost universally failed. The most famous and extreme example would be the Mughal civilization in the modern era. They gain 75% more gold from all sources and a massive 25% loss on all other resources. Their civics tree comes with bonuses to purchasing, a universal 3 combat bonus, and the ability to purchase wonders. While they might fall a bit behind other civs on tech and culture initially, after that it turns out most resources don't matter when I'm making thousands of gold every single turn and can buy whatever the hell I want on the cheap anyway. Run over your opponents with an infinite flood of units, buy the Manhattan project (as it counts as a wonder) to accelerate your ideology win. Flood the market with cheap goods and spawn the great banker, if you can get your city connections to play nice anyway. Yeah, the Sepoy being a random infantry unit in the age where I get 12 Combat power on all my tanks from oil might be meh, and we hardly need a unique settler in the modern age, but who cares. I can field a unit in every settlement in my civ every turn. I can assemble a host of factories and rail stations in the blink of an eye. The science and culture loss is also somewhat offset by all the schoolhouses and labs I can shunt down cheap as hell.

Specialists are another easy example. The game has about a million maluses for specialists and specialist buffs. Specialists themselves cost a 2 food 2 happiness upkeep at base. Specialist boost cards often increase their upkeep or add another detriment. Why? Because specialists are insanely strong once you understand how they function.

Evaluation Cont.

4. Look for yields that are hard to get in other ways. The Mayans are held up as the best antiquity era civ in the game by a lot of content creators. Why? Well everything they have is insane, but I'll focus on the unique Quarter here. Science is a very strong yield, and you need it to get access to all sorts of things and systems in the antiquity era. Their unique science building is already making 6 of it basically guaranteed. They also get an altar bonus, giving the altar a vegetated science adjacency. While every other civ is busy getting a library up for usually around +4 science accounting for adjacency, you're probably getting more like 15 off the backs of your library, that building, and the altar bonus (not to mention the palace bonus and potential Pet Knot effect). In every city. Their quarter bonus being absolutely insane and lasting forever obviously tips things even further in their favor: Large direct bonuses to production are something that is pretty scarce. These yields are hard to come by for civs not specced for them, in an era where getting your science up in particular is very crucial.

Another antiquity age example would be the Han Dynasty. Culture income is another resource that can be very limited early into the antiquity age in civ VII. Even with good adjacencies from mountains and wonders, your max of 1 specialist at the markets tech can only push a monument and amphitheatre so far. Those specialists are also normally going to good science tiles first. The great wall lets you convert rural tiles into fortifications that provide culture, and happiness when adjacent to other great wall segments. Besides being really funny when combined with Serpent Mound and the Forbidden City in the next era, and being even funnier in the bad sort of way if you let your enemies stand on the wall, this is a source of culture from a readily accessible resource (rural tiles) that you have that others don't.

Howsabout an exploration age example? Hawai'i gains a special policy tradition to get 2 extra culture on every single rural marine tile. You know what you work a lot of in your new settlements in the exploration age? Certainly not land. Fishing boat towns are one of the best ways to provide food to other settlements, and this provides a massive additional source of culture when other civs are dinking around with kilns and pavilions. Oftentimes these kinds of bonuses are worth a lot more than special quarters ever could be, though in Hawai'is case the rural improvement's base food and production additions, even forgetting the farm adjacencies also further enable land-based food towns, are quite valuable. Unfortunately you have to check a guide to see these civics trees in advance. There is a set of three steam guides by another user that makes for a convenient set of references for these civics tree bonuses in particular.

What about wonders? In the antiquity age you're typically limited to one specialist on a tile, period. You know what lets you get past that? Angkor Wat, a wonder that simply increases the specialist limit on every tile in one settlement. It comes a bit late in antiquity (which means that the Khmer can get it very readily from their civics tree), but being able to stack two specialists in your strong adjacency tiles is not only strong in antiquity, but also sets you up very nicely for the scientific legacy path in the next age. Here we've found a bonus that's otherwise very hard to get your hands on in the age pretty much universally. It's also one that the Expansionist Tree has no qualms about making its final node and attaching a downside to (albeit that one is universal). Just note that unlike some other wonders, the AI does tend to try to build this one. Even though they barely ever place specialists and tend to use weaker adjacencies a lot of the time anyway from my observations (guess 80% extra culture/science makes that feel less relevant...). While Angkor Wat's real yields can be middling depending on the settlement, it allows you to keep placing citizens on good tiles for longer rather than tiles you don't want as much.

The next sections will focus on the game's difficulty effects, and then each set of legacy paths with an eye towards victories, before talking about other topics and wonder bonuses going forward.

AI Difficulty Bonuses Discussion

See the above Chart. These are the effects of difficulties. I believe this came from RomanHoliday, at least according to Reddit.

Here are a few key takeaways, specifically talking about the highest level of bonuses (Deity) from this information:

1. They get twice as much of a production buff when making units, and their units gain a massive 8 extra combat strength. 8 Combat strength is like fighting Spearmen that have the Bronze Working mastery with warriors. The best way to overcome these numbers is through other boosts: War Support, trading with friendlier AIs for empire resources, Army Commanders (Your best generic path for fighting is probably just the left-hand side of the green tree followed by the Order commendation) and by utilizing ranged units. Early on this means a healthy dose of archers combined with some blockers. These fall out of favor in the Modern era in particular, where a strong navy and set of heavy cav tends to win out due to high oil availability, combined with three ranged siege units and ideally an air force once you get to flight. Cav generally win out over infantry due to their higher combat power, higher movement, and the tendency to get more horses and oil than iron and rubber. Sorry Sid, but being slightly more expensive does not balance that. Seriously, when will the civ devs figure out how to not break cavalry?

Even though the AI get a huge unit production buff, they don't tend to utilize this to simply overrun you through war. To be frank, if the AI just ran towards you with 30 cavalry units they could probably always eventually win. Luckily they're very gun-shy.

You don't typically have to siege down their cities to get some land, though you always can with some good siege units and/or naval superiority (The AI love putting walls everywhere). If you just kill a bunch of their units you can just negotiate a settlement or two out of them, so don't feel like you have to run them down.

They get 80% more army EXP, but this isn't generally relevant as they very clearly do not know how to use commanders

The AI also takes 33% less damage from all sources on the water. This includes you attacking their boats with your boats. This means their naval advantage would be brutal, but this seems to exist because the AI's ability to fight on the ocean makes their ability to fight on land look good. This does mean that every AI ship is going to take like 5 hits to kill from a boosted navy and will trade way up in general, considering their combat bonus on top of this damage reduction, so keep that in mind. This also applies to stuff like their damage taken from the ocean during the exploration age, which helps keep them from suiciding their units repeatedly on the water.

2. Eighty Percent bonuses to most other yields. Most notably this means culture and science. So if you feel bad about an AI having thousands of science and culture, keep in mind they're making almost twice as much as they should. Presumably this is multiplicative with other bonuses.

What's interesting in particular is what isn't multiplied by the difficulty, namely influence, growth, and some types of production. Their bonus production is only for buildings and units, at least according to this chart. This means that they don't get an inherent bonus towards wonders or projects. So it will take them just as long to get out their space race projects or the hanging gardens. This usually means that, if your culture/science is at least competitive (keeping in mind the next point), you can tend to get the wonders you want on Deity. If you want a specific wonder for your build, RUSH THEM. You will probably get them, especially if you're stealing techs and civics with espionage (and you should be). Some wonders, usually the colossus and Angkor Wat, tend to be very hard to get first on Deity despite this, just due to their income bonuses and your price maluses.

The lack of influence boosting means that AIs have to compete for city states fairly, and can't pump their war support very easily. The AI is also kind of bad at prioritizing influence, as they tend to lock in endeavors first when they can even if the endeavors are bad, and they don't tend to try to optimize stuff like preserving villas or monuments for more influence. You'll generally want to support endeavors where possible to stay in at least one or two AI's good books, those percentage alliance bonuses won't enable themselves after all. This means that suzeraining city states is competitive, and that the AI won't start flipping all of them super fast, meaning you can typically still murder the ones you want without taking the 40 relationship hit.

Finally, the AI doesn't get a boost to growth or food. If they did this wouldn’t cause them to have that many more citizens in big cities overall (see ‘Food!’ To understand why this is), but it would mean their towns and more mid-sized cities would be a lot bigger and that they’d ramp up their yields faster. I think this was part of why Confucius ended up as powerful as he did in the game I mentioned in the ideology section (his bonus 2 science may also cause his specialists to be worth more than a rural tile sooner to an AI as well), as Confucius comes with an inbuilt 25% growth rate bonus to cities. The Hanging Gardens, which is already a decent wonder due to having a decent effect coupled with an attribute point, may effectively be better for the AI for this reason, as higher growth may trick them into playing the game better sooner. The AI also does tend to make many of their towns into cities, which is generally desirable for players that want to use food more effectively, and because of this I wonder if growth rate or food bonuses would be overkill for them. They do not make that many specialists most of the time. Confucius actually had 21 enlightenment points in that game which was a huge anomaly, so I’m actually leaning on it being the +2 science on specialists or specific Confucius AI programming that did it. Most AI will not finish the exploration scientific legacy path all the way, even with long ages.

Deity Player Malus Discussion

There is one more statistic that may be less obvious to a new player than the AI bonuses we already assumed they had. It is also probably the most important difficulty statistic in the game, as it drastically affects your strategy. ALL Technologies and Civics cost you and only you 40% more research/culture on Deity. This has some fundamental effects on game-play balance, and is likely part of why content creators and most players have tended to either prefer higher speeds and/or longer ages. Most importantly, this means you should stay the HELL away from masteries unless you have a good reason for taking them, especially in regards to the Modern tech tree when going for the Space Race. Here are a few things this means:

1. The Antiquity scientific legacy path is harder to get done in time on Deity on standard age length or shorter in particular, as it requires you to research several masteries, all of which are more expensive. It is still ubiquitous and has the best overall golden age largely, and should therefore be pursued.
2. The cultural legacy path in antiquity is also harder, as you get to later wonders more slowly.
3. Wonders in the earlier parts of the civics/tech tree are far easier to get your hands on compared to ones later in the tree, as the AI has less of a raw science/culture pay advantage. This means these wonders are functionally stronger as a result. This stops being true if you start really beating the AI in culture in particular (as that's where the lion's share of wonders are right now). Note that you can still often get what you want if you go for it first. This becomes more true in later eras, largely.
4. Treasure Fleet takes even longer since getting to shipbuilding also takes longer. Religion spreading/relic collection, due to being at the start and often the first civic you take anyway, is largely the same. Enlightenment is pretty much identical save for it taking a bit longer to hit education and urban planning.
5. Econ and Science Wincons take longer. In terms of raw yields this is more notable for science. In terms of game feel it might actually be Econ, since you tend to go for Econ with low science. There is also a science production bottleneck that happens more if you choose Communism over Fascism, though Socialism makes up for it to a large extent due to their special policy. Econ in contrast always has a science requirement to start slapping down factories/railroads that you have to hit first before asking for money. Even Ideology is a bit dinged by increased costs because you need to get your ideology first. Geographical society is notably longer as well, as it takes longer to get to Hegemony (to research antiquity artifacts first, for the freebie that that allows) and to future civic. I mainly don’t feel the science bottleneck for science wins here even though it’s 40% more because your science is just so high at this stage when going for the wincon that you don’t really feel it. In reality it is actually highly impactful just in terms of science. In close games it can really matter.
5. Opening Cartography in Exploration is typically mandatory with more average science play compared to the Observatory tech, since you otherwise have to wait too long for settlers to cross ocean tiles. With lower tech costs this typically isn't as relevant (though still sometimes better).
6. The AI will have a tech advantage with their military throughout most of antiquity. In later eras you tend to be more on par with decent tech speed. This can go poorly with the whole '8 free CS' thing. Typically this is most notable for bronze working which tends to come online pretty fast for them (and the independent powers actually. Perhaps they scale based on other players?). I find the AI generally has some issues fielding lots of T3s, even if they should have that tech advantage.
7. Since you need a tech/civic to unlock science/culture stealing, this comes online later in antiquity, further disadvantaging you. It is important for you to get these sooner rather than later, as stealing techs/civics directly is worth more actual culture/science on Deity. Writing 2 is a strong opening not because Writing is better than Masonry (It's not) but because stealing from the AI is so valuable on Deity.
8. Buildings that give culture/science should, obviously, be more prioritized on Deity than usual, to avoid falling even further behind.
9. Production buildings are comparatively worse (though that is not to say bad) because it takes you longer to unlock new buildings, necessitating less production, meaning you spend more time building stuff you don't want as much in high production cities. Basically, Science/Culture is bottle-necking you more here too. Note that I am assuming you're not doing the 'force end turn to save production' exploit that I have read (and now personally confirmed) is in the game.
10. Gold is better for the same reason, as gold immediately lets you put down new buildings and you're able to save up more in-between techs. Putting down that +4 library instantly is more important when you're already lagging scientifically by default, after all.
11. Civ and leader bonuses that enable stronger science and cultural play are more important, though these were always generally strong when they're able to get going.
12. I'm going to state it again. Do NOT take Masteries that you do not want for specific reasons. Yes the bonuses are nice. Yes they can be quite strong. Yes you need tech and culture stealing, so get those. But if it doesn't have an absolutely great bonus or a wonder you really want, skip it.

Personally I think this difficulty malus is weird/can make the game feel sluggish, especially early. The AI already get culture/science bonuses, which they could just boost a bit more. Why hit us with a 'hidden' malus that just makes comparing AI and player progress more difficult? I think it might be because tuning up the AI's science/culture more instead would further abbreviate the actual age lengths in real turns, which I reckon they wanted to avoid. This makes sense given that players are already often preferring longer age settings on higher difficulties or when pursuing certain legacy paths like Treasure Fleet. This difficulty Malus would be far more forgivable if the game actually showed you tech and civic costs. Sure it becomes obvious when pottery suddenly takes more turns, but more UI clarity is always desirable.

The Scientific Legacy Path: The Most Ubiquitous Path in the Game

You should be trying to get ahead in all of your legacy paths, at least to a reasonable extent. That much is obvious. However, in some games you might not build too many wonders in antiquity. You may not make many treasure fleets. You certainly won't always get 12 conquest points. However, in nearly every game with every civ and leader combination, you should be aiming to complete the scientific legacy path in the Antiquity and Exploration age. Why? There are really three reasons for this:

The first is that the Scientific legacy paths in every age are Solitaire. Sure, you can use espionage to slow down someone's space projects. Yes, you'll fight over some wonders that you tend to desire for science play. Even so, no one can stop you from amassing 10 codexes in antiquity save by obliterating you or ending the age early. No one can force you to stop placing specialists in exploration, and the best way to stop a space victory is by winning first yourself. You're not competing for anything, save for victory timing.

The second is that these goals generally reward good play. How do you get lots of codexes? You make lots of science, which you want to do anyway. How do you get high yield tiles? You place good specialists, which you want to do anyway. How do you win Space? You make lots of science and production which, say it with me, you want to do anyway.

In comparison, Maxxing out your red bar is going to require war in the first era and war + religious play in the second one (unless you fancy going well over your settlement limit). You should be getting your third level on the military path in antiquity every time you can, but we'll talk about that in the next section. Antiquity era's maxxed cultural legacy path requires seven wonders, and it's hard for building seven wonders to ever not be competitive. Religious play is bad and aside from just taking as many relics as you can find relevant cities to convert is usually best ignored for the sake of sanity, even considering rationalism's percentage bonuses. Explorers are a viable alternative wincon, but collecting and researching artifacts is a competitive activity with a limited artifact pool (forgetting future civic) to go around) . Econ? Econ isn't that competitive in antiquity since it's about amassing and placing resources, but treasure fleets and factory setups do ask you to have settled relevant locations. It's arguably the second most ubiquitous, it's just that a fair amount of it comes down to finding or fighting for those good settles... and waiting on that ten turn treasure fleet spawn timer. Railroad Tycoon is certainly more involved in getting set up than science, but you can achieve it pretty fast with the right setup.

The third reason? Their bonuses slap. Would you rather keep your science building adjacency for the stronger science building for the next era, empowering specialists in that tile immediately and quickly starting a snowball into the next tech tree, or get 2 units in every conquered settlement when you probably spent the latter part of the age bulking the military anyway? What about keeping your religious founder belief? I guess if you really were able to keep a ton of the map converted, but your production queue will be sad if you focus on that, and it will feel like a game of whack a mole. I probably don't have to talk you into why we love golden age buildings keeping their adjacencies. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some other good ones on other trees. Fealty is a must pickup in antiquity, the cultural golden age in antiquity is just the cultural building version of the science one and is thus also potentially great (If you do get 7 wonders), and while keeping your cities cities is questionable, getting an extra gold trickle for every antiquity era trade route you made can be quite valuable monetarily if you set up a lot of trade routes. In all cases more attribute points are always strong.

Even if you decide to take a different golden age, and there are reasons to do so, there is very little reason not to fill out the scientific legacy path in the first two eras. We should be trying to fill out every legacy path to the extent we can, obviously, but there are some caveats to implementing their strategies within our empire. Building science is something you do every game to at least some extent, and the exploration legacy path in particular is something that every player, regardless of resource focus, is going to naturally develop towards.

