A lacking of wonder

This past week I have been madly modding Civ 6.  Years ago I threw a couple thousand hours into modding Civ 5, and that same fever has seized me again.  Funnily enough I am changing many of the same sorts of problems and doing the same things over again, even though the game is entirely new.

The first thing that bothered me enough to try to fix it in Civ 6 was the Wonders of the World.  Wonders should, to my mind, be powerful.  They can only be built by one player, they cost a ton, and they have their own cinematics and stories.  All that build up shouldn't just go to waste on a terrible effect that nobody needs. 

Mostly, wonders end up ranging between hot garbage and mediocre.  The standard I use is the number of turns until the wonder has paid off its investment.  That is, if a wonder takes 900 production to make, how long until you get 900 production back?  The benchmark is how wonders compare to buildings.  Good buildings pay themselves back in 30-50 turns, and are pure profit from then on out.  There are some that are far better than this, particularly the early buildings like granary and monument, which can pay out as early as 20 turns from build completion.  To make this work I use the game's base assumptions, which is that production, food, science, culture, and faith are all of equal value, and gold is worth half of what the others are.  That isn't necessarily exactly right, but it gives you a ballpark.  I also assumed that great person points were worth the same as other yields, and while sometimes they can be way more, they can also be way less.  At any rate, that is the ratios I went with.

Some wonders paid themselves back really quickly.  Bolshoi Theatre and Oxford University, for example, give 2 free civics or techs.  Those usually pay back immediately, and then you get some small, decent ongoing benefits.  These wonders are solid, and need no changes.  They pay for themselves in a single turn, but they have a cost (a lost tile) and a risk (someone could beat you to it), so they aren't broken.

However, for the wonders that just generate resources over time there is an absurd range of power.  Chichen Itza, for example, would make your city about 10 stuff/turn once it appears, (assuming three workable rainforest tiles and another bonus resource rainforest tile), so it pays itself off in 70 turns.  That is *garbage*.  You would be far better off just building regular stupid buildings so you don't have to risk losing the wonder to somebody else, and so you don't lose a tile space.  Hilariously, Chichen Itza isn't even close to the worst, it is just weak, and virtually never worth building.

Sydney Opera House is the worst.  It is worth roughly 13 stuff per turn, costs 1850 production, and comes at the end of the tree.  So if, somehow, the game lasted 142 turns after you finished off the entire civic tree, then the Opera House would have paid itself off.  It is the saddest sack of crap you can imagine.

I have to fix these things.  Wonders don't have to be good for everyone all the time - it is completely fine for wonders to be good for specific strategies and not others, in fact that is a positive thing.  I want Mont St Michel to be only useful if you are doing the religion thing, and the Hermitage to be relevant to people who are aiming for a cultural victory.  There should be meaningful choices.  But when the choice is always 'don't build that wonder under any circumstances' then there is no choice at all.

And even those wonder that manage to get themselves into the 40 turns to payoff range, that isn't good enough.  Wonders aren't supposed to be about the same payoff as a generic Market or Library.  They are supposed to be *wondrous*.  You should be gunning for them and working to get them done because they impress you!  The risk you take in trying to build them and sometimes losing that race should pay off when you hit and get the wonder done first.  A sweet spot I have been aiming for is to make wonders do 2 things:  First, a premium payoff rate of 30 turns.  Second, some kind of extra, usually immediate, benefit.  For many of the wonders that has meant giving them free units, cash, or other payoffs that do something right away as well as generating an effective ROI long term.

For example, the Sydney Opera House got a modifier that makes it so that you get 10 times your culture per turn in gold.  This feels appropriate - at the end of the culture tree you get a huge payoff for building up culture income, and it is big enough that it is worth the wait.

The combination of math, coding, and creative thinking is great for me.  It is a feeling I get in particular from game design, and modding games is much the same.

I can't write any more right now.  I have more things to build!  Wondrous things!