Why do people keep saying there are no wonders?
Is that just a dig at how lacklustre they are?
There are a few wonders that are actually pretty good, such as the Panopticum, but some are basically just the hanging gardens (without the free garden), i.e. a small +resource boost.
For the hanging gardens it worked because +6 food is pretty massive and it's the only wonder of its kind, in BE half the wonders are like that (and smaller boosts)
There's stuff like Crawler , +25% towards wonders and nothing else - of course way late game when most wonders are already built
Daedalus Ladder, +3 happiness, +2 food - uhm ok. (super expensive endgame wonder too)
Holon Chamber, +5 science and nothing else.
New Terran Myth, +4 culture - so basically a Pantheon, already considered a weak wonder, minus the great work.
Resurrection Device, +8 happiness, also an endgame wonder. Compare to Notre dame...
Tectonic Anvil, +9 production - end game tech, super expensive. Ironworks in BNW at medieval era to compare to?
I'm comparing to BNW wonders because some of the wonders are actually so good, they'd shine in BNW just as well, such as Ectogenesis pod with +3 food, +3 hammers, and all farms +1 food, or Deep Memory with 2 free virtues at the end game. As opposed to BNW, in the last 50 turns you don't run out of policies to buy, so +2 is actually huge, or the Drone Sphere with +10 healing for all units in friendly territory - this means you can easily stack up 40hp / turn healing on your fortified units. Since archer spam is nerfed, fortified melee units in rough terrain are actually a force not easily overcome.
That is a carryover from Civ5 - the AI there does the same thing if you dismantle enough of its units, it will sue for peace and hand you a city - sometimes extremely well developed cities - even if all you do is defend and never make a single move to attack. Just had a game today where the AI did that and I was like, thanks Caesar! All I did was arrow a couple things to death and boom, free city. Probably triggered by losing a certain % of their military strength, and if the AI comes after you, they generally throw everything they have at you so you dent that army, you have them damn near wiped out.
It is almost like an overcompensation; I remember the option to ask for a city being there from the beginning of Civ, but the AI would never give a city up unless you were steamrolling them, had taken most of their cities, and they were on the verge of extinction, and even then it was iffy. Not so much anymore.
I had the opposite experience today, I was besieging an enemy city with 3 tanks, 2 infantry and 3 gunners and one Raptor Jesus.
He lost a lot of units trying to push me away while I waited for Affinity to reach 7 for gunner upgrade, and I saw almost no military presence after 20 or so kills, yet when he offered peace, he asked for half my cash.
After I took his city, he offered half his cash, and I hardly destroyed anything of his army in the process. He still has 4 more cities and plenty of military.