Winning science is fairly straightforward. You just have to build four projects and fill out the modern tech tree. Oddly, you can do the first three projects in any order (meaning the transatlantic flight, the sound barrier, and the satellite) AND AT THE SAME TIME, so fool your friends that don't look for your launch pads with a last minute science push. None of these are wonders and therefore they can't be bought with the Mughals or benefit from other wonder building bonuses, unlike Geographical society and Manhattan. They are projects, and the Socialism Civic has a production boost towards projects.

This is your default for winning the game; other wincons can be faster in certain circumstances, but this one is pretty easy to understand, only requires defensive play if you're ahead, and rewards filling out the tech tree, which you're already doing. Pushing Econ or Ideology is a more deliberate choice, and pushing culture is happily relevant now for winning geographical society. Hell, even if you aren't going for science, the science projects provide bonuses. Not necessarily huge ones, but a little extra plane CS never hurt. You can use this logic as cover for scoring a few earlier science legacy points in the age. 'Oh, I just wanted to break the sound barrier for some plane CS' (I'm not sure who would actually fall for this, but you might get lucky...). Your win timing is realistically the time it takes you to complete the last project (usually the satellite) and then the launch. Since the other projects can be done earlier and simultaneously they don't actually slow down the wincon, but the satellite and launch pads are at rocketry. You tend to buy a launch pad so no need to account for that build time. There is an espionage action to sabotage the pad. I've never seen the AI use it and never used it myself so I don't know how exactly it functions, but the game just says it slows down the projects.

Here are the small bonuses for those curious. As mentioned Breaking the Sound Barrier gives you 1 plane CS universally. The Transatlantic Flight gives you a squadron commander which is only useful if you've already built like five of them. The satellite reveals the whole map like it does in every civ game, though this is typically irrelevant. You can look at the AI's land and try to figure out why their yields are what they are if you fancy, though.

Does the ubiquity and solitaire nature of Science mean the other legacy paths are bad or worse? Not necessarily, just that science should be in your game-plan in every game, even if you don't plan on winning that way in Modern. Next we'll take a look at the economic legacy path, which is still ubiquitous but perhaps less accessible than the science path, and certainly, in the case of treasure fleets, slower.

Golden Incentives: The Economic Legacy Path

The economic legacy paths are probably the second most ubiquitous paths in the game, in that all civs will at least want to attempt to make some progress in them, at least during the first few ages. Whether this is realistically achievable or not in the exploration age in particular will often come down to luck, and the AI's tendency to not properly use treasure fleet ships only makes the Exploration Era treasure rush look silly. They do use them properly... Sometimes, though.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What do you actually do to achieve these legacy paths? Despite the name, hoarding gold is not the answer, though a lot of gold will be required to quickly access the wincon in the modern era (and a bit more on top to pay for the bank offices).

The antiquity era is fairly easy to understand. You must slot in 20 resources. Emphasis on slot or equip. twenty individual resources must be equipped to towns/cities in your empire. Empire resources (horses, iron, wine in this era, etc.) do not count, nor does any unequipped bonus or city resource.

There are effectively two hoops to overcome when pursuing this legacy path. The first and by far the easier of the two is actually getting 20 separate resources that you can equip into cities and towns. Importantly, keep in mind that only bonus resources can be equipped to towns, while either type can go to cities. While many bonus resources (i.e. cotton or hides) are probably better when used on your cities, if you're trying to squeak up to 20 near the end of the age those bonuses might need to go to towns, especially if you've been cheaping out on merchants. Also, while completing this legacy path can be put off as long as you want (though the only reason to really do so is for multiplayer, to hide how many legacy points you're going to accrue. Especially important for single age games from what I gather, as a still unwashed AI bully at heart), you must keep in mind that you can ONLY change resource assignments on turns where you've gotten a new resource or added slots. This is why the game bothers you about it even when you don't have any resources to slot in. The town with the resource must also be connected up via road/fishing quay to utilize its resources elsewhere, which usually isn't a problem in antiquity, just randomly jank and annoying across the whole game. If you're having an issue with it, make more roads.

Most of the time your main limiter for this legacy path in antiquity is your resource slots. Cities get one more by default, but that will not be enough by itself. The Colossus and Monk's Mound give you extra slots, and the Mississippians in particular have very early access to the Mound. Sadly the Greeks are getting the Oracle on their civics tree, which is unfortunate for a variety of reasons. I find the AI will tend to build these wonders before you in Antiquity on higher difficulties even if you supersede them in culture pretty quickly unless you're Mississippi and intentionally push for the Mound just off the back of their initial advantage. Unfortunately for us they know to skip the Oracle. Regardless, you can get access to additional slots through Markets and lighthouses as well, and it is definitely worth building these buildings to attain this legacy path even if you don't have good placements otherwise. Camels are obviously the GOAT resource for this legacy path, and just generally overpowered until the modern age deletes them from existence, so grab or trade for them whenever possible.

The Exploration Age has you collecting 'treasure fleet resources'. You can't get these in antiquity. though you can still see them if you have enough scout bonuses that you are able to see into the new world from your starting continent. Cocoa, Sugar, Tea, and Spices are always treasure fleet resources, and Gold and Silver are also treasure fleet resources if they are on the other continent or the islands (Your original or traded for sources of gold and silver will still work as they did). Which one you have doesn't matter, they all work the same. Once you acquire these resources and fulfill a certain set of requirements, listed below, these towns or cities will start spawning treasure ships every ten turns on Standard.

These requirements are:
1. Putting a citizen onto the resource (duh)
2. Building a Fishing quay in the Settlement with the resource. If the settlement is landlocked then no amount of tea or neighboring coastal Settlements will give you treasure ships. Sadly, the Spanish Treasure cart did not exist.
3. Ensuring the settlement is connected to a fishing quay in your homeland. This should happen automatically if you have both quays and they are within 45 tiles of travel within one another. The Modern era has made me question how... consistent systems like these are, however. I haven't really had issues during exploration though.
4. You must research the Shipbuilding technology, which is the one that gives you tier 2 ships and allows all of your naval units to travel through Ocean without taking damage at full speed (besides individual combat land units anyway. You presumably already have cartography if you're settling distant lands, and funnily land units in an army can cross the ocean with that upgrade because the commander is a support unit, just not by themselves).

After you do this, the treasure ships will start spawning every 10 turns. Each ship is worth 1 point and 100 gold (feels like pennies) per resource, and you need 30 (10 per segment) to fill out the legacy path. If you kill an enemy treasure ship you automatically capture it even without corsairs btw.

My brother in Sid, listen. You will not accomplish the full legacy path in most games. Even with your age set to 'long', the amount of time this takes without a lot of treasure resources is just too long. I'd pausit you probably need 5 or more resources in most normal games to achieve this legacy path if you rush down shipbuilding, and that's pretty rare on higher difficulties without war. You can typically think of your treasure points in this way: You get 1 per resource per ten turns. If the exploration age lasts 80-90 turns (not uncommon if you're playing well on Standard age length) and you rush down shipbuilding so fast that you have that up and running just a couple dozen turns in, you're looking at 60 turns of treasure ships. Which means 6 'rounds' of treasure ships. Hence you need 5 resources. If you can do it faster than that then you may eek out a seventh round, which amazingly still requires 5 resources. Slower, and it's only downhill from there. Playing with long ages probably decreases your needs in this scenario to 3-4.

So what do we do about this, if we still want our economic legacy path and did not roll a godly island chain? Usually the only thing you can do is wage war to take more resources or treasure ships from other players. The AI does roll over and die at any mention of 'naval combat' so this isn't that hard. The AI's home continent on the other side of the pond will simply be too settled in most cases to get these resources otherwise. While I do find this fun, I kind of wish standard speed ages were more balanced around the 3-4 resources mark to make this legacy path more achievable to players that jump on the island chains quickly. Even if it was 3-4 several island chain spawns still wouldn't allow for this to work out anyway. This balance change would also be great if the AI ever evolved to the point where they consistently used the damn things and didn't hoard them around a random island city like little lost lambs. Otherwise there is no wonder or building or magic trick besides 'rushing the islands' (which you almost always do anyway) that can really help you accomplish this faster. 10 or 20 points is notably easier to get.

Econ Legacy Part 2: The Great Banker, Immortal Hero

Last up is the World Bank. The World Bank aka the Railroad tycoon legacy path is an interesting victory condition that gives players that have less developed science but still swathes of land and buckets of money an out for victory that can sometimes, if you're lucky, outpace a good science player. But probably not actually, like seriously do you know how fast you can speed through the modern era tech tree? Similar to treasure fleets, I'll list the requirements here:

1. You need the techs for railroads and factories. You may also be technically required to place at least 5 factories, but to be frank you'll need far more than that to win it anyway.
2. You'll need factory resources. You probably already have plenty. They're things like fish that I guess people just decided they were no longer willing to use unless canned or something. Given our citizens forget sheep exist in the exploration age, we should feel lucky they're even willing to use fish. These also give civ-wide bonuses.
3. You can build a railroad station anywhere with land, which sounds good but is basically a troll, as you can only build factories in settlements connected to the railroad network to your capital. This sounds like it should be simple, but the game is... weird about these railroad connections. Your best bet if things aren't working post-railroad is to just build a ton of connections with merchants to fishing quays on homeland settlements, ideally directly from the capital when possible. You can buy both of these buildings in towns. You want Ports for your islands and homeland coastal settles to link those up.
4. This isn't technically a requirement, but it is very important. Towns with at least 1 factory resource being worked (probably most commonly meaning 'fish') can receive a special town specialization called 'factory town'. This lets you buy the factory (but not the rail station or port) at half price. More crucially, this allows the town to slot 2 factory resources instead of 1. Double the Points!
5. After all this is set up, every factory resource you have equipped will generate one point per turn. You need 500 to spawn the great banker. If you're just beating the AI you can probably get away with 10 or more points (50 turns or less), but your best bets are at 20 or even 25 points per turn (25 or 20 turns). More than this is definitely possible but given the finicky systems involved even getting to 20 can be more of a struggle than it damn well should be.
6. Once the great banker spawns, you must move him to every capital (he can teleport to them for his turn) and use a special action to spend an unspecified amount of gold and influence to establish an office. This amount isn't very large in my experience, and is lowered with higher economic legacy points to what I assume is a minimum (At least that's what the game implies. If this implication is true I've always paid the minimum). Anyway, once you have established every office, you win on the spot. Importantly, to teleport to a capital, you must have revealed it already. So if you haven't found those capitals, get those scouts out at the start of modern. The Satellite project will also do it, but if you're building that fast enough for relevancy then using the great banker is just flexing.

The great banker is completely invincible, like explorers and missionaries. A nuclear detonation can not stop this man's dedication to Global Capitalism. The requirements also mean that this wincon takes two additional turns per other civ in the game (or 1 if the other capital is somehow in walking distance), which is potentially meaningful. Good science players can overcome middling railroad tycoon setups easily. Luckily for the average civ player, the AI is not a good science player. The AI will also basically never go for railroad tycoon (or really anything other than science and the virtually unwinnable culture victory), and will at best get a few halfhearted points for the factories they naturally put down. I think in my most recent game I saw Benji with 78 points when I launched the rocket, and that was an anomaly.

Oh, and because of how The Saint of Capitalism works, this Wincon is worse on faster speeds and better on slower speeds.

The Cultural Legacy Path: Spotlighting Civ 7's WORST Systems

Do you like religion? What about Artifacts? If so, I'd say the cultural legacy path was for you, but I'd be lying. These systems are very undercooked and not fun to play with, and in fact the current modern cultural legacy path is virtually impossible to win in a standard game. Despite the jank these legacy paths are mercifully easy to understand.

Antiquity is the least botched of the three, though it is actually probably harder to achieve than the exploration cultural legacy path. Build 7 Wonders to fill out the path, or 2/4 for partial credit. This inherently makes antiquity era wonders more valuable than future era wonders, and encourages you to plan your game around making a certain handful of wonders rather than just ignoring them entirely. Luckily, because the AI don't have advanced starts and don't immediately rush to wonders, combined with the fact that some of these wonders have what I would call 'specific' placement requirements, you can actually get some of these on Deity. You tend to have better luck with the earliest wonders rather than the later ones (this is generally true for most ages when playing from behind). Things like the Colossus and Monk's Mound tend to go before you even get to their requisite civic, even if you do generate very high culture (Why? The difficulty overview section has the answers).

I don't think this usually changes up your strategy. Maybe it means you build the Oracle or something else you ordinarily wouldn't to hit the next Wonder tier, but that is a pretty intuitive decision in any case. The Cultural golden age here is really strong if you have strong amphitheatre adjacencies, doing to them what the scientific one does to Academies, though it is worth noting that more culture access is more ubiquitous for civ bonuses than more Science is. The other effect, a bit of culture and happiness on Wonders, isn't really worth taking over multiple attribute points.

it's very unlikely that you're going to hit the full seven on higher difficulties (and it can take up enough real estate that it's undesirable to do so), but getting two or four is very doable, and certain earlier wonders are generically pretty good to have in all situations, like Gate of All Nations and The Hanging Gardens as easy examples. If you're trying to develop a strong cultural strategy to blast ahead then dipping for four total wonders is pretty reasonable. We will be discussing the wonders themselves in their own sections.

Exploration Age culture play, which is relic gathering, is pretty easy to understand when you've been told what to do. Basically, to found a religion you have to get the piety civic (which gives you a boost to overbuilding on one policy and ergo should be gotten early anyway) and build or buy a temple anywhere. If you aren't the first religion this should be on your capital just in case an enemy civ picks the relics on capital conversions belief, but otherwise it can be anywhere and the game will tell you when a religion is founded. You then choose a founder belief which determines how you gather relics (the UI implies you can get multiple Founder beliefs. You should assume you will not), and a follower belief which gives you bonuses based on enemy civs following your religion. The follower belief should probably just be the one you want the AI to have the least, because only the truly masochistic spend their production queues trying to out-convert the AI.

Then you go converting enemy cities and gaining relics. Get 12 relics and place them to fill out the legacy path. Several techs and civics and the House of Wisdom also give you extra ways to get relics, as do specific civ bonuses.

The simplest way to do this is usually just to speedrun piety and instantly buy a temple to found your religion first, then to take the founder belief that gives you two relics on capital conversions. The AI isn't very good about founding religions on their capitals even if they do found it before you get there (and they often do not, even on Deity). If they do you can't convert that city, which I find odd specifically because you can still train your missionaries in cities with temples that follow other religions (which makes deflecting enemy missionary conversions very simple if you want to). Anyway, you do this and immediately poop out 2-3 missionaries to convert enemy capitals, then ignoring the mechanic for the rest of the game by picking up any missing relics from other sources, unless you want the percentage bonuses from Rationalism in which case you'll have to babysit the religions of your cities (but NOT towns). Doing it this way is not only easy and a middle-finger to one of the most under-cooked systems in civ 7, but it also makes one of the potential crises pretty much free.

Note that the roadmap says holy cities will be convertible in the next patch, meaning the above strategy is optimal for filling out the legacy path. Other beliefs may be able to produce more total relics in specific situations however.

If the city is converted first, you'll need to convert both the rural and urban population to flip it (I have seen people say it only has to be the bigger share, but I do not believe this is the case). Once the capital is converted you can just let the AI convert it back, it doesn't matter once you have the relics.

Finally, let's talk explorers. They're also really easy to understand, just seemingly jank and unfinished. You get Natural History, you build museums and explorers, you send the latter to dig up Artifacts and to study continents at universities or museums on those continents for more dig sites. Once you run out of those relics you get hegemony and research at a museum or university to get, err, more dig sites for artifacts. Eventually there will not be any artifacts left in the world. You can't steal them, trade for them, or develop your own artifacts in any other way aside from the odd narrative event.

This is still broadly how it works, though you can dig at natural wonders now too I believe. I will make an update about strategy regarding this since certain aspects of it were changed in the most recent patch, such as making explorers more expensive (meaning carpet bombing continents with explorers is presumably less efficient). I’ll also be making some minor changes in other sections when I get my artifact dig on to similarly reflect the changes.

By the way, just so we’re clear as I may not find every time I’ve mixed the two up in this guide and don’t want to cause confusion, the following is how it actually is in game:

Religion great work: relic
Explorer great work: artifact

Conquest and The Red Bar: The Best Back-Up Wincon (for AI)

Finally, we have the red bar, a measure of conquest and settlement. A sign of your willingness to deal with 8 additional CS, 160% additional unit build speed, and 33% water damage defense (which exists entirely so you don't roll over the AI navally. You still do, it just takes longer).

Antiquity is a simple measure of settlements. Yours count for 1 point, theirs (taken via war) count for 2. You need 12 points to fill out the legacy path. 12 is way higher than your settlement limit is for any civ, so you are expected to kill people to max this out. The most important bonus here is not for the full 12, which is a golden age that gives you 2 free units on any conquered settlements (and is probably not worth it in most games). The most important is Fealty, a 9 point unlock that gives you a permanent +2 bonus to settlement limit for 2 points. You will ideally be getting this bonus in every single game, and you do not need to go to war for it. If you want to avoid the settlement cap malus, pre-train Settlers and put them where you want them until the age comes near its end. Then settle them immediately, and reap the rewards. You might have to settle them earlier sometimes, either because an AI is walking towards it or because you rolled the barb crisis, which will spawn hostile independent powers which block settling like all independent powers do. This isn't that big of a deal this late into the age, but it's still worth mentioning that you'll have to deal with happiness downsides sometimes. You should get this bonus every game if you have any settling space at all. It's literally free land.

