Part 12: Mechanics: Inaccurately described effects of the Great Wall wonder
Tiggum posted:
Melth covered this, but I wanted to clarify that it's not just on higher difficulty levels where the AI gets to generate units way quicker than a human player can, that's just how the AI operates in this game.
Unless I misremember, the AI gets scaling bonuses or penalties to Production and Science and whatnot depending on difficulty. King difficulty is where people usually say there's parity and the AI and humans play on the same footing. Except that the AI still cheats in a bunch of ways and ignores most unhappiness and such as far as I recall.
Oh, one other thing. Back on page 3, Carbolic Smokeball and I were talking about wonders that have inaccurate in-game effect descriptions and I tested a bunch and listed them. I forgot to put one major one on the list: The Great Wall. I wasn't even aware there was any misunderstanding of it, but apparently a LOT of people don't know its most important effect.
It's described as forcing other civilizations to always offer you peace in negotiations (actually quite handy) and also doubling combat strength against barbarians (also extremely handy and pretty much the only way to combat them effectively early on). Despite those bonuses being decent already, people usually regard it poorly overall. But it grants another, gigantic bonus which I thought everyone knew about but that isn't mentioned: it counts as a City Wall in every city. That's fantastic really. And I can't believe not everyone knows that. I mean, you can SEE the wall icons surrounding your cities and everything.
The Great Wall is quite a nice wonder all in all, especially against barbarians. On defense against barbarians your city defenders suddenly have a sextuple bonus. That's enough that a mere defending Warrior will absolutely smash a Deity mode attacking barbarian Archer (or even a Legion). Of course, with my strategy I almost never HAVE any military defenders anyway, but it would be fantastic for anyone playing more conventionally.
Delenda est Carthago.