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Food for thought: Redundant Wonders?
I don't know if anyone's ever discussed this before, but it occured to me that there might be some interesting gameplay to be had using redundant wonders. Most wonders don't seem to have real show-stopping power nowadays, but they're still very useful, and there are some really powerful potential wonders to be made--the "put an X in every city" type wonders in particular seem to present good opportunities for game-breakers. Suppose you've got a pair of wonders to put a temple and library in every city in your empire--that's 5 culture production everywhere, right off the bat! The more I toy with ideas for wonders, the more I think that redundancy is a very intriguing idea.
The existing wonders themselves already have some redundancy--there are wonders which go obsolete, some of which are replaced by more modern equivalents, and then there are the various happiness-boosting and science-boosting wonders, but that's mostly just overlap (not that overlap doesn't hurt either); I mean having totally, completely redundant wonders whose sole purpose in existing would be to make the same, NONcumulative wonder effect more available--a player couldn't just build one wonder and sit back knowing they have a monopoly, NOR could they build several similar wonders and reap in increased benefits, but would instead have to choose between letting other civs eventually get comparable wonders or spending hundreds of shields of production building a wonder that they get no further benefit from (well, aside from culture). This could also go a long ways towards filling out the tech tree, if enough suitable wonders could be brainstormed, and could concievably speed up the late game, with big wonder effects available not just to the civilization that managed to build a wonder first but to several.
Of course, unique wonders would still be preferable, but the editor can only do so much... might as well make do with what one has. And the AI's reaction to having scads of wonders to choose from might be less than intelligent... an AI civ of, say, 20 cities working on 10 various wonders simultaneously wouldn't produce much else. Still, it might be worth a shot...
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