The Explorer one combines religion (oh no) with distant land conquests. According to the game, each new settlement in distant lands counts as 1; 2 if it's conquered, 2 if it's your religion, 4 if both are true. You don't have to kill anyone to get some decent progress, but similar to the first age you'll probably need to do some war to max it out. The best way to make some progress without war is to drop a few missionaries once you've gotten your distant land settlements and convert them. You will have to maintain the points at age end, so just sit missionaries on the cities to convert them later. You can still take the religious tolerance path of the crisis, either by prebuilding them, using the policy card to give them back a charge, or just assigning two to each settlement. Two missionaries per settlement also makes for an instant conversion, meaning you're golden for a last second conversion. I... guess this does fly in the face of the 'ignore the religious mechanic' advice from the last section a bit. The bonus for 10 production in distant lands settlements can be a fair bit of raw production, but I tend to be just as happy if not moreso when taking more expansionist or military points.

Finally, ideology, or your get out of jail option in some games. Have you ever played a Deity game where an AI somehow manages to create world record tier yields? Did Confucius show up mid-exploration era with 18 settlements and 2-3k culture and science per turn as he did on the fateful day of my first Deity win? Perhaps he did. Listen, even if you match that, and some characters and builds certainly can, you still might not beat Confucius to space, due to the 40% extra cost of techs and civics on Deity. You'd have to have more like 5k per turn. Yeah, Confucius is an AI and will waste some time getting there, but do you want to take that risk? Probably not. And if you don't have astronomical yields to compare to that? Playing the game out peacefully is asking to lose.

So how can we beat that? Well, to be honest, if Confucius did just ignore everything and rush to space like any sensible human would, you probably couldn't. Luckily, he won't. He'll get there reasonably fast but he won't get there as fast as a human with those yields would. There is one option that will get you to a victory quicker aside from a very strong econ setup: Ideology. AKA World War 2. The way it works is that every settlement conquered is worth ideology points. You get 1 with no ideology (so don't even bother before you get one), 2 if you have one and the opponent doesn't or has the same one (usually this is what you expect to get), or 3 if you have a different one from the opponent. This counts every time you take a settlement the first time, and is not lost if the AI takes the settlement back. It also crucially counts settlements received in Peace deals, and the AI will give up land if you're killing more units than they are and/or are taking land. Once you get your 20 points, you can build the manhattan project which is a wonder that unlocks nukes and allows you to build Operation Ivy. Build the latter (which is a project, not a wonder. Confusing, right? But basically that only means anything for bonuses and the Mughals) to instantly win. Despite the AI's 33% universal every difficulty Water Defense, and Deity's 8 bonus CS, the best way to do this for a lagging player is the Navy (also planes if you get to them, but that takes longer).

Why? because Navies can take coastal settlements quickly, and because if we realize this is happening in the exploration age and start preparing early by building fleet commanders to carry over a ton of boats, we can have a massive navy that we upgrade into dreadnoughts at Combustion going into the Modern Era. Our land army can contribute too, but is often fine just holding the line with landships and ranged units/arty. We rush our ideology while rushing Combustion and war dec the moment we grab it, having denounced our target(s) earlier. This tends to end up in a you against the entire lobby scenario every time, even if the other AI didn't get along before that point. That's fine, more for you. Blitzkrieg all their island and coastal settlements while the army pushes for what they can and holds the line, then peace out for more settlements (ask for whatever gives you the most total settlements. We don't care about quality) and get to 20 points. Build Manhattan and Ivy and win. Prussia is probably the best for this because they'll get big free CS bonuses from fighting the whole lobby, though the Mughals get a universal 3 CS in their civics tree and can buy Manhattan as well, shaving off 6 or so turns. Oil is your best friend here. This allowed me to overcome god-tier Confucius when my yields were, admittedly, kind of crap, and it will allow you to turn around otherwise losing Deity games.

Quick Adjacency and Specialist Discussion

For the most part, there are four kinds of adjacencies:
1. Warehouses, like the Granary and Brickyard, only affect tiles and have no adjacencies
2. Happiness and Cultural buildings like Mountains and Natural Wonders. In fact, if they are next to a mountain that is also a natural wonder, it counts twice. Note the happiness buildings in antiquity are the Arena and Villa. The altar does not benefit from mountains, or any of the other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the civilopedia says it does. It is lying, it only gets wonder adjacencies and its pantheon effect on the current patch.
3. Gold and food buildings like Navigable rivers and coast. Some of these (i.e. the lighthouse) are placed on water directly and still benefit from adjacent tiles, not their own.
4. Science and Military Production buildings (stuff like the barracks, not stuff like the saw pit) like resources. This goes for the Shipyard as well, even though it is also placed on water.
5. Everything aside from warehouses likes Wonders

Also, the palace gains a +1 science and +1 culture adjacency with Quarters (any two Current Age or Ageless buildings stacked on one tile. Obsoleted buildings do not count).

Most unique buildings either have special adjacencies (i.e. the Egyptian Mastaba gains gold per adjacent desert tile) or none aside from wonders. When I implement a civ and leader bonus section in a later version of this guide I'll talk about these in more depth in each section.

When a non-ageless building goes to the next age, it loses all adjacencies and only provides base yields. These base yields are always a specific value (2 in exploration, 3 in Modern). This is most notable with a building like the monument, which gives you 2 influence in exploration rather than 1 in antiquity. For the most part, however, the game expects you to overbuild on these buildings, and you often should if you placed them on strong adjacencies. Overbuilding is when you put a current age building over a previous age building. You can not overbuild on ageless buildings, nor can you overbuild on golden age academies, amphitheaters, or universities in the next age. (You can overbuild the golden age antiquity buildings in Modern. Presumably if we ever get a fourth age, we'll be able to overbuild the golden age universities as well). There is always an early social policy that gives you bonus production towards overbuilding, further encouraging the mechanic. This policy card should be used if you plan on overbuilding in your cities, as it's effectively a universal production bonus towards buildings when doing so.

You should generally try not to overbuild on things that give you a rare specific yield, most notably influence. This means that it's often ideal to use worse adjacency spots for buildings like the villa and monument, so you can just keep them in the next era, and it's also optimal to put them together. Slap the Arena and Amphitheatre in the 4 mountain adjacency tile, let the monument and villa sit together on the 2 adjacency one. Why is it better to keep them together if you're not sacrificing much? Because we generally want more districts to count as 'quarters', and putting these together only prevents one quarter, not two. Note that this is a trade-off, and in some games and cities you will simply just want the higher adjacency instead, even if it means overbuilding those buildings next era.

Are Adjacencies important? Yes. By themselves they are just extra yields, however they also interact with specialists. Specialists provide 2 science and 2 culture at base, as well as half of all of the adjacencies from that quarter. 2 science buildings bringing in 5 science from adjacencies each? That's 5 extra science per specialist. In the science example, the golden age science buildings are useful because your initial science building is always available at the first tech, allowing your specialists to immediately return to full form after a single tech and quick overbuild in the new era. Similarly, ageless special buildings with relevant yields should be placed with as much of an adjacency as you can manage, because their agelessness means that their specialists are always receiving the full benefits of the building. Specialists have a maintenance cost of 2 food and 2 happiness (which you can think of as a malus versus rural citizens) which should clue you in to their potential power. For generic play, bonuses that impact specialists and allow for more specialists are very potent. Specialists also get some insane bonuses in the modern era in particular from ideologies, and your ideology pick generally comes down to whichever specialist bonuses you want. For my money, the 6 gold per turn and 3 production per turn from Fascism is extremely potent and is very useful for any wincon and self defense, though due to the socialism project bonus communism also performs very well. We uh... meme on Democracy, basically.

The tl;dr is that the actual yield output from specialists is very high, that boosting them with bonuses is very potent, that cities should start developing specialists as soon as possible once important rural tiles are worked, and that adjacencies are very strong at least partially because specialists are so strong. For this reason, while having a few cities that can handle production is important, the most important deciding factor for making a town into a city is its potential adjacencies and ability to fill those spots with specialists. After all, you can always supplement low production with gold if it's not a wonder or project, and these cities only really need to buy a few buildings before spending the rest of an age placing specialists and slowly building a few more buildings or whatever else you may want.

Strategy at the Founding

I wanted to touch on this in a section before I jumped into attribute points and the Wonders, which I plan on being the main meat of the guide until I go back and add in Leaders, Mementos, and Civilizations. Honestly, there are really four kinds of rural starts you can have in the game aside from resource tiles. Note that this section generally assumes you're playing Continents or Continents Plus. You, for example, may favor sailing more if you're on an archipelago.

1. Farms, which tend to be the worst. They tend to have higher food than production and with a building that gives more food (the granary). Tends to take you through Pottery first, which is nice.
2. Fishing Boats, often on navigable rivers rather than coasts. Great if you're, say, Egypt. The fishing boat production pantheon also isn't usually taken by the AI, and you get an immediate 2 food on these from fishing and a quay. However, taking Fishing first is kind of dubious simply because it gives you stuff you don't need and doesn't lead into Writing or Masonry.
3. Woodcutters, which takes you through animal husbandry. These often have a combination of food and production, and sometimes some science or culture. The saw pit gives production rather than food which is largely desirable at this stage (and tbh forever). Furthermore, taking animal husbandry first lets you train slingers or your unique ranged unit, which is more desirable than training only warriors. As I'll discuss, you do want to train some military once you've gotten a couple of scouts out, and while you do want some melee, the early ranged units tend to feel very good for knocking out Independents. Civs with Unique ranged UUs tend to like this opening better, the Mayans in particular will usually start in a rainforest too and will usually make use of this opening.
4. Mines, which you put down on rough terrain. These tend to interact very well with openings that create a burst of food, like that 1 expansionist point + 100 food on expansionist point usage memento combination. These also ask you to open Pottery, but to also then follow through to Masonry ASAP for another +1. It's good, even outside of the food burst opening, especially if you have a tile like Kaolin to help you get to 5 pop sooner.

Generally you pick one of these based on terrain and rural options, and you'll tend to get a terrain type based on opening. Don't mix and match more than necessary. Egypt is going to take a navigable river opening with fishing boats most of the time for example, while Greece is going to get that rough terrain start (they have a rough terrain start bias, since one of their unique buildings favors rough terrain). Isabella is going to get a natural wonder 90% of the time and is usually incentivized to take those tiles. Since those tiles are expedition bases and don't benefit from any of the above, you can probably just swing into Masonry early for a good monument. Also, volcanoes and flood tiles tend to become very good rural tiles, but can be a money sink early if you're unlucky.

As for build order? Scout's up first, and is typically followed up by another scout. If you're smack in the middle of the continent a third scout wouldn't go amiss either, but I think on most starts this tends to be overkill and doesn't result in that many extra discoveries compared to 2. In fact, it can cause you to meet enemy civs too quickly to do a friendly greeting to all of them. If you have extra sight for them, often via Imago Mundi, you definitely don't need more than the 2, but should still get at least 2 on your typical continents plus start to ensure you collect the huts you find.

After this, unless you did not find any independent powers nearby at all, you should start building military. Why? Hostile Independent Powers are significantly easier to take out at the start of the game and, similar to huts, dispersing one is a massive power spike early. If you spit out 3-4 military units (which is around what you want unless the power is in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ spot) and take out a military power, you're instantly getting 100 production. At the start of the game. Huts will not give you more than 15 max. This is enough to power through your settlers or even a wonder. If you don't do this and half-ass your military, you'll need to spend more time and military on defeating these independent powers later, Will sometimes be forced to buy a slinger or something to defend a town, and sometimes have to spend a huge handful of influence to mollify them over thirty whole turns (though they do truce out in 15). Generally, your suzerainties are better spent on the nice independent powers that take half as long to befriend, though even these should be murdered if nearby. The free yields killing them gives are insane at the start, as is the Army commander EXP if you get discipline, and why I think 3 scout openings are incorrect in most cases. Even the 100 gold from mercantile independent powers, which is far and away the worst bonus you can get, is very powerful early.

I also think opening Discipline versus high difficulty AI on a typical civ may actually be better sometimes because of this. It's not that altars and pantheons are bad, it's that the AI will tend to take the same few every game anyway, that you can only miss out on 7 on the max game size, and that the AI will tend to get them first anyway before you even with several huts, unless they opened discipline. This way you get your hands on that Army Commander and get more EXP onto it. You could even slap this Commander on the blue path and take 5% bonus yields right from the start, or the logistics path to make military more quickly, instead of the green path which is perhaps more typical for fighting the AI. Though do note that the blue path only pays off in the fighting department at its 4th promotion, turning the commander into an excellent leader for ranged and siege units for the typical upgrade. The middle upgrades are crap. Commendations do mean that you should stick to whichever path you start on anyway, though.

What is pretty much always incorrect is opening an early granary at this phase. I'm not saying 'never build it', but that building it is simply wrong at the very start of the game. Even if you get your requisite military out before you hit 5 population, your city would usually be better handled pumping out a saw pit or brickyard. The granary should be built in cities where it provides a fair bit of bonus food once your other priorities are handled, and for a beginning city that tends to be scouts, military, settlers, production increases, and perhaps a nice monument and/or library if you don't need to stretch out for a spot for one.

It probably goes without saying, but you should start pumping out Settlers pretty much as soon as you hit five population. You should aim for at least 3, as we assume irrigation's settlement limit will come online soon. If, and this is a rule until you are done settling entirely which usually means 'until the latter half of the exploration age', there is good land that you want, you should settle over your settlement limit. Don't overdo it, you should be chasing more settlement limit and probably shouldn't go over it more than 2 as a rule of thumb. But don't just sit there and let the AI take it because you're not willing to suffer the happiness malus. Even if it costs you yields, and it often will, you should take good land. If there's an independent power on that land, and you can settle it, kill the independent power. If you don't want to settle it then, prioritize converting that independent power into a city state. This effectively reserves the land since IPs still prevent settling within 3 tiles, allowing you to bank it without going further over your settlement limit for a later conversion. Oh and, as an aside, the game doesn't seem to let you buy settlers in antiquity for whatever reason.

Food!

I wanted to discuss Food and city growth because it's a confusing topic in civilization 7, and my suspicion that I was glazing Hanging Gardens a little too hard made me dive down a rabbit hole.

The tl;dr is that you should be using citizens in cities for production and specialists, that you shouldn't build raw food buildings except in small cities for their food yield (the ones that give growth rate i.e. the bath and hospital are fine if not high priority) to get those cities up to speed faster, and that growth rate bonuses do more to make citizens faster than up your effective citizen cap, but they do still help your effective citizen cap slightly. If you're deciding between a market and garden for that nice water adjacency tile, go for the market.

Here is an excellent video exploring the topic by Generalist Gaming

Basically, the price of a new citizen in a city is based on the number of placed population and current age (I am also fairly certain that if the city produces a migrant through population growth that this also increases the number, though you have to usually very intentionally build a city or town to produce migrants to make this happen) and it increases exponentially. Though buildings increase the shown population number, these do not add to the price of new citizens. Later Ages have faster growth, not slower.

If you've noticed that your cities tend to have growth spurts when you do an age transition, this is why. Civ 7 effectively soft-caps population growth with its growth equation.

How do growth rate bonuses factor in? The food requirement in a city is divided by 1 + the growth rate modifier apparently (except for Factory Fish which seem to be bugged in the OP kind of way). This is the same as multiplying the incoming food by the 1 + the growth rate in practice as far as I can tell, though I guess this means it’s multiplicative in practice and not additive with (the rare) actual bonuses that increase % food yields. There may also be some marginal real difference for carrying over food with the placing specialist perk.

In practice your food is mostly going to be coming from towns. This equation affects growing towns as well, with their special growing town effect making town growth 66% as expensive. Similar to cities, towns should stop growing when growing becomes ineffective. If you don't want to do a deep dive on the math for this, I'd just rule of thumb that if it's around 8 turns or less to grow into a desirable tile, or if you want to keep growing for resources, let it grow. Also, Switch back to growing town later in the age if you want more tiles, as the food is less valuable if your cities are large.

Production, even though it is turned into gold by towns, remains relevant throughout an age, while high food providing towns only remain relevant if you are continuing to make more cities that notably benefit from food provided by towns. Because of how the softcaps make food worth less for cities that are larger, food is worth more for smaller cities as a hard rule. This means you are indirectly wasting a ton of food if you do not start siphoning it into new, smaller cities. A potato in a large city is worth fewer calories than a potato in a small city.

This can make wonder valuations more difficult if they give food or effectively give food. Luckily that's not all that many wonders. Expect my Hanging Gardens section in particular to be revised. It's still good, just not great.

This also means that food giving resources should be swapped to smaller growing towns and smaller cities as soon as possible as well. This is most notable with Dates, Fish, and Kaolin. Once the city's growth slows down, swap these to other, smaller cities or towns that need the growth. Unless they're enabling Tomb of Askia anyway.

As a result, getting citizens onto desirable tiles rather than less desirable ones is super important, and that farms and the granary are bad in cities past early into the game. Baths, Hospitals, and Canneries all give growth rate and effectively multiply all food, and are therefore more desirable, though not what I would call 'priorities'.

Incidentally this means that Migrants are worth more food if used on huge cities or towns. Unfortunately this is counterbalanced by the fact that Migrants can only go onto rural tiles and can not be specialists. Free pops from other sources (i.e. Dogo Onsen) are similarly worth more food in big settlements.

So, what about Farming Town? It's still good, especially if we remember that Towns can send food to multiple cities and thus feed smaller cities. However, small farming towns are not efficient, for the same reason Gardens aren't. If the Town is half and half or something, you might be better off taking the extra gold from mining town or bonus from some other specialization (the Influence one is particularly noteworthy). It's not like the food it already provides just disappears. Look at the absolute food you'd get from Farming town before grabbing it (Ideally we'll have a UI mod that does that for us one day). Also, if you have special improvements, leaving a town as a growing town to get more tiles for more of these can be worth a lot more than specializing it, especially if the specialization is just for sending more food, because towns are typically smaller and therefore use food more efficiently. I feel this with Monasteries in particular.

Town Specializations

I want to talk about this in depth. Before we get things under-way, however, there is something I want to say because it is an extremely huge misconception in the community.

Specialized Towns:

NEVER
EVER
NEVER EVER
NEVER
GROW

Even if they are not connected to a city.

The food is entirely wasted. Yes, the UI lies to you and says it will grow in X turns. You can test this yourself, you can force end turn and stare at unconnected towns. They will never grow, no matter how many times you end your turn looking at it. I have tested this multiple times, making sure to attempt to grow everything that could grow every turn before force skipping the turn. I even tested it right before writing this section.

If you think this has happened to you, what has most likely happened is that your population has been artificially reduced by something (floods for example). When this pillaging happens, if the towns population is reduced below 7, it will instantly revert to growing town, because it can no longer be specialized. It will not automatically re-specialize. Alternatively, it's probably Dogo Onsen being bugged, or some other odd interaction.

I have seen and still see so many people say that 'towns will still grow if they're not connected!' I don't blame you if you thought this and spread this. The UI is lying to you and the game's population mechanics can make it seem like the town is growing. The town is not growing. Please do not continue to spread this misinformation. Hopefully the civ devs do change this at some point, because it's kind of dumb.

Also, the game tells you this, but you can't change the specialization to a different one (besides back to growing town). The game looks like it will let you change it by presenting all the options if you try to change it on the same turn you specialize it, but sadly this is another case of the game lying to you. So you can't check your yield differences by choosing one then another, etc.

With that out of the way, here are the town specializations and some discussion:

Growing Town
+50% growth rate in this town (this means growing the town is 66% as expensive as growing a city of the same size). Town isn’t considered specialized and uses its own food to grow, rather than sending it (or trashing it if unconnected).

Importantly, this means all food generated by the town is worth 50% more to that town. As we discussed in the previous section, food requirements for pops grow exponentially. So you want your town to grow to a specialization and to grow as long as growing is still good, but you also want to specialize the town to get your cities growing, as city pops are worth more than town pops largely.

The tl;dr is you usually just want to swap off this once you are able to specialize a town and don't have any more highly valuable tiles to grow to. Then, when your cities are growing slowly, you want to swap back onto this to grab some more tiles, thus continuing to use food efficiently. I usually rule of thumb that if the town takes less than 8 turns to grow, I want to grow it some more, and that if my cities are up in the 20s and 30s to grow I probably want to go back to growing town. Alternatively, if you see a very juicy resource tile or even just a high output fertilized tile or something, you can let it grow some more.

Farming/Fishing Town
+1/2/3 (by age) Food to Farms, Pastures, Plantations, and Fishing Boats.

Most People's default, and it's fairly obvious why. Town Food is worth the same as City Food, and Farming Town makes these towns more efficient per tile at generating food. If a Town has a lot of food tiles, this is the obvious pick, and is especially common for fishing boat towns which often have little else to work. You don't want cities working food, so have your towns do it for them.

The downside? Food loses value as the age goes on and cities get bigger (see previous section). What does this mean for your play? That if you're going to micro your towns at all, you should swap them back onto growing town when you notice that your cities have slowed down their growth cycle noticeably. Growing small towns is more efficient per pop than sending the food to large cities, but of course city pops are more valuable than town pops due to often being specialists or contributing to production, so even when it's a bit slow it's often still worth feeding your cities.

Think of your town usage as a swap on. You typically want to swap to this specialization very early into an era to grow your cities. When that starts to seem notably inefficient, you should swap them back to growing town to pick up a few more tiles for the next age. If you upgrade somewhere else to another city, you should swap back onto your specializations to grow that city.

Farming town actually gets better in later ages, due to growth costing less universally and these specializations providing more. As a rule this specialization is good if the town is working a lot of these kinds of tiles (duh), but if the town is half and half, look at the actual raw food pay-out. Getting 4 extra food from this is bad, and you should choose a different specialization in that case. Remember, you don't lose the food you already have if you don't take this, you only lose the bonus food this would provide you. Feels noticeably weak in Antiquity a lot of the time, just due to the +1 per tile feeling minor.

Mining Town
+1/2/3 Production on Camps, Woodcutters, Clay Pits, Mines, and Quarries

The less popular brother of the above, all town production is turned into gold. Gold is very strong in this game, and you do need it to get buildings in towns or to amp up a new city, but turning production into gold is still worse than just using production.

Most of the analysis is very similar to the above, just with the above improvements instead. Have lots of mines? Take this. Worth more gold in later eras and all that jazz. Notably, later era buildings cost more production and therefore more gold, and the ratio of gold to production never changes without purchasing bonuses. Therefore, while food gets better at making pops in later eras, gold doesn't get any better at making production. As a result I tend to only like to take this in truly production tile focused towns, and will often want to take something else if I don't have that. Many of my production focused towns end up as cities because production is worth 4 times as much in a city as a town, so this doesn't get picked that often. Similar to farming town, I'm also more likely to want this specialization if I'm in a later era.

Usually mining towns don't get up to speed as fast as or end up as big as farming towns for obvious reasons. Make sure to check your real yields for this one, as only picking up a small handful of gold off of this would make it far worse than other options.

Fort Town
Units In Town's borders heal +5 HP per turn, and walls in this town gain 25 HP

I don't have to tell you how to use this, right? If you're holding the line at a town, specialize it to fort town, even without the walls. If you want a dedicated fort town then spread out all your buildings into different tiles, rather than making them quarters, and slap walls on all of them. That isn't really worth doing but it's worth noting.

The main strategy around fort town is just not specializing a town you expect to get attacked in the future so that you can make it a fort town. After all, if you're a farming town you can't be a fort town. It's some extra security, and you're only sacrificing a few yields to do it if you decide to make something a fort town early. Of course, since the AI will attack you if you declare war, you can make a fort town and just wardec the AI and have them try to rush it. Generally unnecessary but an option to help even the odds if you're worried about holding the line in those kinds of situations.

Town Specializations Pt. 2

Urban Center
+1 Culture and Science on Quarters in this town

This one, unlike Mining Town and Farming Town, is worse in later ages, though honestly it's hard for it to be good at the start either. Yes it's 2 pretty strong yields per quarter, but you already have to buy 2 buildings to enable it. This is a case where understanding what the yields of your other options will be worth is important. If your Farming town and mining town are weak and you're mixing a saw pit and granary in a tile or something, and the town also wouldn't make a good trade outpost, then this can be the best value pick. In antiquity at least. It helps that Hub Town isn't available till exploration either.

It's pretty rare that a town is bad enough at everything else that it wants this, though it's the most likely in antiquity and basically impossible after that. If they want to make this an actual choice in 90% of cases it should be 1/2/3 culture and science on buildings methinks. Right now it just takes too much to get it going.

Yes, it does look at quarters like everything else does (current age or ageless buildings), which is another knock against it, not that you're typically choosing this. As a result it doesn't really work with previous age cities becoming towns either, as most of their quarters cease being quarters. Theoretically interesting, sadly weak in practice due to the buy in, lack of scaling, and lack of building options for towns.

Honestly, I feel like cities should have specializations, with (a better version of) this being one of them. I think that would fit a lot better.

Trade Outpost
+2 Happiness on each resource tile in this town and +5 trade route range. Unavailable in Modern

I am not sure if the trade route range is universal or only with trade routes that would link up with this town. If it's the former, that's a very strong bonus in antiquity specifically.

Pretty easy value proposition here. Lots of resources? Gain extra smiles and trade route range. If the trade route range isn't universal this is harder to stack up against other typical choices, but if it is you probably want at least one of these in antiquity. Happiness is pretty easy to come by in other ways, but trade route range definitely isn't. I'd still be tempted to take it in 4 or 5 resource towns even if the range is not universal, ideally ones with more diverse resources where farming or mining town aren't appealing, as that's getting close to a wonder's worth of happiness, albeit the payoff is more for global happiness since towns don't tend to have happiness issues. Often towns with that many resources end up as cities because they have high science adjacencies eventually.

Less helpful in Exploration as you tend to have more smiles, not less, and have more trade route range by default (and also typically more access to sea trade routes as well, which don't tend to have range issues).

Hub Town
+2 Influence per settlement connected. Available in Exploration and Modern

People know it's good, and even so I think it's kinda slept on. It's easy for this to be worth a dozen influence with the right town connections. The big problem? It's very challenging to determine how much this is going to be worth unless it's like a random town in the middle of your continent with roads to everything. This is a focus I'd choose more if I had a mod that told me how much influence it would give or an easy way to determine all of the Town's settlement connections. As it stands I don't tend to choose it not because it's bad, it's easily the strongest one in any decent town for it, but because I don't know how much a town will provide from this in a lot of cases.

Religious Site
+2 happiness and +1 relic slot on a temple in this town. Only available in Exploration.

You pick this for your relic legacy path, either because you need the extra slot or you want to save 500 gold on another temple. 500 gold is worth more than mining town will often provide in this era. These are the only reasons to choose this one.

Factory Town
Half price Factory Purchase, +1 Resource slot in this town. This resource slot can be used for a second factory resource. Naturally, only available in Modern.

You choose this either because you're trying to railroad tycoon in which case it's mandatory everywhere that can choose it due to double factory resources, or because you want to setup another factory for a couple more resource bonuses somewhere on the cheap. Remember that this doesn't reduce the cost of the Port or Railroad building, which you will need to make a rail connection to buy the factory. Another fairly clear cut decision. The latter case is fairly rare, mostly because modern is so short that investing in a couple more universal bonuses with a ton of gold is often questionable and unneeded to win.

Attribute Points: Notable Power Breakpoints

There are six attribute trees, each with nodes with varying levels of power. Not every node is created equally, and so it is highly advantageous to understand which nodes you generally want to be building towards. You can get a ♥♥♥♥ ton of points in this game on all the different trees. I'm not going to describe every single trait; I think you're enough of a grown up to figure out what 1 science per age on your palace does. I will mainly be focusing on break points, or nodes that feel particularly strong. We'll be going left to right. Leaders get special nodes in these trees as an aside after leveling them up, based on their leader type. These are noted as legend unlocks. Many of these are crap, and I won't be discussing them here. If I do it will be within its own section, and is generally low priority.

Cultural

I tend to favor the left side of the tree on culture.

-10% production towards wonders is a good generic upgrade, though is basically useless in the Modern era on settlements. Gives you an edge, especially early game, towards getting the wonders you want. Civic mastery speed also does this indirectly, as many wonders are on civic masteries.

-Civic mastery culture early can get you to stealing civics faster. It's also a lot of bonus culture for hunting certain wonders.

-Your highest culture cities tend to have wonders. Once that culture is online, the leftmost node is a lot. Takes a little longer to feel good. Should not be thought of as universal, as many cities, especially those that come online after antiquity and are more secondary, won’t build wonders, when your powerhouse cities are more likely to build several.

-1 culture in settlements for each resource assigned to them is very strong early. This node also leads into alliance culture which is great later. Less important later, and due to the, err, erasure of so many assignable resources, is weakened even more than you'd expect it to be in Modern. Great node for Tomb of Askia plays, as is every other node that gives a similar bonus.

-Culture from specialists is great because specialists are great. Don't feel like you need to stay at 3 or fewer cities, but this does incentivize you to either have a decent number of them or 3 or less. You shouldn't be building for this with 4 cities for example, if you can help it.

-% Resources (in this case culture) per alliance tends to represent about a 20% increase if you're getting along with the AI, at least unless they start dogpiling you in Modern. Players who want these bonuses may want to play ball too to pull ahead of the lobby. If you're in a vampiric relationship where the runaway has allied you for these kinds of bonuses, don't stay in the alliance.

I like it if I can get the full six points to take the whole left side along with Alliances broadly speaking. It is worth noting that 3 cultural points for the resource bonus can be kind of hard early when it's the most powerful.

Diplomatic

You might be tempted to go right side here since it opens up with the always powerful influence. However, your direction on this tree is quite an important choice and will depend on your play plan and style.

-Let's talk about the free 1 influence. It's 1 influence. While it won't knock your socks off, this is probably the most that 1 resource per age is going to be worth. Every bit helps, and this is a monument's worth of influence. However, unlike every other bonus, this ONLY works on your palace. So this is only ever worth 1/2/3 influence, meaning it falls off very hard. Of course, none of these opening nodes are stellar or anything, but the comparison is worth making. I actually tend to favor the other opener here, which is why I've talked at length about this one.

-Resource happiness is nice though less good than other resource nodes largely. Every bit helps you stay more comfortable above your settlement limit though, and this probably represents 2 or more happiness per settlement if you include the opener you had to take to get here.

-The main reason you go down the left path is for the 50% celebration length, which is a super strong bonus. Getting 5 more turns (on standard) out of your celebrations means that much more % income. It is, however, worth noting that celebrations don't stack, and your next one only starts after your first one ends. So you have to wait a bit longer for social policies here if your happiness is high enough to trigger them one after the other. Despite this caveat this is a fantastic upgrade that you're only otherwise getting on the Taj Mahal, which comes too late to be worth a damn.

-In the middle we have 50% influence towards befriending independents. This is a large amount of savings, though its most notable perk is getting to press the button sooner, as influence towards supporting endeavors, even though the bonus is lesser, probably saves you more influence overall in a typical game.

-25% towards supporting or rejecting diplomatic actions represents a large chunk of influence over the course of the game. Unless you're playing as Science Himiko, in which case this node is actually worthless (also, who ever actually spends influence to reject a proposal?)

-1 Social policy slot is a solid bonus that is most relevant early in each age and falls off as you get more slots. Remember, each social policy slot is worth less than the last one, as you would input a weaker policy into the slot than the others that are already slotted. Still, it's good.

I highly favor celebration length and tend to go three points into this tree in most games, ideally by or as I'm entering exploration. I tend to find I make enough influence for playing with the AI without bonus influence towards supporting.

Economic

Again, we tend to favor the left side here.

-2 gold per age for each active trade route and 1 gold for each imported resource can be a lot of money, especially in Antiquity. You are making merchants to grab as many relevant resources as you can, right?

-15% gold towards purchasing is a nice buff that is relevant throughout the entire game. Combine this with the Mughals and other price reductions for some... funny prices on things.

-Alliance gold is alliance gold. I wouldn't take this over alliance culture or science most of the time, but it's still 10% overall income.

Most of the rest of the tree is... kind of crap. resource capacity in towns and cities has been split up for some reason, and the gold on placed resources is only for towns for some reason, which tends to be where you least want resources (and, of course, many resources are only for cities)

Attribute Points Pt. 2

Expansionist

-25% production towards settlers is great for those first four or so settlers. After that you probably don't care very much.

-10% growth rate in cities is half of the Hanging Garden's effect. The other half is an expansionist attribute point, which could be this.

Note that city growth is exponential and you can basically imagine that there is a softcap in each era for growth. So high growth rate bonuses get you citizens faster moreso than they give you more real citizens (though some builds might still pick up 1 or 2 extra citizens off of growth rate bonuses). As a result this node is simply okay, but the things it leads to are very strong.

-25% of growth is refunded when a city grows by adding a specialist is... a lot of free food. It's like a civ 3 granary, though only for 25%. Thanks for that knowledge, Garlic Swordsman, as the last time I played civ 3 was when I was about 9 years old. Anyway, this is even more effective growth than the above, and makes specialists an even better deal than they already are.

-Less specialist maintenance. This isn't actually that much maintenance compared to other sources. Double if 3 or less cities. If you have 3 or less cities those cities will have a ♥♥♥♥ ton of specialists just due to towns sending so much food anyway. This is probably the weakest part of the left side of the tree, but it doesn't hurt. As always, aim for either 3 cities or a fair number more than that. Though I will say, in regards to these perks, that due to food growth mechanics making food worse per pop on an individual settlement level, more cities is probably better than 3 or less cities.

-1 specialist limit everywhere, and 1 less settlement limit. It comes with a pretty huge malus because the effect is that powerful. It's Angkor Wat everywhere. Smash more specialists into your powerful adjacencies and ageless quarters. If you get access to this super early you can have some issues with your settlement limit in exploration in particular, Though if you're getting this against the AI at that stage you'll probably be fast enough to build El Escorial first anyway, so who cares.

-Town yields when specialized are nice. This normally means 'more food for cities' more than anything. The problem is you're going through two subpar nodes to get to it. Stronger in exploration since distant lands settlements get doubled benefits.

-1 settlement limit is obviously strong, but a bit deep considering how cracked the left side already is and how... not cracked the right side is. You're probably fine without this one. This is also way more accessible on the military tree too.

Dive straight down the left side ASAP and never look back. Great in every game, as every civ.

Militaristic

Finally, a tree that's more right side favored for once. Also, you get two starting choices again on this one.

-I feel like special mention should be made for 5 CS against Independent Powers. If you get this early, say from the Egyptian Medjay event chain, it can allow you to run over IPs very quickly and easily, leading to more yields more quickly. Initial advantage is snowball in civ, and this can provide quite a lot of it for 1 point. Basically worthless past the start, save for the whole 'barbarian crisis', though even there it's unnecessary largely. If I'm not expecting to take many militaristic points in a game (as legacy bonus points tend to go to the cracked as ♥♥♥♥ Expansionist tree), I often like to take this if I get one very early.

-Otherwise, 1 war support forever is very strong for a 1 point investment. 1 permanent CS in wars and some happiness maluses for your enemies, or some influence saving depending on how you want to look at it. This is half of Gate of All Nations, and Gate of All Nations is a pretty great wonder if you plan on fighting at all.

-3 points down the right gets you straight to a free settlement limit. Unlike the Expansionist Tree, you don't give up anything to get this unless you're taking militaristic points over expansionist ones at age transition.

-The fourth point is worth a free commander level, which is effectively 15 EXP for all new commanders, more for old ones. Commanders can not 'die', just become disabled for a while. This can help your new ones get up to speed for actual fighting, or can represent a bunch of level 1 blue upgrades for 5% yields on relevant cities. Your call.

-15% production towards military units is nice when buffing up your military, which you often do anyway near age transition to carry over more units. Military isn't that expensive most of the time, and bigger bonuses can be found as social policies largely, so this one feels a bit more superfluous.

Overall I'll either take a point against IPs super early if I'm going to cut up several IPs, and/or take three points down the right as possible.

Scientific

Also fairly strong overall. The right side is more favored but there is a lot to be said for some nodes on the left too.

-Building production is highly relevant at all stages. Buildings are powerful, you build a lot of them. 15% production towards buildings is very good, and building production bonuses are usually relegated to overbuilding bonuses outside of antiquity.

-Tech mastery research is very very good in antiquity, when you need all of the codexes and also tech stealing. It is less relevant in later ages, though many masteries offer rural bonuses or other important things. Falls off hard in the Modern era for, ironically, Science players, where you tend to prefer rushing to rocketry if you're looking for a science win and therefore skip every Mastery until you get rocketry. Other wincons still probably like this even then though.

-Resource science is just as good as Resource culture was, and is better early for all the same reasons.

-20% gold and happiness savings towards maintaining buildings is actually a fair chunk, often enough to keep you in the green for happiness with higher building numbers and a lack of happiness bonuses. I'd take it later if you want it, its main issue is that it doesn't lead to alliance science like the resource science does.

-10% alliance science is as good as ever. Just... try to keep allies in the modern era for that rocketry rush at the very least.

-Specialist science is strong with the same caveats the other specialist resource upgrades have; lots of cities or few cities, none of this 4 cities crap.

BIG NOTE: Theoretically, since cities become towns at new ages but retain specialists, you can get the larger bonus while functionally having more specialists in many cases. Simply puts tons all over your empire then go down to three cities next age. I haven't tested how effective this feels, but I wanted to point it out while I was thinking about it.

How I pursue this path often depends on when I get the points. The resource node is really convenient because it leads into alliance science and specialist science, but can feel weak if gotten too late. Buildings are king so I like to take building production where possible, but tech mastery speed is also good, especially in antiquity, and leads into resource science and quarter science, both of which I would want online sooner rather than later. You'll probably want to get your hands on specialist science eventually regardless. The maintenance reduction does legitimately feel good as well, though is perhaps largely unnecessary. The fact that I only feel the desire to totally ignore the '1 science in towns or 2 in distant lands' towns node (besides the obvious repeatable that I just take if I have extra points like every tree) is proof of the fact that this tree has a lot to offer. Albeit the quarter science node isn't as good as you may assume either, but we'll talk about that more when we get to the Colosseum.

Future Tech and Future Civic: Should you or Shouldn't You?

I decided to make this section because I've seen people complaining about ending ages faster by taking these techs. If you're worried about that then play on a higher difficulty, but I digress.

99% of the time you should take as many of these as you can, and I'm honestly surprised this is even a real question. The other 1% of the time is when completing it will guaranteed make you miss out on an important legacy node, usually a golden age, like getting to 10 codexes or something. Alternatively, if it would end the modern age early and cause you to lose via score (which I guess is what can happen if it hits 100%? I've never actually let modern go that long), you shouldn't take it, though if you're getting to that point in Modern you're playing slowly.

Future Tech/Civic not only gives you a head start in the next age by halving the cost of one of the first techs or civics, it also gives you a free wildcard point. Wildcard points are broken powerful, and an extra wildcard point is worth more than almost anything you're getting off of the legacy path bonuses. The more Future tech/Future civic procs you get, the more overall powerful you're going to be. This is one of the primary reasons that playing on longer age lengths makes you stronger and also why you should skip masteries you don't need, largely. Presumably the AI can and will take these too and get stronger as well, though I can't see what they take and therefore do not know what attribute points they tend to invest in. I get the feeling the average AI goes back and fills in all of their untaken masteries first though at the very least.

The cost of these goes way up every time you research them. If you can get 2 wildcard points per age from this, you're sitting pretty, though you can often get more.

Also, the first person to get to specific points on the legacy track will boost age progress. If you don't need specific legacy bonuses and can see that the AI aren't going to get them either, you should skip them if it enables you to get more future techs or future civics. In fact, you often don't need to make a sacrifice. Most commonly this happens with Treasure Fleet. Just let your treasure fleet sit in your borders, unused, and dump all your points at the end of the age.

So the tl;dr is you should take as many future techs and civics as you can in the first two ages, and you should only delay getting them for very specific reasons. Understood? Great.

Production/Science/Culture Saving Exploit

In Civilization 7, if you force end your turn, you will reserve your production, science, and culture forever if you do not spend them on anything. This means not choosing production items for your cities or civics/techs to research. This allows you to play the game in ways that are clearly not intended.

I do not recommend you play the game with this exploit. It greatly affects the balance of the game and it will likely (and hopefully) be patched out one day. However, if you do want to play with this exploit, either for fun or just because it is a more optimal way to play the game, it does warrant at least some discussion.

The first thing to recognize is that this means that the ultimate bottleneck for making wonders and buildings is Science and Culture, unless your production output is truly pitiful. This is because all production can be primed towards building these items before the tech or civic is unlocked, and therefore these items can be built as soon as they become unlocked. Therefore, if you get to it first, you can build it first, so long as you're not effectively forced to spend your production on other things.

This already begins to have an effect at the very start of the game. In our founding strategy discussion, we looked at building up military or even a production building depending on our growth timing before we make our settlers at pop 5. With this exploit we don't even need to build those, we can simply hold our production until settlers become available and instantly squirt them out. The same goes for library and monument tech. We know that science and culture are the ultimate bottlenecks, so as long as we have a good place to put these buildings, we should plan on immediately putting them down upon unlock.

Production buildings (specifically the non-ageless ones in particular) in contrast are far closer to useless, as our ability to save production means that their ability to increase production output for future buildings is largely irrelevant. Sure, they can still be used for army development, but there is a much larger onus on these buildings actually paying for themselves rather than enabling you to produce more efficiently when you access those later buildings. Gold is even worse off, as its main selling point is stolen by simply saving up our production. Other than using it in towns (which is forced), it's strictly far less efficient than the production we have in decent production cities, and its ability to suddenly purchase things is only ever relevant in new cities that have no production as a result. This was always true to a degree, but it is an absolute rule with this exploit. The resource slots from buildings like markets and lighthouses are at least still quite valuable

This exploit is perhaps most notable with wonder rushing. In a normal game, your wonder production speed is effectively a factor of your science or culture to get to their tech, and your production to build it. So if it takes you 10 turns to get a civic and 6 to build the wonder, it takes 16 turns to get the wonder. With this exploit the 6 turns goes down to 1, and your only relevant bottleneck is that culture.

Oh, but you don't even need to take a risk with that culture. Let's say you can build your culture towards The Colosseum or Weiyang. If you'd rather have Weiyang, you can simply hold your production and culture until you would instantly unlock the civic, then spend it and build Weiyang in one turn. What if someone else builds it first? That culture gets funneled into Entertainment instead, and you instantly build the Colosseum. The same would be true if deciding between Nalanda and Colossus. Invest in whichever one gets left behind. You don't have to take any risks.

What about military techs? It's certainly safer to invest into Chariots early to bulk up the stronger part of your military, but on the other hand specialists are right over there. Hold all your science and you can scope out the situation when you could instantly get either tech, making you perfectly responsive if you expect war in the near future, and allowing you to quickly jump on that specialist limit instead if you don't. Your options are forever open and you don't need to make a sacrifice to do one or the other.

Oh, and the payoff is obvious for future tech and civic. Filling out another legacy path? If you finished Future Tech and ended the age, you would miss out on that. So just uh, don't research it until you're sure that won't happen. And if the Age timer gets up there anyway and you're afraid the age will naturally end, you can just throw your science at Future tech instantly anyway and get those points.

This can also allow you to snipe with culture or tech stealing. If you unlock masteries to research early you might end up stealing those, but if you simply don't unlock techs until the moment you need them you can time your culture and tech steals to steal things that are more valuable on average. This will also prevent you from over-teching the AI (in later ages) and therefore not stealing techs or civics directly, which tends to be more valuable on a culture or research point basis. You can also simply wait to see what you steal first. If you steal the civic for Weiyang and have saved up all your culture, you can suddenly launch right into unlocking the Colossus, possibly guaranteeing a wonder that's very difficult to get at high difficulties.

Of course, this also means you will win nearly instantly once you unlock the last space projects, Manhattan, or World's fair (the latter of which is a much more competitive option now). Railroad Tycoon is sadly left in the dust as a result, as it has a guaranteed turn requirement when using the capitalist superhero. Your science projects will eat up 2 turns (We still buy the launch pad, and then one turn for each project), as will Manhattan + Ivy, and the Fair will appear in a single turn (all of this assuming you saved up enough production).

These mechanics make you infinitely flexible and remove a lot of risk taking and decision making in the game. Of course, their power becomes somewhat less relevant if you overtake the AI later in the game, but the flexibility this offers you is never lost. These exploits will make the game far easier in single player and I imagine they would be downright cancerous if abused in multiplayer, and we've only really scratched the surface here (as we did not even mention the ability to suddenly pop out an entire military instantly, taking anyone by surprise, though this isn't too relevant versus the AI). I hope this exploit is removed one day, and if it is this section will be removed along with it. However, if this all sounds fun to experiment with for you, give it a try in one of your games. You'll probably understand why it's such a big deal after a little experimentation.

By the way, something I have not tested is whether these resources can be carried over into new ages too. This would be monstrously overpowered if so. I'm working on the assumption this can not be done (and it's not like I play with this exploit for anything other than understanding it), but if it can you can probably set a world record for a science victory at the very least doing this exploit lmao.

According to The Ultimate List, these saved up yields are in fact lost on age transition, thankfully.

Wonders Foreword

Some civilizations get access to some wonders on their personal civics tree. This is only really useful if the wonder shows up later in the civics tree. For example, The Mississippian's access to the Monk's Mound on their civics tree basically guarantees that you're able to get it before anyone else. These wonders are better for these civs, largely. The same goes for any production speed bonuses towards specific wonders. The Oracle is better on the Greeks, for instance, because they get more production towards it. The Oracle is still bad there of course, just... less bad. All Wonders are better for civs that make wonders faster (i.e., Egypt) as well, obviously. This discussion will not constantly say things like 'Angkor Wat is better for the Khmer since they get it early', as I think bringing it up repeatedly is redundant.

As an Aside, you get all the effects of a wonder you take in war. So if you steal the Hanging Gardens, you get 1 expansionist point immediately, once. Or if you steal terracotta, you immediately get the free commander. So steal those wonders!

Here are some main factors that I look at when discussing Wonder strength.
1. The effect of the wonder and/or the technical yields the wonder provides. As a benchmark, 16 effective yields is good enough in Antiquity, and probably more like 20-24 is good in Exploration. Broadly this is any yield besides food for simplicity, as food becomes worse by large strokes over time in large cities, though it is worth noting that with no purchasing bonuses 4 gold is a more flexible 1 production. This does not count the Adjacencies you get out of the wonder. We don't care almost at all about per turn yields in Modern, because Modern currently revolves around winconning, meaning most wonders not called 'Oxford' are irrelevant, even if the bonuses are very strong in theory. Generally wonders that you see people think of as 'strong' are meeting or beating out the above benchmarks, or do something special. Wonders not seen as strong, like the Great Stele or Oracle, tend to fall well below those benchmarks.
2. Notable synergies with other wonders or gameplay strategies. Synergies with stronger gameplay strategies (i.e. specialists) are highly relevant.
3. Uniqueness of the effect. Effects that are more unique, even if they are used for more niche strategies, are effects that can be very hard to come by elsewhere and therefore can be very valuable. Mausoleum of Theodoric is one such example.
4. When you get the wonder. If the wonder is on civics or techs you already want, it's better. The Hanging Gardens, for instance, is at irrigation, which you want anyway. Also, the Deity AIs in particular seem much better at getting later wonders in antiquity specifically than earlier ones. I find the cutoff point for 'not usually being able to get it unless beelining' is around Weiyang Palace. I'm not sure why this is, it's probably due to how they prioritize things.
5. Wonder placement requirements. Sometimes easier is better, sometimes harder is better. Easier to place wonders can often go quicker, but you can more easily place them where their adjacencies are better and use stronger cities to build them. Harder to place wonders are less likely to get picked up, but may require more real turns for a city to build if you plop them down in lower production cities.

We're assuming you're not using exploits, most notably saving your production between turns via forcing your turn to end which you can apparently do. This isn't usually relevant for our discussion, but doing so can make it easier to get specific wonders, most notably Colossus, Monk's Mound, Nalanda, and Angkor Wat which are late in the antiquity civics tree (and thus Deity AI bait). I am also assuming you're playing all 3 ages in a game, starting at Antiquity.

Wonders in Antiquity

Antiquity Wonders are inherently more powerful than wonders in other ages for two reasons:

1. They last for a longer section of the game. This is notable to a small extent even for wonders that have instantaneous effects or that aren't providing a lot of long term value, as they can at least still be utilized for adjacencies.

2. All Wonders that you build count for the antiquity cultural legacy path. In layman's terms, you can think of this as every two antiquity wonders being worth 1 diplomatic or cultural attribute point, as that's how you're typically using those at age transition. If you get 7 you can get golden age amphitheaters. You don't tend to get 7 at higher difficulties or in competitive games, though 4 is actually quite achievable even against Deity AI. This should not be confused as me saying it’s ‘impossible’; I have gotten 7+ wonders in antiquity on deity before, and some civs are very good at doing so.

We'll be going in alphabetical order in each age. Each age will probably take multiple sections. I will insert pictures of the wonders in a later, prettier version of this guide.

Angkor Wat
-Adjacent to a River
-+3 Happiness
-+1 specialist limit

Starting with a wonder that I've personally flip flopped a lot on. The Angkor Wat gives the city it's built in an extra specialist limit, which means your specialist limit is doubled when it's built (unless you somehow got there before currency). This does a few things.

First: It allows you to keep putting your citizens on more valuable specialist tiles for longer, leading to more desirable citizens overall. Every new citizen makes further growth take longer, so using citizens on tiles you want to actually work means that your best citizens come out earlier rather than later. It also means you can stack your academies/amphitheaters and special quarters more aggressively for a stronger step into the next era. For this reason we like this better on civs that have special buildings, which are always ageless, that actually have good adjacencies. The Mastaba, for instance, tends to be a building that can achieve very high gold adjacencies pretty easily. Even when stacking things in quarters that won't be ageless, you can often overbuild in the new era pretty quickly. This ability is actually technically better for civs that have less specialist bonuses, since flat specialist bonuses don't care where the specialist actually is. The raw yield differential may be the same, but the percentage increase in using this wonder is lesser for those playstyles.

Second: It allows you to get a headstart on the exploration age scientific legacy, and it also makes that legacy easier to achieve. This legacy tends to be pretty easy for any half decent city planning, but a higher specialist limit does mean that less good quarters and adjacencies can still hit the 40 yield requirement in multiple tiles.

Third: It can allow a city to remain more rural in total makeup. Oftentimes many of your cities tend to end up as urban sprawls, but if you want to maintain a city with a lot of, say, high production rural tiles, possibly with unique improvements, while still having room to place effective specialists, you can give up a less desirable tile for Angkor Wat and stack more specialists in the few urban tiles you have. For a production city with a decent set of military production buildings this can allow you to raise your production even higher while contributing to science/culture. I tend to find that buildings are so powerful right now that I just... make many cities urban sprawls at some point anyway, but this is something you can do to further enable powerful production focused cities with only a few quarters.

My main caveat? The actual yield differential. You have to have some pretty chonky adjacencies for the real yield difference of putting an extra specialist in one tile instead of another to be particularly large. If you have a city like that then Angkor Wat's real output can end up as a nice chunk of usually science and culture. Angkor Wat doesn't exist for cities where you're placing like, 2 adjacency libraries for example. Often the best cities for Angkor Wat are therefore cities that have already built other wonders and are therefore enabling gigantic adjacencies more readily. I tend to value science and culture more than other adjacency bonuses so I'd typically want a city to have one or both of these if I'm going to put Wat there. Overall it's a wonder I usually do want to have but due to its late timing making it hard for the non-khmer starts to pick up, I find it needs to justify itself, especially if the choice is between it and something more ubiquitous and obvious at that late point like Monk's Mound or Colossus.

Colosseum
-Next to a District
-+3 Culture
-+2 Happiness on all quarters in this settlement
-An event will always fire early in the exploration age that lets you choose whether this wonder provides an extra 2 production or 2 happiness.

What is a quarter? Any combination of two buildings?

NO.

My testing has shown that a quarter is only a quarter if BOTH buildings in it are one of the following:
1. Ageless
2. A Golden Age building from the last age (so Golden Age academies for example in Exploration)
3. From the current era.

This is true for EVERY WONDER AND EFFECT THAT LOOKS AT QUARTERS. You can test it yourself.

So anyway, what does this mean here? In Layman's terms, the Colosseum is worth like, 10-16 happiness in a settlement, not counting choosing the happiness on the event (and you should choose the production). More if you have a unique quarter, more if you're building out all your buildings, less otherwise.

This is a pretty good return, but not broken. It's enough yields to be worth building if you can, though happiness isn't the 'best' yield in the game by any stretch. The important takeaway from this is that if you thought the Colosseum was giving you happiness for all those old buildings in later ages that are sitting around, it isn't. That, and that the Colosseum loses a lot of power at age transition.

Antiquity Wonders Pt. 2

We only made it through 2 wonders in the last section. That's a bad sign for steam guide character limits.

Colossus
-On Coast Adjacent to Land
-+3 Resource Slots in city that builds it
-+3 gold per turn
-Economic legacy point.

While economic legacy points aren't the most powerful in the game, all legacy points are good and most wonders with legacy points are worth considering based off of that alone. The Colossus is a very stacked wonder. 3 resource slots is worth around 12 yields in Antiquity, and more in the next era (resource slots sadly fall off kind of hard in Modern due to the erasure of several resources and the relegation of many of the remaining ones and new ones to factories). The placement requirement notably lets you put more adjacency on a type of tile where you're not typically putting down citizens, at least for cities. The Colossus should stack with water tiles for the gold adjacency, and of course allows you to use a water tile for other kinds of adjacencies too. Just like the Monk's Mound, it goes well with anything that makes resources stronger, such as certain attribute nodes and the Tomb of Askia. If you can actually get to and build this before the Deity AI, you should. You probably won't though unless you are hardcore beelining it.

Dur-Sharrukin
-On any flat tile
-3 combat strength to every fortified district in your empire (mostly meaning walls and I assume the Aerodrome as well).
-It also counts as a fortified district, but it does not get the walls. You just have to stand on it to capture it.

Walls are a powerful defensive option since you can just put archers in them and get a lot of attacks out as the enemy knocks down the walls. Despite this, building a whole wonder to make your walls a bit stronger seems somewhat niche to me. I don't think you ever really need this to protect against the AI because their ability to fight a war against any amount of resistance could charitably be described as 'braindead'. Because of this I fear that my opinion of this wonder is rather skewed, as I find it very unnecessary at the worst and best of times. Maybe if there's a game where people are actually building walls and having close fights and sieges this could help give a player an edge, that just doesn't happen against the AI. Still, quite unique as Wonders go at the very least.

Emile Bell
-On any Rough Tile
-Gives you a special endeavor called Ginseng Agreement, which gives your capital more food (Scales like other endeavors by ages), and the other person's food as well if they support it.
-1 Diplomatic Attribute Point

1 Diplomatic Attribute point is what makes this worth building if you plan on getting enough to hit a relevant breakpoint (i.e. the celebration length) and need some help to get there. The endeavor is weak but it is another endeavor that players can sign with the AI, meaning this wonder lets you farm higher relationships quicker if you have high influence generation.

I assume that Benjamin Franklin can sign 2 of these agreements at once, for maximum relationship farming, but I have not attempted that myself. Anyway, if you build this and get 2 diplo points from age transition (the max) or elsewhere, using this to springboard you to celebration length, then this was the Taj Mahal. I'd build the Taj Mahal every time I could if it wasn't in the Modern Era. This wonder is super slept on, and you should try it out in your games for the diplo point. It being at Culture Stealing, a civic you really want to pick up early against the AI, is also a huge point in its favor.

Gate of All Nations
-Adjacent to any district
-+2 support on all Wars

We discussed this a little already in another section. 2 War Support is minus 2 CS to all enemy units and -6 (or more, depending on if they're theirs or not) happiness to their settlements. If you're in the negatives instead, it's +2 CS for you and +6 happiness in all settlements when at war, or split down the middle. That's more than 1 settlement limit's worth of happiness gain/loss, albeit only for wartime situations, and +2 relative CS EVERYWHERE (except for Independents I guess) is very good. It's hard to go wrong in building this, and you can often get it fairly easily since it's on Discipline 2. The AI usually puts this off.

Worth nothing if you never go to war. However, if you elect to never go to war in a game you're probably doing so because you'll win anyway. Even then it's a further deterrent.

You can buy war support with influence. The cost scales by the amount of war support you've already paid for. Ergo, this wonder can also be thought of as worth the next two war support purchases you would be able to make. The more you buy the more actual influence this is effectively worth. You don't need the Gate to beat the AI at war, especially considering they don't get influence income bonuses, but it always feels good to have the Gate if you ever do go to war.

Great Stele
-On flat terrain. We don't want the big white ♥♥♥♥ wonder to be tilted on a hill after all
-Gain 200 gold every time you build a wonder in this city, including this one (presumably scales with game speed).

A granary costs more money than this. Even in Antiquity after a little work this isn't worth much more than a few turns of gold. It is at least available at writing, so you can do some weird thing where you build this then use the extra gold to buy the library, sneaking in an extra wonder that no one else probably wants. You just make too much money in this game when playing properly for this wonder to feel super impactful past the start honestly. I think the yield type is a big issue here: 200 gold per wonder built just isn't that great in this game. If it was 200 science per wonder built it'd be super good. Despite this I think it still out yields some other (admittedly bad) wonders in this game if you assume something like 1000 gold, +/- 200, even if you consider that it's gold. So like... just slap a legacy point on it or something and I'd build it? It's kind of indirectly up against the Hanging Gardens which is... worth more yields than this and gives an expansionist point so... yeah just give this thing a scientific legacy point or something and call it a day honestly.

Oh, and if this doesn't scale with game speed, it's obviously a lot better on higher speeds.

Just for the Math, Every 200 gold is in this 200ish turn game is 1 gold per turn. So the per turn yields here are bad. Those yields being up front mitigates this, it being gold exacerbates it, and it's just not enough gold.

Ha'amonga 'a Maui
-Grassland or Tropical tile next to coast
-+2 Culture
-+1 culture and food on fishing boats in this settlement
-1 cultural attribute point

Another example of an attribute point, and we do like some extra culture on our fishing boats if we're working navigable rivers or something. We can't build (most) buildings on water after all, so unlike Petra your buildings aren't going to wipe out these rural yields at some point, unless you bridge spam. Culture is a nice additional yield, and yes you can stack this with the pyramids if you feel so inclined. Its extra yields can be very high if you have a lot of fishing boats in a settlement, and you can probably work that a bit if you make a coastal city and take the fishing boat production pantheon to make a respectable production output city that you can downgrade into a settlement next era. Unlike its cousin the pyramids, the cultural attribute point here is very useful and means that this wonder is often worth building even without fishing boats. Since it comes at navigation the AI does tend to get this one, however. I'm a big fan of cultural attribute points so I do like to build this whenever I can. I see the fishing boat buffs as an extra bonus if I can get my hands on some fishing boats.

Antiquity Wonders Pt. 3

Hanging Gardens
-Adjacent to a river
-+1 food on all farms in this city
-10% growth rate in cities
-1 Expansionist attribute point

I have found more information about city growth rate. You can see that in the 'Food'! section of the guide. I will rewrite the Hanging Gardens in the future, as my valuation of it has changed a lot. I am still sure that it's still good overall, but I was glazing it a bit too hard in the previous version of this guide.

Mausoleum of Theodoric
-Adjacent to Coast
-+3 Production
-+100% yields and HP from pillaging(!)
-+1 Militaristic Attribute point

Makes you feel more like Civ 6 Norway... Though perhaps that's not as strong in this game. Healing 60 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ HP when you pillage though is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane, and you can farm money and yields from random ♥♥♥♥ with your navy in particular. Due to the changes for walls and the AI's tendency to build them everywhere though you can't just run through their land pillaging all their libraries and stuff most of the time, sadly. If you're capturing a city you probably want to leave their things alone since you can't repair stuff until unrest goes away. Still, this is a highly unique bonus that is hard to get in lesser quantities that provides a very notable edge in warfare due to the healing at the very least.

The 1 militaristic point is enough to push this over the edge. By the time you build this you probably don't need CS against IPs, so this is another point down the right side for the most part. What a cool wonder for any warmonger out there.

I've noticed the AI tends to go for this civic before entertainment, so this tends to be harder to get than the Colosseum. Sad, given how cool it is.

Also, for fun, your commanders can not die and will just re-spawn. They can also burn ♥♥♥♥. So feel free to nominate a rambo or two and send them on a mission to burn down random ♥♥♥♥ in your enemy's empire. Is this an effective strategy? Probably not, especially since the AI will just have units randomly all over the place. Is it funny? Yes.

Monk's Mound
-Adjacent to a river
-+4 Food
-+4 Resource Capacity in the city

Similar to the colossus, this gives you more resource capacity in a city. 4 resource capacity is probably around 16 total yields in antiquity, and more like 20-24 in the exploration. That's quite good. Just like other sources of capacity, once you hit modern and have a massive resource dropoff, the power of this wonder falls off to some extent. Still, it's strong, and stronger if you're going to rush Tomb of Askia in the Exploration age, or if you have the relevant bonuses to equipped resources. Just like those other wonders, if you can't get the needed resources, they're weak.

As an aside, I really dislike how resources just... disappear in this game. It makes adjacency considerations for science and production buildings more complex (because if you know that you're going to lose wool and salt next era, you know your exploration age science buildings are weak on what look like strong tiles in Antiquity) and the game doesn't let you reposition those citizens either.

Weaker than the Colossus due to only picking up 1 capacity and losing out on a whole attribute point. That's not to say it's bad, it's also quite strong and you'd build both, ideally in the same city, if you could. Generic additional strength in every game.

Mundo Perdido
-Tropical Tile
-+1 Happiness and Science on tropical tiles in this settlement

The main problem with these petra-esque wonders is the tendency for you to build towards urban sprawl because buildings are largely worth more than rural pops, who can then be reassigned as highly valuable specialists. That doesn't mean your entire rural population will be erased, but that wonders like this and Petra in particular can have issues with staying power. If you build this with lots of tropical tiles covered in woodcutters and manage to keep those around, the yield boost here can be pretty solid. If you build this and 70% of your rainforest is gone by the end of Antiquity, you would probably have been better off with another wonder.

I still think I like this more than Petra in this game, largely. Since this grants happiness to tropical tiles, this may mean that it also enables Shwedagon, which is another rural focused wonder in the exploration age that grants 2 science to rural tiles with happiness. I say 'may' because I have not tested this. Wonders like this are asking for more rural focused cities that carefully ration out their urban tiles for specific buildings. If you want to do that then these can offer some notable return, especially if you're also utilizing a swathe of powerful unique improvements. If you're going to cover your city in sprawl though, Mundo doesn't have a whole lot to offer past the early game.

As far as my testing has shown me, the effect for this, Petra, and the Pyramids does not work for urban tiles on these tile types, hence the focus on Rural. That's what I thought was the case intuitively but I did make sure that was true.

Nalanda
-On Plains
-+3 Science
-+1 Codex, 2 Codex slots
-+1 Scientific Attribute Point

The actual effect adds up to 5 science, meaning were it not for the scientific attribute point, considering when you get this thing, it wouldn't be worth it. Furthermore, you lose the codex next era and you really don't need this thing's help to get to 10. You can keep some codex science as a global income if you're willing to invest 2 legacy points into a specific buff, but that is not a good investment given how many strong scientific attribute nodes there are.

The attribute point, like many other wonders with them, makes this wonder worth it. As stated there are a ton of strong options in the scientific attribute tree, and building a wonder for another point and a trickle of extra science is generally worth it if you can pick it up.

Antiquity Wonders Pt 4.

The Oracle
-On Rough terrain (RIP mine tile)
-+2 culture
-Gain 10 culture per age at every narrative event.

The oracle does not scale for ♥♥♥♥, and that is its main problem. 10 additional culture per narrative event is probably weak by the time you even get your hands on it. In terms of actual yields, considering it does scale a bit with the ages, it's a few hundred culture. So I guess that's better than the Great Stele, since it's culture. Crossing the lowest of low bars is not a sign of quality though.

It honestly baffles me how something like Hanging Gardens and the Colossus give you an attribute point but The Oracle doesn't. The Pyramid of the Sun, albeit harder to get your hands on, is giving you more culture in 1 turn broadly than this will be giving you on a narrative event.

Honestly I think The Oracle is very hard to balance, and that they've gone with a very conservative amount of culture here because if it did give you like 100 culture per narrative event it would be stupid strong in Antiquity. I'd either just give it an attribute point or change the effect entirely tbh. I might still build it for the cultural legacy path if I have time, but that's about the only reason I ever would.

The AI also puts this one off for a very long time to the point that it's noticeable and feels like a flex on this wonder, so if you do want it you will probably get it.

Petra
-On desert
-+2 Gold
-+1 production and gold on desert tiles in this city

Petra has a big problem in this game. Well, two big problems really. The first is that you don't tend to work a ♥♥♥♥ ton of desert unless it's all rough desert in a mine focused city or something. The second is the urban sprawl problem. You tend to turn your desert tiles into more districts, and you don't tend to wait super long to do this. The Pyramids, which are quite similar, actually don't have this problem but have the problem of tending to hit less tiles. If you have a city that will be using rural pops to work a lot of desert tiles, ideally also with unique improvements, then Petra will provide a decent or even strong number of yields. I don't find that I have cities in this situation super often, and therefore don't tend to value Petra much. It is, at least, at Code of Laws, which you want to pick up anyway for merchants and culture stealing at least, so in most games you will at least decide if you have a city like this or not.

Pyramid of the Sun
-Flat tile next to a district
-+3 culture
-2 culture per quarter in this settlement

It's the Colosseum but for culture. That also means it's the other half of the Eiffel tower. Unlike the Eiffel Tower which comes too late for you to care, this thing produces a big handful of culture over the course of the game. It also comes at Mathematics which you already want to get online ASAP, though Deity AI tend to get to it first and build it first even if you prioritize it, as it's just too late in the antiquity tech tree. Sadly, this wonder looks at quarters the same way that other quarter wonders do, meaning it gets weaker at age transition before ramping back up. Still, the output is pretty good. You should build it in that big urban sprawl city if you can get to it first.

Pyramids
-On a desert tile next to a navigable river (notably specific)
-+1 gold and production on all rivers (navigable and minor) in this settlement

The pyramids simply don't hit enough tiles in a lot of games, which is a bit of a shame as you tend to overwrite far fewer navigable river tiles with urban improvements, unless you're just spamming bridges everywhere for 5 gold each. They also have the problem of not getting unique improvements and being a generally less desirable tile without flooding boosting their yields. The minor rivers can of course be overwritten and often will be by something. I'm generally assuming one navigable river tile is going to like a Fishing quay + Bath or something too.

It's good if you have like... 7 or 8ish tiles for this to hit that you plan on keeping around (so 16 or more yields), but that's sort of a big ask. If you have that kind of city then you can also throw on Ha'amonga'a to supercharge those navigable river fishing boats. The good news is that if you're in that situation you'll probably get this before the AI, who don't tend to build it. Whether this is due to prioritization, valuation, timing, or just the specificity of 'desert tile next to navigable river' is unclear to me, but regardless you can get this very reliably if you're in a situation where it's very good.

I find it a bit weird this doesn't get an inherent 2 production or something, as Petra gets 2 gold. I guess that's not that big of a deal though.

Sanchi Stupa
-Plains Tile
-+2 Happiness
-+1 culture per 5 happiness surplus in city

The culture output from this by itself tends to feel pretty mild. The culture output from this in a city with the Colosseum and later an additional wonder like Borobodur on the other hand? The output can reach nuts levels. The main issue is that the yields here are kind of... meh without very high happiness excesses, and that it effectively slightly nerfs specialists who eat up happiness. 40 excess happiness for example is only 8 culture here. If we're benchmarking around 16 yields for a wonder to feel good I probably want double that which can be asking a lot. Yet, with lots of wonders and some happiness buildings I can get a ♥♥♥♥ ton more excess happiness in a city than this, which makes Sanchi Stupa quite strong.

By the way, a wonder like this can be somewhat sabotaged if a player draws you into a war and forces war weariness onto you. It's not going to be a huge loss unless your ally makes you fight a harriet tubman or something, but it's worth noting that you're going to lose happiness per negative war support (typically 3) and that that will... minorly impact this wonder. The same goes for settling over your settlement limit. In fact this wonder is very minorly punished by several things that make for good play patterns, like putting down lots of buildings and specialists. For the most part that's kind of irrelevant, but it's worth keeping in mind. Honestly, in many ways Sanchi feels like a win more wonder in most situations because extremely high excess happiness often comes from building tons of other wonders anyway on top of good happiness buildings. I suppose it is worth pointing out that Ashoka really like this thing in general.

Terracotta Army
-Grassland Tile
-+2 production
-Free Army Commander (Don't know if this is truly free or if it increases the cost of the next one)
-+25% Army Commander experience

There are a few things about this wonder that I don't know. I haven't tested if this gives bonus experience to all commanders, though the writing here implies it's just army ones. I also don't know if the army commander is truly free or if getting it increases the cost of future army commanders.

Either way the Cost of this wonder is close enough to the cost of a 3rd or 4th army commander that it's worth building if you can just because of that. On the flip side that being the main draw means that we don't care very much if we don't get it, and the AI loves to build it. In fact we can just steal this off the AI and still get the free commander, which is the best outcome.

The EXP Bonus can be seen as an extra 1 EXP for every 4 EXP. This can be notable for hitting higher levels

The main reason you'd build this is if you want another army commander and can build this, because it's just better than building a raw army commander. So do that if you're in that mindset, and don't worry about it if the AI picks it up first.

Weiyang Palace

Really Steam? You couldn't spare enough characters for one more wonder? Oh well...

Please lobby steam to remove character limits on guide sections. Thank you.

Weiyang Palace
-Grassland Tile
-6 Infuence

Honestly somewhat overrated. Don't get me wrong, 6 influence is a lot early game, However, it doesn't scale like even your monuments will in the next age. It's also the amount of influence that 3 villas are worth and is only slightly cheaper than that. It's also at a very awkward civic, right after Code of Laws. You might steal your way into it if you took culture stealing (and you should take culture stealing), but the average player is going north or south on the tree for settlement limit before Citizenship unless they have a high enough culture output that they can push their way towards the real powerhouse wonders that come after Citizenship, and all four of the wonders in the next civic unlocks are winners

The Weiyang Palace is good if you can get it, 6 influence is nothing to scoff at, but there are so many other ways to get influence income and you should be making a habit of trying not to overbuild influence generating buildings like Villas and Monuments if you can anyway. The good news is that if you do have that culture output and are able to make a move for Weiyang successfully, you can probably also get Colossus and Monk's Mound too. (Or Nalanda and Angkor Wat if you fancy that direction instead).

In comparison Villas can be a bit awkward too unless you want to kill your neighbor. If you don't you're probably going for Bronze Working and Currency first and making do. The Weiyang is another one of those wonders that I will build if I can build it, but that my other priorities tend to pull me away from. I'd probably like it a lot more if it was 6/9/12 influence by age or something. Honestly a lot of wonders would really benefit from some sort of age scaling.

Antiquity Wonder Wrap Up

The big payoff for having high culture in Antiquity really is the Wonder Access, and it's because of this that Deity can really limit you. Many of the Strongest wonders in Antiquity are later on the civics tree, and being willing to build for culture and make sacrifices in other areas (mostly Settlement limit-wise to beeline for the wonders at the end of the tree) can insanely empower specific strategies. For an average game I really like that it is balanced in this way. For a Deity AI game where I pay 40% more for civics, it tends to mean writing off those wonders unless I'm beelining them hard or have special access to them in my personal civic's tree. The Khmer should always plan for Angkor Wat and the Mississippians for Monk's Mound, as easy examples.

There are many more accessible winners too, some on the Civic's tree and some on the Tech tree. Most notably Gate of All Nations is just universally powerful for war, and Hanging Gardens is going to be good in pretty much every game. I think Emile Bell is slept on too. You really want that mastery for Deity difficulty due to culture stealing being worth more actual culture, and 1 diplo point is 1/3 of the way to 50% celebration length which is an insanely powerful buff. Since you can only take up to 2 of one kind of point at age transition, a player less interested in the culture attribute tree can build Emile and 3 other wonders and guarantee access to 50% longer celebrations. People are paying way too much attention to Ginseng Agreement being fairly weak and way too little attention to the attribute point and the civic that Emile is on.

In fact the biggest takeaway for Wonders in general, especially in antiquity, is that if it's worth an attribute point, it's probably worth building. The rest of the effects can be completely irrelevant, yet the wonder should still be considered if the attribute point is going to be relevant at all. In Contrast, serious onus is put on a wonder's effects being good if it doesn't give you that attribute point. So something like the Oracle and Stele really feel bad because they don't have an attribute point, and only wonders with very strong yields or overall effects can overcome not offering one. It's worth noting that even so, every wonder does adjacencies and in antiquity is worth half a cultural or diplomatic attribute point by virtue of the legacy path. In your average game against the AI, try to build at least 4 wonders. Even if that means building the Oracle, it's still worth it.

Exploration Age Wonders

Christ I never thought I'd make it through Antiquity. Exploration Age wonders don't have a cute little legacy path to fill out, and only last for two ages. Luckily that's still early enough for them to be good, unlike a lot of Modern Age Wonders. These wonders need to be more powerful to make up for not offering legacy points and for existing for less time, and therefore require a higher standard to be effective. Many of them are still super powerful despite this. Like last time we'll be looking at them in Alphabetical order.

Borobodur
-Adjacent to Coast
-+3 Happiness
-+2 Food and Happiness on Quarters (whole empire)

Ah yes, the Colosseum on crack. It doesn't require a rocket scientist to tell you that the yields on this thing are very large. Think of it like this: With Borobodur, for every quarter in your empire, one specialist requires no upkeep. Or more than that if you have specialist cost reductions. Not only do I try to build this in almost every game, I tend to rush for it specifically if I want it. You don't need Borobodur to win, but Borobodur makes almost any run feel a lot more comfy.

If you don't have much land or are playing with fewer cities and quarters this is significantly worse just in terms of overall yields. You tend to have as much good land as you can get though. I don't have a lot to say about Borobodur, it's kind of obvious that its yields are well above other wonders. Even though Happiness and Food aren't the overall strongest yields in the game, getting this much happiness and food is going to be strong regardless.

Has the same definition of quarter that other quarters wonders have. So it will fall off temporarily when you make an age transition, and is otherwise gonna be worth probably 10-14 happiness and 10-14 food per city. More with more ageless quarters. The yields are still very high despite this caveat.

Note that the worth of food is diminished in larger cities, which often have more quarters. I think the smiles alone do warrant Borobodur, but it's worth noting that food is a noticeably worse yield than most other yields for big cities. These cities are the ones with more quarters, usually. Borobodur is still good, though more for the happiness yield which is still very large as a result.

Brihadeeswarar Temple
-On a minor river or next to a navigable river
-+3 Influence
-+All buildings with an active adjacency (Meaning 'current age and golden age buildings' that aren't ageless warehouses) gain a happiness adjacency with navigable rivers

Mostly used with food and gold buildings for obvious reasons. This can be a fair chunk of happiness in cities building these kinds of buildings. It won't be as much as some other sources, but is still alright. The policy card that increases happiness adjacency by 1 each does not affect this happiness adjacency from what I can tell. As for actual payouts, it's alright. Not super universal but empires with lots of navigable rivers can get quite a bit of happiness out of this wonder. The question is how much navigable river the map gen will give you. If you want more, start as Egypt I guess.

El Escorial
-On a Rough Tile
-+3 Happiness
-3 Relic Slots
-+4 happiness in every city 7 tiles or less away from this wonder
-1 Settlement Limit

That's a lot of effects. You're building it for the settlement limit though, largely, but you can probably squeak out a fair bit of happiness from the AOE depending on placement. The relic slots do feel kind of nice, mostly serving to save you money on temples when going for the cultural legacy path.

El Escorial only does anything with its settlement limit if you're settling at that limit or beyond it, in which case it's worth 5 happiness in each city, as it's saving you from a malus. In the exploration age you tend to settle to your settlement limit and if that limit is ordinarily 13 and this gives you 14 you're getting 70 happiness out of it, which is great. It only becomes more with more settlement limit.

I tend to find that this falls off hard in Modern as your singular focus towards 'winning' tends to mean you don't actually go up to your settlement limit as you unlock more. The big exception is ideology, where you're taking cities nonstop and therefore will tend to benefit from this, even if the AI manages to take them back a bit later. Otherwise all the land will probably be gone, so even if you want to settle, there's not really anything left a lot of the time against high level AI.

Still, it's worth a lot of happiness, and is quite strong in Exploration as a result. Many things don't make the cut in the modern era, so it's hard to ding it too badly because of that fall-off. It's also worth another handful if you remember that it has that happiness AoE, and it saves you around 1500 gold on temples given its relic slots, unless you take the 2 relic slot belief anyway.

Erdene Zuu
-On flat plains, flat tundra, or flat desert
-+4 Culture
-Making a cavalry unit gives you culture equal to 25% of its cost

There's a project you can do past the early game to convert 25% of your production into culture. This is like that, but every few turns you get a free cavalry unit out of the deal. Now I wouldn't call that project 'good', but it would certainly be a lot better if it gave me cavalry. Obviously a lot better if you're building a lot of cavalry, and if you're building up your military it's probably a lot of cavalry. Also, since this happens on 'creation' it also lets you effectively turn your gold into culture directly, with a unit attached. Gold cost is 4:1 so it's 16:1 in terms of culture which is, ah, questionable if you don't want to buy cavalry units otherwise (and you'd often rather build units).

The rate of transaction gets better with boosts towards making cavalry, most notably in exploration the chivalry policy. I assume it works with the Mongolian unique ability too. The Mongols are more likely to want to use this. Everyone else has it come a bit late to feel truly good imo, even if they love their cav (i.e. the Normans).

Forbidden City
-Adjacent to a District
-+2 Culture
-+2 Culture and Gold on All fortification buildings in this City (mostly this means 'walls')

Did you play as the Han in Antiquity and have a settlement awash in great wall? Are you playing as the Ming now, and are doing the same thing? This is worth a lot of yields in the first two cases in particular, as those count as 'fortifications' and thus work with this. The normans can also enable their special building adjacency with medieval walls which work with this, so you can make a case for it there sometimes too, albeit far weaker.

Otherwise, who the hell is building walls all over their city besides the AI? Probably not you. Unless the above is true, skip this one.

Hale o Keawe
-Adjacent to Coast but not Adjacent to Tundra (Can it be on tundra?)
-+2 Culture
-Buildings constructed ON the coast give a burst of culture equal to half their production cost
-3 Relic Slots

In exploration this means the Wharf, Shipyard, and of course Fishing Quay. In the Modern era you pick up Ports. That's... it, I think. Notably you can buy Ports and Quays in towns but not the other two. Sometimes the game has tiles that are 'coastal lakes' which I assume work with this too. Fishing Quays are cheap and only worth 27 culture. The wharf is worth 87.5, the shipyard 100. Ports would be worth 275. If you're going to end up with a lot of these, especially for railroad tycoon players dipping lots of ports (and I assume purchasing counts), and presumably also have plenty of cities where you want the wharfs and shipyards in exploration, then this wonder can provide a good amount of culture. If you build this and only put down fishing quays and the odd wharf and shipyard in a big city though, I'd just skip it.

Exploration Age Wonders Pt. 2

House of Wisdom
-Adjacent to a district
-+3 Science
-+3 Relics
-3 Relic slots
-+2 science on all great works

Unfortunately you lose all your great works when the age passes, which I hate because it means this is notably weaker. If you're really farming those relics then this can be a decent amount of science. I don't typically farm a ♥♥♥♥ ton of relics, just the 12 I need, which is, 27 science total? That's alright for a wonder (though lower than a good science district with specialists by far), but I still think this feels like a worse version of Nalanda. Losing all your great works and having to grab artifacts to re-enable this is also annoying and means its real output feels lower than it should, and carrying strong science into Modern is crucial. Doesn't help that the artifact race is even dumber than religion is.

Can really help you finish the cultural legacy path in the exploration age too. I don't find I typically need that if I use my 'rush capital conversions' strat and get like 8 relics or something. 3 relics is a lot though. Overall I think I sleep on the House a bit. It has a lot going for it; good real yields, helps with your cultural legacy path notably, but falls off in age transition.

Machu Pikchu
-On a tropical Mountain(!)
-+4 Gold
-+2 resource Capacity in Settlement
-+4 Culture and Gold on all buildings adjacent to this wonder

Takes up no real-estate, which I already really like. The effects also create high yields, at least if the mountain isn't surrounded by other mountains. The placement requirement is really strict; tropical mountains are surprisingly rare. Your ass has to be right on the equator and you still have to get lucky. As a result this wonder is shockingly non-competitive, and should be built if you have said mountain. It's 8 gold and culture per tile with 2 buildings next to it. The 2 resource capacity is gravy. Oh yeah, and this ♥♥♥♥ DOES count as an Adjacency for Specialists for reasons I can not truly comprehend. It does not seem to work for obsoleted buildings. If you want this, you should probably start as the Mayans in Antiquity. Otherwise you'll probably have to kill someone for a tropical mountain. Considering how massive Machu Pikchu specialists are, it's certainly worth grabbing.

Notre Dame
-Adjacent to a river and a district (presumably, a district on a river counts for both)
-+4 happiness
-Immediately start a celebration (or queues one to start right after your current one ends)
-All specialists provide 3 bonus culture when in a celebration

That's a LOT of culture, and only ever more as you go later into the game. This is already super strong by itself, at least in most games, but it gets even stronger if you also took celebration length in the diplomatic tree, allowing you to chain celebrations with lower overall happiness. Seriously, 3 culture per specialist? They must think the celebration requirement keeps this wonder honest, because that's a monstrously high number. It does not. You do have to beeline pretty hard for this one if you want it, it shows up sort of late in the civics tree. This lateness also makes it somewhat weaker overall, as there's less of the rest of the game left over and we don't care so much about culture in Modern. Still, it's a ton of value and will get you to stuff like your ideology faster as well. The effective yields on this thing are so high it brings my valuation of other wonders into question tbh.

Serpent Mound
-Grassland
-+4 Influence
-All unique improvements in this settlement gain 3 science and 2 production

Did you play as the Han... Wait, I think we already went over this. Well, it's not just the Han. It's any unique improvement, so Great Walls, Pairidaezas, any of the random ♥♥♥♥ the Independent powers give you, etc. The valuation for this is really easy. It's disgustingly strong if you have a settlement with lots of unique improvements (and therefore typically little urban sprawl). It's not very good if you don't have that. So... build it in places with lots of unique improvements or where you will have lots of them. I'm sure that's the kind of in-depth analysis you need.

In terms of real yields this thing is getting 5 yields per unique improvement, which means you don't actually need your entire floor littered with these improvements to make this good. The fact those yields are 'production and science' helps, as they are arguably the two best yields in the game save for maybe influence (which this also gives you four of lmao).

Actually this can make a more rural-focused city so disgustingly strong that you should probably build it first if you're afraid your friend is going to build it in a good city for it. Don't let your best buddy who played China or Persia in the first era put this down. Bad things will happen.

Shwedagon Zedi Daw
-Adjacent to a Lake
-+4 Science
-+2 Science on all rural tiles in the city that have at least 1 happiness (Unsure if the happiness needs to be a base yield or can be added on by other effects i.e. Mundo Perdido)
-+1 Wildcard Point

Shwedagon gives you a wildcard point, the most powerful type of attribute point. It's like researching future tech or civic an extra time. That's enough to build a wonder.

That aside, this can be a lot of science in a rural city, especially if it works with something like Mundo Perdido (which I, sadly, do not currently know. The question is whether it cares about base yields or current yields). Either way, put it in a city with big rural happiness yields if possible, but build this thing either way if you can. The wildcard point is enough by itself.

Tomb of Askia
-Desert tile
-+2 Gold
-+2 Resource capacity on settlement
-+2 Gold and +1 Production in this city for each resource assigned to it.

Great yields even without anything else. Absolutely breaks a city's gold and production output if you've also got other ways to assign more resources, like Camels, Monk's Mound, and Colossus. Even if you don't want this wonder that badly, you should build it so that someone who does want this wonder that badly can't get it. This not only produces so many yields, it lets you stack so many yields in one city, creating a powerhouse that will drill through even more of what you want. Stacking tons of gold in a city also makes Jade quite powerful as a resource too.

Sadly the extinction of the beloved camel (may they rest in peace) and removal of many other resources or relegation of other resources to factory status makes this feel notably weaker in Modern. It's still good in Modern, you can still normally fill out the slots you retain, just not pants ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ broken like it is in Exploration.

White Tower
-Next to a City Hall (presumably this means 'not in the capital' but to be honest I have not checked so just going by what it says).
-+4 Happiness
-+4 more happiness in this city per tradition slotted in to the government

Cannibalizing your social policy slots for 4 happiness each isn't worth it by itself. If your traditions are great and you regularly equip several of them as a result, then this can be worth a lot of happiness. That's going to come down to your civ choices, and I often feel I need room for strong policies even with some good traditions. Also falls off at age transition due to less policy slots. Pretty middle of the pack. Comes really late in the civics tree too for not Normandy, and if your choice is rushing this or rushing Notre Dame... Well, I guess the AI can have this one.

Exploration Age Wonder Wrap-Up

The name of the game on the Exploration Age Civic's Tree is 'Rushing for which wonder(s) you want'. Want Borobodur? Better go straight there. Notre Dame? Pretty large trip up the top of the tree and through Diplo Service. Escorial? With all due haste. As a result I find that if I want these, and especially if I want several of them, I tend to put off my personal civics tree for a very long time, even if that tree is strong, unless it offers big culture. Also, for this reason I think Culture is at its absolute best in Exploration. In Antiquity you can really squeak by with more middling culture, picking up some earlier wonders for a 2 or 4 point legacy path. In Exploration if you want the good ♥♥♥♥ you have to work for it, unless the good ♥♥♥♥ is like an early Serpent Mound or something. In Modern they have sadly made Culture bad, save for getting an ideology a bit quicker.

The Exploration Era's civics tree is also very thick. I feel the length of this one more than any other era, and find that if I don't prioritize culture I'm not getting to Future Civic. The big ask for good Wonders at Masteries adds to that stress. If I don't prioritize some way of developing strong culture by Exploration, not only will I miss out on some big wonder plays, I'll also tend to miss out on Future Civic too!

So, what if that isn't you? Well, War. Seriously, if you're making a tech lead instead of a cultural one, kill people for the good ♥♥♥♥. Don't just let some dude sit on Borobodur, Notre Dame, and El Escorial because you're feeling gun-shy. Decimate them. The AI will forgive you, and even if they don't World War 2 is right around the corner anyway, and the AI are programmed to go after your ass if you're winning Modern anyway. Civ 7 rewards the Opportunist even more than the city planner.

Modern Age Wonders

For the most part Modern Age Wonders are bad unless they win you the game. Even if the wonder has a really strong effect, the context of when you get the damn thing has to be taken into account. Like take Chengde for example. The effect of Chengde is clearly monstrously strong on paper. However, you get it at Hegemony 2, and if I'm at Hegemony 2 I probably don't care how much culture I'm making anymore.

Anyway, just warning you. I'm going to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on many of these wonders entirely because the Modern Age ends in 50-70 turns with a rocket ship, nuclear detonation, or Capitalist super-hero and therefore I couldn't care any less about most of these.

Brandenburg Gate
-Adjacent to a District
-+6 Production
-This city doesn't suffer a happiness malus from war weariness (this is stronger in settlements you've conquered, not settled)
-+5 happiness in all conquered settlements

The Modern Age against the AI almost universally devolves into World War 2 if you're winning. You're Germany btw, and you'll be lucky if you have a tiny little Italy AI allied to you. They seem to be programmed to start going after you if they think you'll win. Because of that you tend to be fighting multiple individual wars that have their own war support counter, some of which will probably be in the negative and hurting your happiness. Unfortunately this is not universal, so the only way it's going to be worth a lot of happiness is if it's in some conquered settlement, which produces more unhappiness from weariness. Better if you've been warmongering the whole game to keep your happiness up and therefore your yields from going down. Most of the time it's not that important, but I can at least see a use.

Honestly this would be good if it negated war weariness unhappiness universally.

Chengde Mountain Resort
Adjacent to a Mountain
-+6 Gold
-+5% universal culture per trade route with a unique civilization

Yeah, I know I just talked about this. It's a lot of culture, if the AI doesn't group war you or your name is 'Prussia' if they do anyway. Do you need a lot of culture at Hegemony 2? As it stands, no, no you don't. Perhaps the most culture from any wonder in the game, it's just a shame that it comes when it does.

Guess it can help you get faster access to policies elsewhere on the tree if you've put them off, like the military ones for more safety. Honestly that feels like what it's designed to do for a player that's chasing a culture victory since they 'theoretically' want Hegemony, but since culture victory is mega-scuffed that ideal niche doesn't seem relevant.

Dogo Onsen
-Adjacent to Coast
-+4 Happiness
-This city gains 1 population when entering a celebration

I think this might be broken and will give all of your settlements(?) one population instead of what it says. If it wasn't it would be worse than the Statue of Liberty, as there simply isn't enough time in Modern for that to pay out. Even with the bug it's still not that insane. Yeah, 1 pop everywhere is a ton of yields. My Modern era is still going to end with a wincon, and how many turns Dogo is actually going to cut off of that is very much up for debate. I guess that's more than I can say for most wonders though.

Doi Suthep
-Rough Tile
-+4 Influence
-+5 Culture and +5 Gold per city state suzerainty

Ah yes, this is what I need to close out my game of civ 7. A wonder that gives me 10 yields per suzerainty. That's going to tip the scales. I think I wouldn't usually build this if it was an antiquity era wonder. As it stands, it contributes very little this late into the game.

Eiffel Tower
-Adjacent to a District
-+5 Culture
-+2 Happiness and Culture on quarters in this settlement

It's Colosseum + Pyramid of the Sun! Except at the tail end of the game, meaning it's worth much less than either of those wonders! It doesn't help that Modern Era Civ 7 takes culture out back with a shotgun. You build this because you have nothing else to do while waiting on your space race victory, not because it will help you win the game.

Hermitage
-On Tundra
-+4 Culture
+10% culture in a city if said city has a great work slotted.
-3 artifact slots

That can be a lot of culture and it's not insane to get 3 or 4 artifacts to turn this on for 3 or 4 big cities. It also has the decency to come at Modernization, not Hegemony 2, meaning it may get you like... a turn or two off some of your civics, maybe. Every turn does count now so shaving off a bit of time to get your next civic unlock, especially if said civic is an ideology is valuable. I feel kind of bad that 'saves me maybe a turn or two on my victory' is the highest praise I can give a wonder that multiplies your culture at a relevant time, but that's just what Modern Era civ 7 is right now.

Honestly, if every era only has one type of great work, Modern being artifacts, why does this wonder even say 'great works'? It may as well say 'artifacts', because they're the only kind of great work this wonder can interact with. I think this is further evidence that Civ 7 probably initially did have a 4th age that was cut at some point.

Manhattan Project
-+5 Science
-+Gives you a Nuke
-+Lets you make more Nukes
-+Lets you do the 'Operation Ivy' Project, which just wins the game

I assume this can be built by multiple people, but it is a 'wonder' so don't know for sure. You build this when doing an Ideology victory because you have to. It counts as a Wonder, so the Mughals can buy it (which I find funny for some reason) and wonder boosting traditions help you here.

The Nuke will kill all the walls and units in the radius shown, and therefore is very strong. You probably don't care because after you build this you're going to win the game after you build Operation Ivy (which is a project, not a wonder), but it is fun to nuke people like it is in every other civ game. I suppose in a really close game you should just drop the nuke on the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the launch pad.

Muzibu Azaala Mpanga
-Next to a Lake
-+4 Food
-+2 Food on all Lake Tiles
+2 Culture and +2 Happiness on Lake tiles in this city

I had no idea what this was. It's apparently a Big Domed tomb that is used for kings from one of the African Kingdoms. That's pretty cool.

Not sure what else there is to say. The effect is terrible. Even if you somehow have a billion lakes, this is still bad due to its timing. Naturally, if you do not, and you never have a billion lakes in this game, it's even more worthless.

Oxford University
-Adjacent to a District
-+4 Science
-2 Free Techs
-Wildcard Point

Why the ♥♥♥♥ did they give the only wonder with a reasonably relevant effect a wildcard point too? I mean, did you guys just read Muzibu? Why the hell doesn't that have an attribute point but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Oxford, which is giving you two free, admittedly random, techs, gives you a wildcard point? Was the balance team high when they designed Modern Era Wonders? Who Read Oxford and thought it was remotely okay to have it be this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loaded?

Despite that rage-filled ramble, the fact this can grab Mastery techs makes this still worse than civ 6 Oxford. You can try to snipe with it, but the masteries are in the pool too and will make your success RNG. You can grab Masteries to avoid that but... then you're grabbing Masteries, and giving your opponents more time to build this. Still, it wins the medal for 'the only Modern Era Wonder that doesn't win the game that I can say is still inarguably very good'. Even this late in the game, since the wildcard point can go anywhere you can often find a decent use for it. Sometimes that use might even just be 1 war support from the militaristic tree for a bit more safety.

Modern Age Wonders Pt. 2

Palacio De Bellas Artes
-+5 Culture
-+2 Happiness on Great Works
-+10% Happiness in This City
-3 Artifact Slots

Odd that we keep putting Artifacts into ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ art museums. Seriously, what Culture victory got scrapped so we could have World's Fair? Can we have the other one back, please?

Hegemony is the other way Civics tree, why is this down at Globalism? Generally we don't need happiness on artifacts, nor do we need 10% happiness on a city in the Modern Era. Hermitage at least had an arguable niche. This really doesn't, and it not being on the road to Hegemony where our dream to win a cultural victory dies is kind of weird. Then again, whenever someone reveals any artifacts everyone can see them so why even get Hegemony? Let some stupid AI do it for you, pick the Mughals, buy a ♥♥♥♥ ton of explorers, then post them up all over the world, ready to react the moment someone else does the work for you. I can't imagine winning culture in a more honest way in an average game.

Red Fort
-Adjacent to a District
-+4 Gold
-Counts as a fortified District
-+50 HP to Red Fort and all City Centers

Irrelevant as it often is, this does do something. It makes you a bit tankier. Maybe that could help sometimes in a last ditch effort city defense... Nah, probably not. If you're getting your city center pounded you probably aren't going to save that city with 50 more HP on top of it. But, hey, it does something that could theoretically be relevant, and I can't say the same for most of the wonders in the Modern Era.

Statue of Liberty
-Coast Adjacent to Land
-+6 Happiness
-Spawns 4 Migrants

Apparently we pre-oxidized our copper for this one, because that ♥♥♥♥'s green before it's even finished building. That admittedly understandable quirk aside, this is four rural pops. I guess if you slam those pops into your giant production city on some mine tiles you don't already have on lockdown, it could be worth like 20 production, which might save you some time on your victory. Usually my big production cities don't have mine tiles that aren't being worked but hey, if that's you, then the Statue of Liberty might come in clutch.

Taj Mahal
-On Plains
-+5 Gold
-+50% celebration Duration
-Wildcard Attribute Point

What is it with the wildcard points going to wonders that have strong effects. To be fair this is coming in too late to extend more than 1, maybe 2 celebrations. The wildcard point, however, can often still be useful at this point, albeit this is somewhat later than Oxford. Decidedly decent, which is more than I can say for most of the others.

World's Fair
-Place Anywhere (Presumably)
-Wins the Game

Can only be built if you're displaying 15 artifacts. This is a lot more doable now and since researching a continent first apparently gets you an artifact, as does future civic, high culture is finally rewarded in Modern!

Why did I update this here first instead of elsewhere? Good question. Anyway, winning the game this way is quite realistic now. Winning the game is obviously a strong effect, and you can rack up artifacts very quickly if you get to Hegemony fast, so World’s Fair is a reasonable wincon. At least from what I can tell.

There are still several other places in this guide memeing on this wincon. I’ll rewrite them as I come across them. I still think it’s kind of dumb as a wincon, but it’s far more accessible and rewards high culture play now, which has made it a lot less stupid mechanically. Still less funny that building the Illuminati in Base Civ V though.

Modern Age Wonder Wrap Up

Why are so many Modern Age Wonders bad? Because the Modern Age lasts 50-70 turns or less on Standard Speed, at least for someone trying to win the game. Even wonders with what should be decent or good effects can be bad because they simply come too late into the game to be relevant. Chengde, and I know we've talked about it twice already, was the biggest example of that for me. Its effect is obviously an insanely strong amount of culture. Culture is a lot more relevant in Modern, but Chengde still comes too late. You get explorers at one of the first civics, and Chengde comes so late that it’s not really helping you get many more artifacts.

So, what makes a wonder good in Modern? Strong immediate effects. Wildcard points? Strong, immediately usable where you want them to push turns off a victory or get more safety. Free techs? Immediate burst of Science. The other wonders simply do not have time to make reasonable payoffs in an age where you're busy spending production on projects, science, factories/railroads, and war. For many of these wonders to be usable, we'd need complete reworks of them or the speed at which the modern age is completed, or an entire fourth age added to the game. At least Chengde can be used to try to close out the game more quickly with future civic to force a score victory. I can't even say that for many other wonders here.

For now, your best bet is to build Oxford, build Dogo while it’s still bugged, maybe build the Taj, maaaaaybe the Hermitage occasionally, and to just leave the rest of the non-victory Wonders alone.

Conclusion/Legal

I'll save a truly sweeping conclusion until I've included everything I want to in this guide. My main gripe with this game really is Modern just being a glorified rush to victory in the game's current state. I feel like all I'm doing in Modern is war and winconning, and that I don't engage with a lot of the things I do in previous eras as much as a result. In fact the emphasis on War and winconning warps the exploration era too, as preparing a powerful force for Modern, especially navally, is something you really start doing in Exploration, especially if you're going Operation Ivy.

There are a few other things, like the disappearance of certain resources from era to era. This is at its most egregious going into Modern since not only do we drop several very good resources but we also turn many others into factory resources. Not only is this unfun, it also has knock-on effects with science and production adjacencies. A city with a great library/barracks setup doesn't stay great if its resources are wool or salt and nothing spawns to replace those. We can have the drop-off in power, like Horses go from making cav stronger to just being worth happiness and that's fine. Nerf the camels in modern if you want devs, but we don't need to take them out back and shoot them.

Monster Hunter Wilds comes out soon, so I'll be playing less civ since I'll also be playing a lot of that. That's part of why I wanted to get the guide out today. More sections are coming, just as I make time to work on them.

You can republish sections of this guide or use quotes or blockquotes from it in otherwise original works if you properly reference and link to this guide. Similarly, feel free to reference it wherever else you want to, whether that be to praise it or ♥♥♥♥ on it. This guide was originally published on Steam and should not be wholesale republished anywhere else without my express permission.

[Finarfin]

Thanks, SpiderKhan. Maybe I'm just dense or missed this stuff in the tutorial, but I don't recall many of these details being mentioned.

[SpiderKhan]

Army commanders will get a section. I might make some sections for general important milestone civics or techs in each age, that’s not a bad idea.

Anyway, to answer your question:

Basically, if it’s not part of your home continent or connected to your home continent by coastal waters, it counts as distant lands for you. At least I reckon that’s largely true, some odd continent spawns or something I can’t account for may apply, but I think that’s always been the case for me in continents plus games.

Army commanders at base have a range around them where they can issue orders. The ones you mostly care about are the coordinated attacks, which order a certain kind of unit to attack a specific target with a buff to strength. All units inside the dude’s 1 tile command radius able to hit it will try to until it dies. Generally everything else they do is a promotion, and the promotion will tell you what it does.

[Finarfin]

I'm glad someone took the time to share this information. Any chance of getting some more fundamentals for those of us that still are grasping things, e.g.:

What is the this Distant Lands concept and how does it play into the game?
What effect does an Army Commander have on combat?
Call-outs to some key techs, such as those that allow your ships and then your units to enter deep ocean.

Maybe there's a guide somewhere that already explains all this. To be honest, I haven't looked that hard inside the game for this information.

[Prison Mike]

Incredible write up well done!

[SpiderKhan]

You are correct, and I think I noted in its section that Quarters are current age/ageless buildings. And yes, anything that says it does X with quarters (Colosseum, Pyramid of the Sun, Borobodur, Eiffel, etc.) look at quarters in the same way.

Overbuilding is very highly recommended as a result of that, the production bonus policy, etc. ofc, but ideally it's good to keep your influence buildings around (i.e. the Monument and Villa) just due to the raw influence output. I've been trying to stack those kinds of buildings in less valuable adjacency tiles when I don't feel like I'm giving up too much to do so just to maintain the influence income.

[Rhapsody]

Didn't read all of this, but I just wanted to say good job noting the effect of Colosseum requiring a complete quarter of the age. From what I can tell, the happiness effect can actually be lost when moving to the next age when buildings age. I think it works like that for any bonuses to quarters, too, which makes overbuilding with current age's buildings very important.

[SpiderKhan]

I appreciate the thoughts. I’d noted that spreading (or spamming as I tended to call it) explorers around the continents sounded viable, in some later sections, and it’s great to hear some confirmation that spreading them out like this is a viable strategy and an elaboration on how it’s done. The civ update roadmap says the culture wincon is going to receive some updates soon so I don’t think I should elaborate more on the wincon at this time. It’s likely what you say will stay relevant, but it’s best to wait in case things do change notably.

[SpiderKhan]

The positioning advice in particular here makes sense. Being first to the artifacts, or at least making it to the dig sites to stack up, is important.

I’m not sure how important the Heg 2 rush is, but I can imagine that relying on the scatterbrained AI to do the research for you isn’t the best idea, as who knows when they might get around to it. So I can see the importance. It’s a theoretical out/wincon for high culture low science players in any case.

[plaguepenguin]

The second wave, the one unlocked by Hegemony, leaves you more control. You have plenty of time to position at least two explorers on each continent. You can produce rather than purchase them. You get to beeline Hegemony, letting you get it first even against competitors who might have more culture per turn, but fail to beeline and spy as ruthlessly as you do.

There are lots of artifacts on the map. I didn't realize how many until I applied this strategy, in a game that yielded over twice as many as I needed to get to the third milestone. The only way this method can go wrong against AI is if you are hopelessly outclassed in culture per turn, and so fail to complete Natural History, then even Hegemony, until many turns after more than one of your competitors. On higher difficulty they have bonuses that can get them a nice raw culture output, but only a human can do the strategy part of this method.

[plaguepenguin]

This works best if you prepared for the effort back in Exploration.

You want the entire map explored, because the artifacts can be anywhere on each continent. You specifically want to know where all the universities on each continent are located. Missionaries are almost designed to do this exploring, because you generally have little use for them after they have picked all the low-hanging relics you want.

It's ideal to have one of your own universities on each continent, but not really that important, because you can use any player's university for the research. It's more important to have at least one settlement at least near every continent, so the explorer(s) for that continent don't have far to go to reach the university for research, or the dig sites themselves.

Finally, it's best if you leave yourself a fair amount of gold in your treasury as Exploration ends, because 3000 gold is a fair amount.